Day Six of Seven
August 26, 2006
Guest Blogger: Charles Gibson

A couple months ago, our 2 year-old little boy, Trenton, raided a drawer in the kitchen. He grabbed a large box of toothpicks and proceeded to spread them around the living room floor. When I told him to pick them all up and put them back in the box, he said "okay," then proceeded to start putting the same two toothpicks in and out of the box.

For whatever reason he had decided he wasn't going to pick up his mess. When faced with various measures of discipline, including missing the chance to go to grandma's house, he still refused, but wouldn't directly tell us "no." Instead, he shrugged his little shoulders and said the toothpicks were "too heavy."

Trenton is very skilled at making messes. He is good at evenly distributing the mess for maximum clean-up difficulty. Another time he found a piece of styrofoam in a box. He broke it into small pieces and spread it around his room. It looked like it had snowed in there.

But this mess I didn't expect him to clean-up. I cleaned it up with a shop-vac. Even though Trenton was responsible, he couldn't reasonably pick-up all that styrofoam with his hands, especially the way styrofoam sticks to you.

I believe God deals with us in much the same way. There are some messes we make in life that we can and should clean-up. But there are other messes we make that we can't fix ourselves that God, in his grace, will clean up for us.

By mess I'm really talking about the consequences of our sin. Maybe it's a word spoken to someone else out of anger, or perhaps the effects of a sin that's become a harmful addiction. Either way, God desires to first clean-up the mess in our own souls, damaging lies we've believed that led to the sin. God also provides the grace to help us clean-up the damage our sin causes in relationships. Whatever the issue is, call on him today to bring his cleansing truth to where the lies are in your life.