I Wish the House Would Just Stay Clean

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. Revelation 3:20

I’ve often heard my wife lament a messy house, wishing that once she cleaned, it would just remain clean on its own. The problem of course, is that, while we’re living in it, cleanliness isn’t our home’s natural state. The law of house entropy says that, left alone, it will always descend into disorder and chaos. The house doesn’t naturally get neater. Rather, it naturally gets more and more messy. So, if we want to live in a house that’s neat and orderly, regular maintenance cleaning is required.

I get it though. In my recovery, I wanted to it to be once-and-done. I wanted to get sober once, get through withdrawal once, and then just go back to my normal life. The problem was that my normal way of life kept leading back to relapse. To maintain sobriety now, I’ve found I’ve had to continually work on my recovery. Daily, I get up, read, pray, meditate, and make a genuine attempt to point my life at God instead of myself. My recovery of course, is intertwined with my faith so that the two are indistinguishable. They’re one and the same. For me to recover, I must practice faith – daily pointing my life at God instead of myself. There was a time when I treated faith like it was also a once-and-done event. When I read today’s passage, about Christ standing at my door and knocking, I could look back and say – I’ve done that. That’s a past event.

This is a common mistake for us as Christians. As evangelicals, we stress the importance of deciding to follow Christ, which was a specific point in time. It may have been a historical event, but today’s passage describes an experience that isn’t meant to be once-and-done. In the passage, Christs says he’s standing at the door of our lives. He wants in, but he wants us to want him in our lives and so he stands, knocking. If we open, he enters and walks alongside us through life.

This unfortunately isn’t our natural state. Our natural state is to walk alone and, if we don’t purposefully open the door to Christ daily, we find ourselves once again alone, following our way, with our house descending into chaos. We don’t get saved daily, but if we want to know the new life for which we were created, then it isn’t a once-and-done event. Daily, we must purposefully open our lives to God, choosing to abandon our natural state for a life lived with him.