How did you do practicing the presence of God last week? It is ‘the glorious employment of the Christian’ so please persist and rejoice in this holy habit.
One discipline you might consider as you seek to be always aware of God’s presence is to let God wash your spirit as you wash your body. What do you do when you ‘get ready’ in the morning? You clean yourself and analyze your appearance and prepare for the day ahead, right? How much time do you spend doing this? Thirty minutes? An hour? Every day, right? How much time do you spend in repentance every day?
They have much in common, don’t they? When we repent, God cleans us. In His kindness, He shows us where we have turned away from Him. He teaches us how we have fallen short of the glory for which we were created. And, the forgiveness has already been given. So we can repent of our folly and turn back to God. We can reorient our lives around Him and become sanctified. This is the will of God, your sanctification. (1 Thess. 4).
So I encourage you to look beyond the physical act of cleaning yourself each morning and look to Jesus. Use that time to think about how He cleanses you and makes you holy. Try it daily; we don’t wait until we are covered in filth to take a shower, do we? Spend your thoughts on God and His desire to purify your heart, rather than worrying about the day ahead while trying to get every hair in its perfect place. Beauty is vain, but those who fear the Lord are to be praised.
rlowenfield
14Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. 15Nothing outside a man can make him ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him ‘unclean.’ ”
20He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ 21For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’ “
“Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.”
Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”