Hitting Rock Bottom
“Now no chastening seems to be
joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the
peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” –
Hebrew 12:11
In my kitchen I have a drawer that we affectionately refer
to as the “junk drawer”. When you open
it up you’ll find all the stuff that was left out, has no place in the house,
or just really shouldn’t have been kept anyway.
There’s loose thumbtacks (beware!), rubber bands, adhesive rubber pads,
crazy glue, ear plugs, ink pens, loose string, batteries, hand tools, loose
change, magnets, old keys, and just about anything else you can imagine.
Once in a while I do decide to clean it up, but in order to
do that, I have to first empty the whole drawer out on the kitchen table. That makes quite a mess! Then I can sort through all the “stuff” we’ve
accumulated, figure out what needs to stay, what needs to go, and then try to
put it back in the place it should have been…or in the “junk drawer”. But until I empty it out, I can’t clean it
up! And I don’t empty it often because
those thumbtacks can HURT!
I had a revelation about this drawer one day. Every time I clean it out, I always put those
thumbtacks back in there. One day, after years of putting them back, I finally
asked myself why I did. If I know that’s
why I avoid cleaning the drawer, and I know it’s a safety hazard for anyone who
needs to find something in it, then why do they constantly go back in there
loose? It’s simple. I’ve just developed a habit of doing it.
As Christians, sometimes God looks at our lives and at our
hearts and decides to empty us out on the table too. He does it for our own good, because a good
Father corrects His children to make them better. We can receive it, and grow from it, or we
can go back to bad habits and endure the correction again, and again, and again. His love is unending, and so is His correction.
There are times when we have to be taken down to “rock
bottom”. It’s called rock bottom because
you can’t get any lower than that. It’s
like the bottom of the junk drawer. God
has to get us to that point in order to sort us out, and make us take an
inventory of what we’ve got inside. The
problem is, just like the pain that my junk drawer can cause me - this kind of
cleaning by God is often painful too. He
can take your job, your spouse, your friends, your kids, your finances, even
your church, and turn them upside down.
It seems to me that if we understand that God has the power
to turn us out onto His table, and we understand how painful that can be, we
would avoid it by doing our own house cleaning first. I don’t know about you, but rock bottom isn’t
somewhere I want to be taken. I’ve grown
very use to the blessings God has given and very passionate about some of
them.
Friends, take time to do your own house cleaning. Ask God to reveal to you the habits you have
that he wants to get rid of. Ask Him to
show you the things that are hurting you.
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