Unclutter Your Lives - Clear Away the Conflict

Matthew 5:23–24 (ESV)

"So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift."

I met this man on my vicarage.  I was the fourth of 7 vicars (interns) to serve this vacant congregation in southern Nebraska.  He was a man every single one of us vicars visited sometime during our year of vicarage.  He came to church, but he refused to go to communion.  He hadn’t been to communion in 40 some years.   So each vicar, during his year, went out some time to visit with this man out of spiritual concern.  Why wouldn’t he take communion?  The initial reason we were given was that he objected to having to kneel for communion.  Back in the day, when the congregation put in the kneeler for communion, he was against it. Since the congregation went ahead and did it anyway, he refused to go to communion. 

Well I suggested to him that he didn’t have to kneel.  He could stand to receive the Lord’s Supper.  Apparently, I was the 4^th vicar to suggest this to him.  That was when the real problem came out.  40 years earlier this man had been involved in a conflict with another church member from a nearby church.  The other man had accused this man of attempting to have an immoral relationship with his wife.  This was fervently denied by the member of my vicarage church.  So the other man proceeded to beat him up… severely beat him up.  The result was that this man, the member of my vicarage church, was very bitter.   He was bitter about being wrongly accused.  He was bitter about being beaten up.  He was bitter because this other man was never disciplined by his church.  He held on to that bitterness for 40 years. That day of my visit, he showed me an old picture of what he looked like after the beating.  He carried that picture in his wallet.

I share that story because that conflict from 40 years earlier had really cluttered up his life.   This unresolved conflict left him angry, destroyed his marriage, hurt his faith (he wouldn’t go to communion), lost him all sort of friends.  The list of clutter goes on and on.  That’s what unresolved conflict does – It leaves trash all over your life.  It is a cancer that eats away at your heart and faith.  When you allow conflict to fester, you hurt yourself most of all. 

How do you clear away such conflict?  The words of Jesus make that clear.   So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.   First, go to God and ask for his help and his forgiveness.  After all, it takes two to tangle.  Then go to whomever it is. Go not for revenge. Go in humility – willing to listen and willing to see your own fault in the matter.  Go ready to ask forgiveness.  Go in love.  Speak the truth in love to the other person.  Jesus said it in Matthew 18, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”

Why should you go, especially if the other person was wrong?  Well it doesn’t really matter which of you is wrong.  Most likely you both are wrong.  No, the reason to go is because that is what God did for you and me.  He didn’t wait. He came searching for Adam and Eve.  He promised a savior from sin right there in the garden.  “He sent forth His Son…”  “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their sins against them…”  “God demonstrates His own love for us in this, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”  “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and gave His son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  He is the shepherd “who leaves the 99 in the open country and goes and searches for the lost sheep,” came searching for you and me.  That’s why you go… that’s why you seek to clear away the clutter of conflict – you want others to know about, to see and meet in you the love of the God who loves them and you.  You love because Christ first loved you… That’s what God’s love does – It clears away the clutter.   

Unclutter Your Lives - Get Rid of Your Worries

Philippians 4:6-7

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.  

Are any of you a pack rat?  I wanted to know if I am, so I googled it and found this definition.  A pack rat is a “bushy-tailed rodent that has well-developed cheek pouches and that hoards food and miscellaneous objects.”  Phew… that’s not me.  But then there is another definition – ‘a person who collects or hoards especially unneeded items.’  Now I wondered, am I hoarder?  Or is that different? Not really - a hoarder is simply a pack rat on steroids.  “Hoarding is the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value.”  People hoard because they get attached to things.  What if they might need these things some day?”  People actually hoard free things – like Ross on Friends who used to load his suitcase with everything free from his hotel room.  Hoarders, and pack rats just have a hard time letting go of things.  They end up with cluttered homes, like a man I knew in Nebraska.  He had stacks of magazines and newspapers and other junk he just couldn’t throw out.  There were little trails through the stacks to get from his chair to his kitchen to his bedroom.  For someone struggling with hoarding, our “40 days – 40 items” challenge could be very difficult.

Now I don’t know if you or I are hoarders of things.  But I do have a suspicion that many of us are hoarders of worry. How many of you worry too much?  Any of you have trouble letting go of your worries?

Now please understand, I’m not talking about having legitimate concern for something or someone.  That is a difference between worry and concern. Concern has to do with being responsible or taking responsibility for something or someone – where you have the ability to make a difference.  When one of you sees that someone is missing in church and you reach out to make sure they are okay… when the boss gives you a job and you take steps to get that job done… you are being concerned.  Worry is what happens when you neglect your responsibilities and instead fret over them.  Worry is what happens when you become anxious about things you have no control over.  Concern is the natural state of a servant of God.  Worry is the natural state of someone who is trying to be God… to do God’s job for Him.  Since you and I can’t handle His job – we worry!

Worry is a huge source of spiritual clutter in our lives.  Think of all things you worry about – lay offs at work, money, bills, kids, health, etc.  Worry causes loss of sleep.  It ties our stomach up in knots.  It can make it hard to focus or concentrate.  On days when I am really worried I find it hard to get anything else done.  Worst of all – we all know we shouldn’t worry…It’s a big waster of time.  Most of what we worry about never happens.  We know that we should get rid of worry… but we are hoarders- we hold on to worry like we can’t live without it… after all to quit worrying is to admit that we aren’t God.   

The problem with worry, is the problem with a lot of the junk we hold on to in life.   Who can we give it to?  Who would want our worries?  He does – the Lord – the only one who can truly handle them.  “Cast all your cares on Him, the Bible says, “for He cares about you.”   How do you give Your cares away?   The answer is so simple, it almost seems too simple.  Pray. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.   When you give your worries to Jesus, guess what you discover?  He already took them.  He already carried them. He already conquered them for you.  He carried them to His cross.  He gave up His life to handle your worries.  He rose again to dispel all worry forever. 

Whatever it is that worries or scares you… what ever it is that you can’t handle – He knows about it.  He can handle it.  He has handled it.   I love the words of Jesus in Matthew 6.  “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?  “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?  So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’  For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.  But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Yes, get rid of your worries.  Give them to Jesus.  He’s already gotten them all handled. Amen.

Unclutter Your Lives - God's Spring Cleaning

“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.   Joel 2:12-13

I love what we are doing for Lent – Picking out one item a day for forty days to give up… Something we don’t need that we can give to someone who does need it.  When Donna first proposed this idea to me, all I could think about was all the clutter in my life – in my closet, in my dresser, on the kitchen table, on my home desk upstairs, on my desk here at church.  It seems like no sooner do I clean off the clutter and new clutter takes its place.  Sometimes the clutter gets so bad that I can’t work at my desk… or we can’t eat at the table. We have too much stuff.  This is a great idea.

Lent is the perfect time for this project.  What a great reminder that we also have too much spiritual clutter in our lives.   Just like its good from time to time to give our home our good spring cleaning, that’s what the season of Lent is for spiritually.  This is a time for God to give our Spiritual lives a good old-fashioned spring cleaning.  That’s what we are going to do these next few Wednesdays. We are going to consider all the spiritual clutter in our lives… the things in our lives that either crowd out or leave very little room for God.  We will be looking at the burdens we carry, the busyness that clutters our schedules…the worries that consume our minds, the conflicts that threaten our relationships, the false treasures that we think we can’t live without. Tonight, though we consider the worst clutter, the clutter we are ashamed of, the stuff we don’t want anyone else to see, the clutter we hide in our closets.

In my family when we heard someone unexpected was about to show up, my mom would go into a panic.  She didn’t want people to see any kind of mess.  We would take all the clutter and shove it in closets. That wasn’t really cleaning… that was just hiding the mess.  Too often that’s what we do with our spiritual mess.  In our shame we hide the mess. We cover it up.  We blame others.  We lie.  We do what Adam and Eve did. When their eyes were opened by their sin and they realized they were naked.  They tried to hide it.  “They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”  Then when “they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day… the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God…  What are the things in your life you are so ashamed of that you don’t want anyone to know about them… so ashamed of that you would do anything to cover up that secret – an addiction?  Alcoholism?  Troubles in your marriage?  Something from far in your past? 

Let me tell you something important about all our attempts to hide our shameful clutter in the closet.  When my mom would tell me to clean up my room, I would often shove it in a closet or push it all under my bed.   That didn’t fool her for a second.  In the same way you and I can’t hide anything from God.  He knows all about the things we hide.  He knew where Adam and Eve were hiding. He knew why. He knows what you and I are hiding. Indeed, He made that clear today.  He marked us with ashes.  “Dust you are and to dust you shall return.”  With those ashes He said to you and me, “I know all about the clutter in your closet. I know you are a sinner!”  You can’t hide anything from Him.

So why try?  That’s the message of Lent.  Listen again to the reading from Joel.  “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” He invites us to fling wide the closet doorway.  Let Him see the mess… Let Him do His spring cleaning.  He does for us here what He did for Adam and Eve that day.  He knew what they done before He even asked them.  “The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”  He said, “Who told you that “you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”   God didn’t need their confession.  They needed to confess.   He was giving them a gift – the opportunity to let Him clean out the closet.  That is a gift our God holds out to us as well – a time of confession in our worship… or if you need a private, confidential time with Pastor Bauer or me… or a Stephen minster or some other person you trust.  You need not fear.  You won’t shock God… You won’t shock us.  We already know this about each other – we are all sinful and unclean.  We will tell no one.

After all God has marked us with more than the ashes of repentance.  At baptism you and I were marked with the sign of the Holy cross both upon the forehead and upon the heart to mark us as those redeemed by Christ the crucified… as those for whom Christ shed His blood and rose again.  He did that for our sins.  We have been marked by Him at baptism… “by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing...”   God’s chief desire is clean out the closets of our lives… to remove the clutter… to forgive our sins!  Indeed, He already has in Christ.  That’s the invitation before us tonight… this season of Lent.  “Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.   That’s my challenge to you this season of Lent – as you take out one item each day and place it in your bag… spend a few moments in prayer.  Consider the spiritual clutter in your life.  Give it to God.  Let Him do His Spring cleaning.  Amen.