at the bottom of our dirty laundry...

i have been reading the book, a leader in the making by joyce meyer for a weekly bible study. we just finished up a few chapters on negative conditions of the heart. wow! there were twenty of them listed and i didn't realize how much junk can be in our hearts. junk that God certainly doesn't want there. junk that satan puts there to keep us from truly being who God is calling us to be.

the book focuses on the fact that we have to work on these negative heart conditions before God can use our leadership potential. regardless if you see yourself as a leader or not, it is important to find out what negative conditions of the heart you may possess so that you can live a life that fully worships God. some negative conditions that were described were a proud heart, a faint heart, a greedy, lustful heart and an unforgiving heart. i am realizing our hearts can be full of these negative things and we may not even know. and only God can reveal them to us if we ask.

the other day i was doing laundry. i had gotten way behind on it due to the stomach bug that hit us last week. it was really piled up. and i started thinking, i did a ton of laundry last week, why am i so behind? that is when i realized, i was only doing the stuff on top of the piles, the stuff that was the dirtiest. i was able to get that cleaned and put away. but the bottom of the piles never got washed, because i just couldn't get to it. the stuff on the top of the piles consumed me and i never got to the bottom. in fact, i had forgotten that we had some of those clothes. as i was digging my way to the bottom of the piles, i thought how much my dirty laundry piles are like our hearts.

we have these negative conditions of our hearts, the messy ones that are on top and we deal with and we get a handle on. we get a handle on those and think we are all set. but because we are always maintaining what is on the top, because just like dirty laundry it continues to pile up, we don't have time or we forget to work on what is on the bottom. so we have to dig really deep to get to the bottom of our heart and pull the things out that we haven't dealt with. just like the huge dirty laundry piles sitting on our laundry floor. they may not always be there, we may get caught up but before we know it those piles appear once again.

so, my encouragement to you to do on a very discouraging topic, is to dig deep. ask God to reveal to you the things that He wants you to work so that He can take you to the next level of where He is calling you to be.

for the Lord sees not as man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance,
but the Lord looks on the heart. 1 samuel 16:7