A mess we cannot clean.

Recently, my mom has been getting frustrated with my little sister, Hollis, because when asked to clean her room, she will throw her clothes under the bed, in the corners of her closet, basically anywhere so she doesn’t have to hang them up or fold them. When my mom asks her, “have you cleaned your room?” she replies, “yes” and hides the fact that her room only gives the appearance of being clean, but hidden in the nooks and crannies, there are clothes, toys, and piles that are not clean.

When my mom discovered this, she called her into her room and told her, “Hollis, this is not cleaning your room! You can’t just hide your clothes and tell me that you’ve cleaned your room!” My little sister takes it in, nods her head, but eventually ends up back to the place where she’s hiding her mess to keep my mom happy.

I thought about this for a while, and realized that this is a metaphor of our relationship with Christ. He asks us to clean up our act and try to be like him, and we respond with the attempts to hide our mess from him. But we are incapable of hiding our mess from him because he is omniscient and sees us in our sin. We cannot perfect our actions, but he calls us to try and assures us that he will make up for our lack. So many of us are just like Hollis. We think that we can hide our sins and our failures from God and we think that that is necessary. But in the midst of our sinfulness, in the midst of our mess and uncleanliness, He loves us the same. That is the beauty of God’s love. 

He doesn’t ask us to stop sinning altogether, he asks us to bring our sins to him. We need to stop hiding our sins by piling them in the corners of our closets; we need to bring the piles to God and say, “Lord, I cannot clean this without your help.” And in that moment where we admit our inability and ask for his help, he takes the weight of the heavy sins from our hands, and he puts them away in their rightful place. 

Our sins are a mess we are incapable of cleaning by ourselves, a mess that only God can clean. But we have to bring our mess before him and be vulnerable in admitting we are not clean in order for him to do so. A relationship with God is not one in which we appear to be a certain way; it is where he sees the very depths of our heart, where we come to him with our piles of sin and allow him to cleanse us of them.

⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

- 1 John 1:9