Pastor Obvious is cleaning house today. The combine has finished harvesting the field next-door to the south of our place. This morning they are disking the stalks into the dirt to decompose. The wind is blowing in our direction and the sky is hazy with dust and chaff. Most of us have forgotten what it means when the Bible speaks of the wicked being like chaff that the wind blows away. We just buy our cereal, flour and bread, and like Justin Trudeau, (the Prime Minister of that giant farmland to our north), we think that it doesn’t come from the farm, it comes from the grocery.
But getting the bread to the grocery is dirty work. That haze in the sky will soon settle on to our yard, our porch, our patio furniture. We'll have to keep the dogs outside and the windows closed for a while to keep it out of the house, but even that won’t work. The chaff dust seeps into the smallest cracks. It will take a few days of housecleaning and a clean wind before it’s all gone.
Evil and Sin work in much the same way. They blow around in our atmosphere looking for a place to settle, a crack to invade, a furry back to carry them in where they might not otherwise find easy entry. It doesn’t much matter if you are not looking for them, they find you and dump on you and become ingrained and then you must clean house. It helps if you can invite a fresh wind of the Spirit to help with the deep cleaning. And then you can enjoy a new season of relative cleanliness for a while, but you can be sure that another harvest and another disking is coming and you will have to do it all again. The Bible calls this kind of soul-cleaning “repentance.” It’s the least we can do for the house where the Spirit dwells.
