Rebuilding The Home Getting Rid Of The Junk In The Closet

Rebuilding The Family House: The Closet

7/4/20101 Genesis 27:1-19 1 John 1:5-12

We are launching a new series of sermons today on Rebuilding The Family House. We are going to look at The Closet in order to get rid of the Junk. We are going to look at the kitchen to discover how to work together. We are going to visit the dining room to learn ways of being kind, and we are going to enter the bedroom to talk about sex. The first room we are going to enter is the closet. The closet is the place we put other things in, in order to keep others from seeing them at the moment.

How many of you have closets in your home where everything is neat and hung up and in its place? How many of you have closets that are semi-neat and in order? How many of you have closets in which everything was thrown in and the door was shut as quickly as possible before it all falls back out on top of you.

As a kid, closets were somewhat a mystery to me. Our closets never had lights in them, and I thought they were much larger than they actually were, and that they had monsters way in the back section. I was always afraid of the end of the closet in my parent’s bedroom and in my grandmother’s room in Ga. We didn’t have a closet in the boys’ bedroom.

The only other closet was in the bathroom and the hallway in our house, and I was always surprised by some of the things that I would be able to find the hall closet that we thought had been lost. I even had dreams of going into the closets and finding a whole section of the house that we never used.

Closets are interesting. Sometimes they can be places where we hide things that we do not want others to find or to see. Sometimes we stash things way back up in a closet that we intend to bring out at a later time when we could blend it back in. I once stole a baseball glove at school, but I had to hide it in the closet until I could bring it into the open without arousing to much suspicion. How many of us have hid things in the closet until we thought we could safely bring it out into the open?

Sometimes we make our homes closets in which we keep things hidden from those on the outside. We place in them family secrets that can be very painful if brought to the light. Jesus made an interesting statement that shows us what we all take into our homes. A group of people were so concerned about eating the right food to be clean, when Jesus was trying to get them to see. It’s not what’s on the outside coming in that’s making a mess, it’s what’s on the inside coming out that’s the real problem.

Jesus said, Mark 7:20-23 (Today's New International Version)

20 He went on: "What comes out of you is what defiles you. 21 For from within, out of your hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile you."

I want you to know that these things are in your home, and they are in my home because we are in our homes. Sometimes we like to think, that some people are really bad or really messed up and that’s why certain things happened in the their families. No that family had the same thing in its closets as we do, but they failed to realize that some things need to be locked up in a closet and left there.

What are some secrets we carry in our families that look good to others? Some of you have terrible tempers at home, that you pull out of the closet. Some of you have terrible spending habits. You keep spending more than you have and you’re getting deeper and deeper in debt and its hurting your family. But you keep shopping and pulling it out of the closet.

Some of you have adopted lying and deceitful ways at home and its destroying others trust in you, and you keep pulling them back out of the closet. Some of you have crossed sexual activity lines in your home that never should have been crossed, but you keep pulling them out of the closet. Some of you are stealing from other family members and deliberaterly putting the suspicion on others thereby causing distrust in your home, and you keep pulling it out of the closet. What you don’t realize is that these will be affecting how you are treated by others for years and years to come.