May the meditation of our hearts and the words of my mouth be acceptable to you O Lord, My Rock and my Redeemer! Amen!

If Pastor came to your door this morning what kind of greeting would you give? Would you be happy to see him, arriving unannounced as he did. What would be your very first response to His visit? Would you feel put out or put upon because you didn’t have any warning. Would you be angry that you didn’t have adequate time to tidy things up for your guest? Would you be afraid that you were giving the wrong impression? Maybe you’d try to delay His visit telling Him to come back much later after you had straightened out your house.

Would you tell Him to come in in 30 minutes while you straightened out just the major messes in your house, put some of your junk into a closet so He wouldn’t see, do a little light cleaning, perhaps run the vacuum. Those of you with small kids will understand how horrifying these unannounced visits can be with little ones. Their stuff is everywhere, some left by them and some left by you.
Think about you house and the various rooms that are in your home. The house and the various rooms are your life as you are living it out; today.

Why do we try and put things in order at the last minute and not keep our lives in order all the time? Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger – we all fall short of the Glory of God.

Now would your reaction be any different if your unannounced guest was Jesus and not Pastor Parker? Would you be mortified, terrified, welcoming, angry, hostile, or humble? How would you be?

Let’s take a look at a couple of the rooms in your house:

First let’s look at the place where you take your meals. Many families will eat around the kitchen table for most of their meals. What kind of food would Jesus find in your pantry or refrigerator? Would He find good, wholesome food like lean meat, lots a vegetables – sorry kids – milk, and fresh fruit? Would He find junk foods that are high in calories but have little nutritional value, and gobs of transfats and cholesterol? You know the type of junk food we know is bad for us but we still love to eat it! What would Jesus find in your pantry?

Let’s move to another room, say your home office. What would Jesus find there. This is a place where you do a job for others, does it have all the things you need to do your job or are their things that are missing – perhaps a scanner to input documents for you, or perhaps the perhaps the PC that is there is slow and needs to be rebooted frequently. If you work with your hands are your tools taken care of, or do they have some rust on them. Do they have the edge to do the job or are they dull and needing of sometime of the sharpening stone?

Finally we come to that closet; you know the one I mean. It’s locked and the contents never see the light of day. You go there occasionally and indulge yourself in some behavior that you feel ashamed of. It may be porn, don’t get too smug ladies – the fastest growing group of people addicted to porn are WOMEN. Maybe it’s the latest gossip or the news about the latest episode of a soap opera. Whatever you do that you don’t want others to know about, is stored in here in this dark place; kept apart from the rest of your life. What would the Pastor think, what would Jesus think?

The food that you eat is really about how you feed your spiritual life. It consists of your prayer life, the time you spend reading the bible, the time you spend in silent prayer and meditation. This is how we learn what Jesus has in store for us; what He wants us to do with our lives. We do this so that the peace that surpasses all understanding is with us. Here we learn about the deep love the Jesus has for us; how he desires to spend eternity with us in heaven as co-heirs of His Father’s Kingdom, we learn that nothing on earth or under the earth can separate us from the love of God. We learn that despite all the sin we are burdened with, He has forgiven that sin. He has cleansed us from ALL unrighteousness. It is here that we learn, we begin to understand what it means to be one of God’s people. His Holy, and treasured possession, the pearl of great price. This is what today passage means when it states: “… what is the breadth and length, and height, and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge”. It is speaking about the incredible level of God’s love for you and for me. The Love that would, before the foundations of the earth were formed, would devise a plan of rescue that would entail the torture and credulity heaped upon Jesus to reconcile us, to God the Father. He was, and is, and will be forever the Lamb of God who took on sin for you and I so we could become co-heirs with Him in heaven.

I’d like to go back to my earlier analogy of Jesus coming to visit your house. As He stops in the pantry and sees all the junk food we take on in our lives, He becomes the celebrity chef. He personally takes out the useless junk food and throws it away, he then takes you to the store and buys for you, out of His own pocket, good, wholesome, and nutritious food; the exact food that your spiritual life needs and requires. They type of food that will make you grow strong in the way of the Lord, reading the bible and learning what God has done for you and continues to do for you. What He wants for you. It tells us of God’s incredible love towards us and that He wasn’t to be with us during the high points as well as the low ones. He wants to walk by our side to ensure we stay on the path that He has set forth and He wants us to grow strong in our faith. Not as a “to do” list, or some sort of spiritual check list, but as a response of what He first did for us!

The workroom or home office gets the same attention; Jesus sharpens our tools of love, compassion, and humility towards others who need to hear the message that will save them from sin, the devil and death. God gives us the tools, the relationships so that we can spread the Good news that He has to offer a broken and sinful mankind. The tools are there for us to use, or not; but for what He did for us on Calvary, we pick them up and use them as best we can. Asking for His intercession to use them better.
Finally, that closet. That closet that contains all the ugly, dark, foul-smelling sin that we hold so, so dear; Jesus wades into that cesspool we call our lives and He begins the clean-up we can’t even imagine. He carts out the foulness, He wipes the closet floor, He introduces a fresh clean aroma into what was a pit of nasty, nasty garbage. He does this out of love, pure unadulterated love. Love for His people, His sheep, and His treasure. That is what we mean to Him so we could be co-heirs with Him of the greatest treasure of all time – forgiveness of all our sins; because of His love, His incredible love for us.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.