Forgotten Closets

I know my profile says Sioux City Iowa. I am going to Sioux City Iowa in less that 3 weeks, but currently I am finishing things at Desert Sky Baptist Church in Casa Grande Arizona. I graduated, we are doing VBS next week, I preach on Father's Day and in the mean time, try to get everything labeled, passed off and accounted for. One of the duties I am passing on is music/sound/video/worship stuff. Setting up the program lyrics and running the sound board. I met with some guys this morning to get some music stuff set and set up. In doing so I cleaned the music closet.

I found a very large spider. I also found the books they used at the very beginning of the church, about 5 years ago. I found a monitor that was still new in the box. There was some good things in there. . . and a big spider.

I think we spiritually put stuff in closest sometimes. We spend so much time on the mandates, duties and order of Christianity, we begin to lose sight of where we came from. We lose touch with who we used to be. Ephesians 2:11-12 reminds us to remember we were once separated from Christ. In Revelations, John writes to the church at Ephesus to remember from which they have fallen in chapter 2, verse 5. It must have been a hard lesson to learn at Ephesus. I think it's a hard lesson for us to learn.

When those who are lost act like they are lost, how do we respond? When those who are lost behave the way lost people do, what is our response? Do we love them, or do we shun them? Do we want them to find punishment or redemption? When a lost person wrongs us, does something selfish and sinful and hurts us, do we love them and pray for them, or do we want to exact revenge? Do we act like Jesus, who was led like a lamb to the slaughter, or do we fight back and make our own needs known?

I think if we look in our forgotten closets of the way we use to behave (or sometimes still do) we will find that we are not so far removed. We are not much higher than those sinners that we often detest so much. We remember, not so we can revist the sin or we can roll in guilt, but we can remember where we were, and how far God has brought us. We remember the journey, so we can help someone else on the same journey. Just watch out for the big spiders.