CLEAN

By Sarah Bryant, with Fellowship Bible Church Celebrate Recovery Devotional Team 5/29/19

I really struggle to keep my car clean. The outside usually looks pretty good, but the inside…not so much. Specifically the passenger floorboard. This is my catch-all area for tossing things that I can’t deal with while I’m driving. The trash piles up until I’ve had enough of driving around in my own garbage, and I clean it out. I tell myself I’ll keep it cleaner this time, but it never fails, within a few days I’ve started accumulating the trash again. I’m not exactly sure when I picked up this habit, but the cycle has been going on for several years.  A couple of months ago I got a new car. I saw this as my chance to start fresh. I told myself, “I’m going to keep this one clean.” But this time I didn’t just decide to keep my car clean, I started changing my habits. Over the past years I had unknowingly trained my arm to just toss things into the floorboard without even thinking about it. It was easier than dealing with the trash appropriately. In the beginning I still struggled with tossing things into the floorboard, so I started with cleaning the floorboard each time I got where I was going. Slowly I became able to stop myself in mid-toss and put the trash in my pocket to throw away later. Then eventually I didn’t even think about tossing it to the floorboard anymore.

Well, I was recently putting a receipt into my pocket (instead of in the floorboard!) and thought to myself how closely this resembled my recovery. Before recovery I used to keep my “car” (body) clean on the outside but drove around in my own garbage that I didn’t want to deal with on the inside. Always wanting to change, but continuing to fall back into my old habits each time I tried. Just like with my old car, I would tell myself, “This time I’ll keep it clean.” I would decide with my mind but did nothing to change my habits. My heart never changed. In my recovery, as with my car, it wasn’t until I made both the decision to change and began working on my habits, my heart, that things actually changed.

Are you stuck in an unhealthy cycle? Maybe it’s a small habit like keeping your car clean. Or
maybe it’s the much larger issue of keeping your body and soul clean. Let me encourage you to work all the steps – not just a few of them. Often it seems that we get stuck in a cycle when we stop at Step 3. We give it to God then sit on the couch and wait on things to change. While He can certainly change us that way, I believe He wants us to be active participants. There are nine other steps that God wants to work through with us. Working all the steps in order allows God to make lasting change in our lives as we grow closer to Him through the process.

“Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.” – Romans 6:12-14

Thank you, Father, that you never give up on us. No matter how many times we struggle through the same cycles of sin You are always faithfully waiting on us to return to You. With open arms you greet us, offering hope and a future. Thank you for loving us where we are, but loving us too much to leave us there. Amen.

Click HERE to listen to "Clean" by Natalie Grant