Do you have a junk drawer? That place in the kitchen where everything goes. I have at least two. Really three. This morning I inadvertently started cleaning the smallest of these drawers. It is a long narrow one and recently I noticed that it wasn’t properly closing. I knew that I had a lot of stuff in there. But I didn’t realize, as I started pulling out a small mountain of napkins, old hot sauce packages, plastic utensils, matches and used Ziploc bags just how much stuff was in there.
As I started pulling stuff out, throwing away some things, setting aside others, God spoke in my spirit, “It’s time to clean your junk drawer.”
You’ve got garbage in your life that you didn’t even know that you had and that you don’t need.
We have to clean before we can move. We have to purge before we can go forward. We have to get rid of the stuff that’s been stuffed and hidden in our past, packed in the back of our mind, the pain hidden in our soul so that we can function properly.
As my brother, Pastor Kenneth E. Copeland teaches, you have to process (or for this analogy we can say clean) the wounds of the past. Those wounds can turn into weakness. And those weaknesses have the potential to turn into wickedness.
Childhood wounds. Relationship wounds. Wounds left by those who intentionally or unintentionally hurt or harmed us deeply by their actions. Those hard things, the emotions attached to them and the lies of the Enemy that we have internalized. Cleaning a wound is a matter of life and death. When we let the wounds and weakness of life turn into wickedness, not only does that sin impact us, but it has ripple effects that impact those all around us.
James 1:15 says in the New Living Translation, “These desires give birth to sinful action. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death.” Or as the Message Bible puts it, “Lust gets pregnant, and has a baby: sin! Sin grows up to adulthood and becomes a real killer.”
Sometimes our junk drawer is filled with stuff that may have been good at one time, that we thought we would need or use but those things are not useful anymore. Throw it away. Let it go.
Keep the good stuff. You can’t get to some of the good stuff that you can use-- the good things your parents passed on to you, the foundation that was laid in the past, things that you have picked up along the way-- because you’ve got too much junk in the way.
In the spirit, sit quietly before God and let Him lead you as you clean out those junk drawers in this new season of your life. Let Him speak to those areas that you have closed off and not wanted to deal with because it has been too painful. If you have sin in your life, get rid of it and commit your way to Him. He wants to move you. He wants to bless you. But you’re keeping too much junk. It’s time to clean your junk drawers.
(Note: This photo is not my junk drawer. My drawer was way more junky.)
