Ah, home. The place where you hang your hat, where the chickens come to roost and where you bring the bacon, if you have some. There’s something magical about the comforts of home and those comforts grow on us until the point that well, if we’re away from it too long, we can even get sick from its absence. The power of and the love for home is something that has a curiously strong pull on our psyches.
But don’t think about the emotional Hallmark movie feeling of home, but specifically the physical home. The house. The big organized pile of wood, bricks and nails. As we live in a house, it gets dirty. The floors, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and this time of year even the yard. (stupid leaves) The result is something some love, some loathe and most simply just tolerate. Cleaning house. But regardless of your feelings for cleaning your house, it’s just something that has to be done.
You might be wondering where in the world I’m going with this, but believe it or not, chapter 14 of Leviticus talks about just this…cleaning house. Specifically, the cleaning of a house that had leprous inhabitants. If you missed yesterday’s 5MC, I strongly recommend you back up and read it. Leprosy is seen as a parallel to sin in our lives and the process of dealing with leprosy astonishingly mirrors how we should deal with sin in our lives today. (You can find yesterday’s post at The5MC.com.) Leprosy was a very contagious, aggressive disease and it was known to even live temporarily in very porous surfaces such as the stone and mud-based plaster they coated their walls with. As the priest would deal with the bodily cleansing of the leaper, he would also be summoned to the leper’s house to see if it was clean as well. If God did heal the leper, it would make no sense for him to go right back into an unclean home and possibly be re-contaminated.
Hence our lesson today. Cleaning your home.
Imagine I had a sweet Delorean time machine. I hit 88 mph in my local mall parking lot and whisked back to the days of Leviticus and picked up the High Priest Aaron and brought him back to 2019. As I did, I brought him over to your house to inspect it for leprosy. Naturally he wouldn’t find any leprosy but remember in our context, leprosy is considered anything unclean, that is unpleasing to God. Question. As Aaron walked through your humble abode what would he see? Does your house need cleaning?
There’s no place on this planet where we are more comfortable than home. It’s where we eat, sleep, play, relax, dream, talk, love and live. We quickly make home our safe place. We exist at home like we will not exist anywhere else. We talk, act, and treat others as we truly are within our home. If you want to see a person’s true heart, go live with them for a week. As a result, our home can either help us be clean before the Lord or it can do just the opposite, it can be filled with things which cause us to be unclean before the Lord. And folks, if you’re living amongst unclean things, you have no hope but to be unclean yourself, it will wear off on you without you even knowing it. Let’s look at how to clean our house before the Lord.
1) TV. There is nothing in your home that can pollute easier and quicker than your TV. The news constantly barks out fear, anger, hate, murder and deadly disasters. I personally don’t watch the news. It is full of carefully manipulated stories that have little bearing on me and that I personally can do nothing about. It is merely produced to stimulate a desired response from me. I’m not telling you not to watch the news, but I am telling you to protect your heart. What goes into your heart, will come right back out. Your average TV drama and sit-com today has changed dramatically compared to 25 years ago. A sinful world has pushed censors to their limits. The language, innuendos and graphic images has me constantly asking “can they do that on TV?” Again, I’m not anti-TV, but folks, it’s all about what you’re filling your mind and your heart with. If you want to clean your house, most American homes should start with what’s on their TV.
There’s also the point of how much TV. Did you know that the average US family watches 35.5 hours of TV a week? The state of Texas considers 37.5 hours a week full time employment. So basically, the average American has a full time job watching TV! Imagine if some of this time were spent talking to spouses, reading to the kids, studying God’s Word or even spent serving others. TV and its programming can cause a house to look pretty unclean before the Lord.
2) Internet. In 2019, home means internet. I saw a funny meme the other day that said, “home is where the wi-fi automatically connects.” Did you know that a whopping 82% of US homes have internet? Access to the internet has become as common a staple in the home as water and electric. The invention of the internet by Al Gore (just kidding) has been both one of the biggest blessings and the biggest curses to the world in the last 20 years. The internet instantly brings things into our homes that just as instantly contaminate everything they touch. Anything that can be used for good, satan will use for evil and this evil streams directly into where we live. Internet pornography has become one of the biggest issues of our generation. If you read up on the stats, it will shock you. 40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites and over 200,000 are considered porn addicts. Every second 28,258 Americans are watching porn. And in a stat that just stuns me, 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic. As a result of this instant home access, pornography is literally consuming our nation. Porn use is destroying marriages. Teen porn use is radically affecting our young generations resulting in astronomical levels of depression, sexual promiscuity and heightened sexual deviancy. The internet has polluted our homes in a way that the world has never before seen. The improper use of the internet within the home can turn a clean house into one that is tremendously unclean.
3) Cell phones. Another item meant to connect, satan is using to separate. How ironic that what Alexander Graham Bell meant as a connection tool is actually driving people into seclusion. You’ve seen the dramatic affects smart phones have had on society just as much as I have. Families at dinner, each with a phone in their face, not talking or even acknowledging each other. Hours of down time within the home, each family member on their phone within their own little world. The parents are on Facebook, the kids are playing games and the teens are texting 90 miles per hour. A family divided. As the three musketeers would say before entering a big sword fight, “United we stand and divided we fall.” The family unit is the basis of society and if the family unit is divided, it falls and has a direct affect upon society. In many of the studies of the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, breakdown of the family structure is listed near the top. If you can divide the family, you break down society. And just how do you break a family? Kill communication. Stop the talking. Don’t let cell phones and what they can do cause an unclean broken house.
Folks, I could go on and on, you get the point. Where you live and how you live is the basis of who you and your family are before the Lord. You can’t live one way and try to act another. As the priest walks through your home, he can see who you are. If you have called upon Jesus Christ as your Savior, you have been gifted with a miracle, the Holy Spirit of God. As a result, He is living right there with you, seeing all and hearing all. Create and maintain a home that would please Him. Create a clean home where your clean heart can live in peace, joy and freedom.
Blessings.
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