He walked on water which shows us that nothing can separates us from Him.
He made that water into wine which shows us He can create something out of nothing.
He ate and drank with people that we would never want to be caught around which shows us that we are all deserving of even the smallest of attention from each other and the greatest of attention from Him.
He gave a blind man sight. He also gives us visions and dreams.
When he spoke he always drew a crowd. He also offended many with the truth.
He brought the dead to life and gave us life when we found Him.
He spoke light and he spoke fire into existence and He created in us a passion for Him.
He lived his life as if he was a living testimony to the words he spoke
Yet many of us fail to see this truth because of the noise in our lives. We have fancied our lives up to look like an ornamental decoration dedicated to the gods of the unknown. With no remorse for the pain that we have given our soul, we continue on with one eye towards heaven and the rest of our body firmly planted in the depths of an eternal grave that will bring nothing but pain and sorrows eternally.
It seems as if we are constantly grasping for a ray of hope that will bring us forth from the living grave that we are in, searching in every corner of the known and unknown. We create hope by giving power to the inanimate creations in our lives. We have created hope by giving power to the ‘spirit’ of love and the ‘spirit’ of friendship with each other. We have created hope by giving power to meaningless words that spring forth from each created being as if the words of man have more power than that which ‘spoke’ man into existence.
We have leaned on our own understanding of things to give us a sense of power. We have have leaned on our reasoning that gives us a false sense of understanding. We have leaned on the clutter and the noise in our lives to give us a false reasoning. The ornamental decoration that is our lives is a life that is full of nothing. This nothingness is not void and empty, instead, it is a nothingness that is full of noise and clutter. Yet it is nothingness in the eyes of the Great Creator.
Because if it is a life that is full of our own reasoning that brings us a false understanding which gives us a false sense of power.
And it creates things to have hope in.
And it fools our souls into thinking that all is well.
Then it is nothingness. No matter how humanly full our lives may appear to be, they are empty and void in the eyes of God the Father, God the Creator, The Great I AM. The clutter of human reasoning and understanding has created a great divide between us and The Father above.
Jesus hates clutter. Jesus hates when we fill our hearts and minds with clutter. Mark 11 gives the account of Jesus cleaning the clutter. The people had the appearance of seeking God, but it was not the reality for the majority. People had lost their focus. His appearance in the temple gives us insight into seeing that Jesus was adamantly opposed to anything that gets in the way of people encountering Him. Quoting from Isaiah, He said that we have made his house a ‘den of thieves.’ We are allowing the thief to steal our focus away from Jesus, The Son of God.
I was counseling a gentleman the other day. Over the years I have invited Him to church and He would tell me he was thinking about it, but the day never came. I hadn’t seen him in a couple years except for bumping into him at the store on occasion, so we thought it was strange when he called out ot the blue wanting to meet together with Carissa and I.
As we were talking, he shared how he had been attending a bible study and reading his bible. He said he was reading a book and the book told him that if he had faith he could find victory. So one day as he was meditating, he was playing an online game of chess on a level that he just couldn’t seem to find victory at. He said he began to pray and believe that he was going to win. He even began to speak it! He said he didn’t know what happened, but suddenly about 4 moves later, he looked on his screen to realize he won. It took him a moment or two to realize it, and when he did, he started to think back to what had just happened. He said that during that short game, and after he began to speak victory and believe, he couldn’t really remember anything else. I told him that it sounded as if God was showing you that if you clean your mind and the clutter in your life, you’re going to begin to find victory.
Dont you think it would be nice to find victory and offer our lives to God the Father as a living testimony to His Word, instead of having so much clutter in our lives that we give off an appearance of holiness yet having a nothingness life.
Hebrews 12:1:
Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. . . .
Every weight would be everything that clutters our lives up so that we can’t find the true Jesus.
1.Physical Clutter
a.The show ‘Hoarders’ is a great example
b.Wall to wall furniture
c.Things we hang onto
i.books, magazines, clothes, bottles, tools, cars, etc.
d.Affectionately call them ‘antiques’
e.Often causes us to feel constrained
f.The difficulty we have in freeing ourselves from physical clutter metaphorically parallels our difficulties getting rid of spiritual clutter.
2.Spiritual Clutter
a.Unconsciously accumulate things that are many times not edifying or profitable.
b.Man made rules, and religion without relationship with Jesus
c.‘Words’ of prophecy that have never come to pass that were made by those of questionable faith to begin with.
d.Focusing on opinions of The Word of God instead of the Bible
e.Staying too busy ‘doing’ ministry instead of spending time with God
3.Negative Self-Image
a.Denial of anything that is positive in a persons life will often cause a person to feel incompetent and worthless.
b.Feeling the need to compare one’s spirituality to someone else’s spirituality
c.To hang on to this negative self-image rather than to conform to God's image (Romans 8:29) means to resurrect and hang onto the old man—with its obnoxious habits and behavior patterns.
d.Ignoring and then accepting the ‘elephant in the room’ that is often created by our own fear of changing our attitudes and mindset
e.Feeling as though God could not possibly use me because of my sins and my past. Which often comes from a feeling of unworthiness which leads to…
4.Unspoken Prayers
a.I wonder what great things God has in store for me if I would but ask. We read in Scripture, that we have not because we ask not.
b.Perhaps it is a feeling of unworthiness that keeps some of our prayers from being offered to God.
c.Maybe we are afraid of what may have to change in our lives for our prayers to be answered.
d.Philippians 4:6 we read, 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,present your requests to God.
e.When we hold unspoken prayers in, we allow them to build up and clutter our lives up with negativity. We begin to feel un loved, un important, we begin to feel all alone in this world with no one on our side that is there for us to guide us and lift us up.
f.When this happens, and we start to feel all alone, we turn to whatever it is that we feel will make us feel good, or give us a sense of acceptance among people. This often causes us to begin to sin because we are turning away from God, and not spending time with Him, and instead turning to sin which often goes unconfessed to God because of shame.
5.Unconfessed Sin
a.Psalm 66:18 refers to the main hindrance to a Christian's prayer life: the clutter of unconfessed sin!
b.Psalm 32:3-4 says, "When I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, and I groaned all day long. Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me. My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat."
c.John Bunyan said in his book, Pilgrim's Progress, "Prayer will make a man cease from sin, but sin will make a man cease from prayer!"
d.The late Dr. F.E. Marsh stated, "There is nothing that so takes the joy out of a prayer life as unconfessed sin on the conscience."
e.George Barna (The Index of Leading Spiritual Indicators),
---95% thank God for what He has done in their lives
---67% acknowledge his unique and superior attributes
---61% ask for specific needs; however, only
---47% ask forgiveness for specific sins
f. Our unconfessed sins often lead to…
6.Unresolved conflicts
a.Sometimes with ourselves
i.Romans 7:15--For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate.
ii.When we are battling our flesh, we often find ourselves at war with ‘the old man’
b.Sometimes with others
i.I believe we all have had conflict with people once or twice in our lives. It may have been a family member, a business partner, a fellow employee, a neighbor, a total stranger, but we have had difficulty with them.
ii.We are not going to see eye to eye with everyone we work with or even worship with. We read in Acts 15 as Paul was making plans for his second missionary journey that he and Barnabas got into a rather heated discussion over taking Mark.
iii.Paul felt Mark deserted them in Pamphylia and did not want to take him on this trip, but Barnabas did. Barnabas eventually took Mark and went to evangelize in Cyprus while Paul chose Silas and headed toward Syria.
iv.They eventually came together for a third missionary journey. They resolves their conflict and realized that their focus needed to be on God with no clutter to hinder their mission.
v.Unresolved conflict clutters our spiritual life and it blocks the peace and power of God in us.
HOW TO CLEAR THE CLUTTERS? (Philippians 3:3-12)
1.Trust in The Spirit: “For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh.” (3:3) Spiritual clutter can never be cleared by the flesh or human efforts. We need the Spirit of God to clear spiritual clutter.
2.Value Christ and your relationship with Him more “But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Paul changed his value and priority since he met Jesus Christ and no longer holding his old clutter. We can’t take anything with us, but there are a lot of things that can keep us out of spending eternity with Christ.
3.Know what to keep: “For whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ.” (3:8b) Paul gives us a pretty good list to follow in 4:8 which reads: Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. “Think about such things” means keeping such things in your mind and your heart.”
4.Focus on the goal: “Not that I have already obtained all this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” (3:12)Paul was very focused. What are you focused on?
