A Remedy For Suffocating Clutter

What kind of insidious plot is going on? There is this creeping scourge that drains productivity and slowly strangles. This destroyer is every where. If you are not extremely diligent it will get you too! In fact it is a pandemic threat to the modern world. I am talking about the plague of clutter.

My computer used to do its thing so quickly, and working with it was such a joy. Now it takes forever, well it seems like that anyway. So I consult my computer experts. No not the Windows help line, my teenagers! They inform me a computer slowing down is really a common problem. The computer simply has so much clutter hidden in there that it takes it a long time to find its way through all that stuff!

They very patiently told me what the cure was. I have to regularly run the clean up utilities: programs like Ccleaner. So now I run it daily and it cleans megabytes of, you guessed it, clutter out of my hard disk every time. I can remember when my hard disk was not even that big!

As I looked at Ccleaner doing its thing this morning, and gloomily reflected on having to do this so often, I decided to spend some time praying, thinking that had to be more pleasant.

In my prayer time God brought some disturbing yet important things to my attention. These centered on the fact that my spiritual life had destructive clutter in it too! This clutter hurts the spiritual life in several ways. Here are two of them, if you come up with more please email them to me so I can publish a more complete list. Thanks ahead of time.

First, spiritual clutter gets in the way of proper Bible study and application.
It clogs our mind and spirit up so we do not really see or understand what is really there. For example: We learn many things as we grow up from well meaning and sincere people that unfortunately is not correct. These things then influence how we read the rest of the Scripture. Ever hear "God helps those who help themselves." People repeat it as Gospel truth, so passages are read in that context and we go through life depending on ourselves not God. Unfortunately God did not say that, instead it comes from that famous author Anonymous.

Second, Spiritual clutter gets in the way of prayer.
This clutter often consists of unconfessed sin. Sin, creates a barrier in our relationship with God. One way it does this is stated in Isaiah 59:2 "But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear" This kind of clutter also hardens us so that we do not hear God. That is a familiar image in the Bible and all too common in our lives today too.

A solution:
The solution to this "spiritual clutter" problem is actually similar to what Ccleaner does to my computer. Identify it and delete it! This is part of what God was doing with me during that prayer time this morning. Some things came to my attention. At that point I had a choice: do I keep this spiritual clutter or do I get rid of it? Getting rid of it involves the process the Apostle John describes for us in 1 John 1:9 "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."

This cleaning opens us up to greater spiritual health, a vital prayer life, opening our minds and spirits up to the Holy Spirit guiding our study time, and much more. In short when we clean out the spiritual clutter our spiritual health improves.

This morning my computer cleaned out megabytes and megabytes of computer clutter. I cleaned up some spiritual clutter. Right now we are both functioning better. I said right now because just as I run Ccleaner often to keep my computer operating well, I need to clean up the spiritual clutter often too.

Take a few minutes do some spiritual cleaning and have a great day with God.

Written by Rev. Daniel B. Baker September 2007

By the way, Ccleaner is not the only utility that cleans out clutter; it is simply one that I use.



Articles by Rev. Daniel B. Baker :: Webmaster: Joseph I. Baker