Sermon Illustrations
The Holy Spirit Helps Clean Areas We Overlook
In his recent book, Daniel Rice shares the story of Pastor Matt Chandler who came home one night and found his son in the living room playing a game on his Xbox, instead of cleaning his room. After asking his son to clean his room Chandler said:
After a pause he went to clean his room and start on his other main household chore—vacuuming the house. As I left to start unloading the dishwasher, I heard him turn on the vacuum—for about forty-five seconds. Reid found me and happily reported, "I'm done."
I said, "You vacuumed the whole house?"
"Uh-huh."
"Son, Superman could not vacuum this whole house in forty-five seconds."
"I did, Dad."
So I did what a loving father would do. I grabbed his hand and said, "Let's just walk around and see." We walked around the house, and over in this corner, we found an entire bag of Goldfish crackers that looked like someone had intentionally dumped them on the floor and danced on them.
I said, "Reid, did you vacuum this?"
"I didn't see it."
"Okay, but it's on the floor. You're supposed to vacuum the floor. I don't know how you missed this."
We vacuumed. We walked around and I showed him other obvious things he failed to see. It reminded me of the line in the Gospel of John when Jesus says, "We will make our house with you" because that is what the Holy Spirit does for us. He takes us around the house of our heart and says, ''Hey, look at these crushed up Goldfish. It's going to be awesome for them to be gone. Bugs are going to get in here, and bad stuff is going to happen. There's going to be a smell in here. Let's get this cleaned up. I'm going to help you get that cleaned up. He wants to clean up places that we didn't even know were dirty. "