Intro: How many of you grew up when having a big front porch was the way houses were built…they were built that way because in that time people were open to having friends just drop in and they would sit on the front porch and talk…in fact I can call my dad and 7 out of 10 times he is on the front porch or just came in from the front porch…
Now granted the house I grew up is likely over 100 years old at this point…and today we don’t see as many front porches being built for those public invites into our personal lives…in fact we have morphed into people who sit in the backyard behind 8 foot tall privacy fences…most people do not want their friends just showing up…
As a preacher I learned my lesson on just showing up a few times and I will not give you some of the embarrassing details of my encounters except for one…I walked up to a house in Bristol VA of a middle aged couple with children and knocked on the door… they had a huge front porch and it was anything but inviting there was literally bags and bags of trash stacked all over the place with kids toys mixed in here and there…
I knocked on the door and saw a curtain open and close…then I heard the preacher from that church is here put away the porn and the bottles…when the door opened it was an obvious stand off of you can not come in…so I left a card and got in the car and left…
Grab the bucket full of trash…
How many of you have dirty front porches?
Ok let me rephrase that…
Think of your life the things you do…the way you live your life is your front porch…if you think of your lifestyle as your front porch…
How many of you have dirty front porches?
I didn’t think that many would be willing to admit that their life was dirty…
Let me ask another question…
How many of you can tell me of someone else’s dirty life or front porch?
OH now we are getting somewhere…it is easy to see someone else’s dirt rather than our own…some of us are simple pushing aside our piles so that we can see our friends dirty porches and never acknowledging our own trash…
Over the next few weeks we are going to look at how we can stop spending so much of our time focusing on everyone else and getting down to the nitty gritty of cleaning up our own mess…
Jesus himself says that we should take care our own mess before we attempt to criticize or judge someone else’s…
Matthew 7:3-5
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
WHAT IS ALL THIS DIRT ON MY PORCH?
I recently asked my dad to go over to our house in Virginia and spray for the weeds in our flower beds around the house…his follow up was… I hope that all I sprayed was the weeds…
To clean up your life or your porch your first have to see the dirt…
Get bucket with list and other trash and talk about each one as I wad them up and scatter them all over the stage followed by old cans and literal dirt…
Before long the pile has overtaken your life to the point that it just appears normal…
You cant see the plank in your own eye anymore…
If you have any doubts of what is considered sin, then we can refer to the what is commonly known as vice list…
Rom. 1:29–32; 1 Cor. 5:9–11; 6:9–10; Gal. 5:19–23; Phil. 4:8; 1 Tim. 3:1–13; Titus 1:5–9
We could sit here and read all those verse but that would mean less lunch and the Christian City people would have to have service without us…
So to save time I printed a bunch of this list that you can pick up and go home and read when you are ready to start sweeping you front porch…
TIME TO GET THE BROOM!!
Our text says we should remove our own plank or speak or log depending on which version of the New Testament you are reading… Some of you have whole forest stuck in your eye and others have just a little bit of sawdust in the corner of your eye…
Let me let you in on a well-kept secret…sin is sin even if it is just a “little” sin…
It is still spelled with the same three letters…
Israel’s God sets the ideal, the standard for human behavior, and the most frequent biblical words for sin (Heb ?a?a’; Gk hamartema) meant originally “to miss the mark, fail in duty” (Rom 3:23). As Lawgiver, God sets limits to man’s freedom; another frequent term (Heb ?abar; Gk parabasis) describes sin as transgression, overstepping those set limits.
R.E.O. White, “Sin,” Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 1967.
