Since my mom died, my brothers and I have faced a task that eventually comes to almost every family: cleaning out her house.
There is nothing particularly unusual about cleaning out a house. You open drawers. You empty closets. You decide what to keep, what to give away, what someone else in the family might want, and what simply needs to be thrown away. Except when it is your mother’s house, nothing is quite that simple.
A drawer isn’t just a drawer. You open it and find something you remember from childhood. A closet contains clothes you still picture her wearing. A cabinet holds something you haven’t seen in thirty years, and suddenly you aren’t standing in an empty house anymore. You’re ten years old again.
Cleaning out Mom’s house brought floods of memories. But it also brought another realization. Life can become incredibly cluttered without us ever noticing it.
Very few of us wake up one morning and decide, “I think I’ll fill every drawer, closet and cabinet in my house with things I may never use again.” It just happens.
We put something in a drawer because we might need it someday. We move something to a closet because we don’t know what else to do with it. We keep something because it belonged to somebody we loved. We hang on to something because throwing it away feels wasteful. One thing becomes ten things. Ten things become a closet full of things. Eventually we stop noticing.
It isn’t necessarily bad stuff. Some of it is valuable. Some of it is sentimental. Some of it once served an important purpose. But somewhere along the way, the house became cluttered.
As we worked through Mom’s house, another thought slowly began forming in my mind. This is what Jesus wants to do with my house. Not the house where Vanessa and I live. Me. My spiritual house.
The House Gets a New Owner
When we come to faith in Jesus Christ, something far more significant happens than inviting Jesus into our lives. The house—my house—gets a new Owner. We deed the property to him.
Paul puts it rather bluntly:
“You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price.”
—1 Corinthians 6:19–20 NLT
The deed has changed hands.
But here’s where things get interesting. We still live in the house. And living in a house you used to own after someone else has taken ownership can get uncomfortable. Because the new Owner begins opening drawers.
“What’s this?”
Oh, I’ve had that for years.
“Do you need it?”
Well, no. But I’ve always had it.
Then he opens a closet.
Jesus, we really don’t need to go in there.
But he does.
Opening the Drawers
There are resentments we’ve stored away. Old wounds we’ve carefully boxed up. Ambitions we haven’t quite surrendered. Habits we’ve learned to live with. Attitudes we’ve stopped questioning. Fears we’ve carried so long that we think they’re part of the house.
Some things aren’t necessarily sinful at all. They simply no longer belong in the life Jesus is creating. And some things carry memories. That’s when cleaning gets difficult. Because Jesus isn’t sorting through somebody else’s house. He’s sorting through mine. He starts rearranging furniture.
Wait a minute. That chair has always been there.
“I know.”
I like it there.
“I know.”
Then why are you moving it?
“Because this is my house now.”
And there, I think, is much of the uncomfortable work of sanctification. By grace, we gladly gave Jesus the house. We meant it when we did. But we didn’t necessarily understand everything that new ownership would mean.
We knew about the things lying around in plain sight. Those were often among the first things we expected Jesus to change. But then he starts opening drawers. Then closets. Then boxes we haven’t opened ourselves in years. And sometimes he points toward a door and we realize we’ve been living in this house so long that we had almost forgotten there was a room behind it.
“I’d like to go in there.”
There?
“Yes.”
Why?
“Because it’s mine.”
The Whole House is His
That may be one way of understanding what we Wesleyans have traditionally called entire sanctification. It does not mean Jesus has finished cleaning the house. It means there are no rooms we knowingly refuse to let him enter.
There comes a point when we stop following him from room to room negotiating over every drawer and simply say, “The whole house is yours.”
And that is more than another step in the cleaning process. It is a moment of surrender—a decisive work of grace in which I quit deciding which parts of the house Jesus may have. By grace, I hand him every key I know I possess. I may not yet know everything stored in every room, but there is no room I knowingly reserve for myself. The question is no longer, “How much of this house will I let Jesus change?” The answer has become, “All of it. Whatever you want. Wherever you want to go. The whole house is yours.”
Not just the living room where everybody can see. Not just the rooms I’ve already cleaned up. The closets. The drawers. The attic. The boxes. The room at the end of the hall. All of it. Yours.
Ownership and Renovation
That surrender can be real and decisive. But it doesn’t mean the work is finished. In fact, it may mean the real work has only begun. Because complete ownership is not the same thing as completed renovation.
Tomorrow Jesus may open another drawer. Next year he may move another piece of furniture. Ten years from now he may show me something that has been sitting in a corner my entire life, something I have walked past ten thousand times without ever realizing it didn’t belong there. That’s not evidence that I never gave him the house. It may be evidence that he loves me enough to keep working on it.
John Wesley understood sanctification as both something God does decisively and something in which we continue to grow. There is a genuine surrender of ourselves completely to God, but there is also a lifetime of discovering what that surrender means.
Maybe that’s because we don’t know our own houses nearly as well as we think we do. We know the rooms we use every day. Jesus knows what’s behind the walls. And grace keeps working. Opening. Sorting. Cleaning. Repairing. Rearranging. Sometimes throwing away. Sometimes uncovering something beautiful that had been buried beneath years of clutter. And all the while, we are still living in the house.
Trusting the New Owner
Maybe that’s one reason sanctification can be uncomfortable. The old owner still has opinions about where the furniture ought to go. I certainly do. But I’m learning that the question isn’t whether I like every change Jesus makes. The question is whether I trust the Owner.
After all, he didn’t purchase this house in order to destroy it. He bought it because he loves it. And he intends to make it into what it was always meant to be.
So perhaps the prayer of sanctification isn’t nearly as complicated as we sometimes make it: Jesus, this house belongs to you. Whatever you find, whatever needs to change, whatever room I have yet to discover—remind me whose house this is.
As my brothers and I worked our way through Mom’s house, every drawer we emptied and every closet we opened made the house a little less like the house we had always known. That was tough.
Those things were part of her life. Our life with her. Some brought laughter. Some brought tears. Some made us wonder why in the world she had kept them. And some were almost impossible to let go. But eventually, everything had to be examined.
Maybe that’s what I didn’t understand about sanctification for a long time. When I gave my life to Christ, I gave him the house. But I brought a lifetime of stuff with me.
Jesus keeps cleaning, sorting and rearranging, not because he despises the house, but because he loves the person who still lives there. And perhaps that’s the grace I’ve begun to see differently. Jesus didn’t buy the house so he could throw me out. He bought the house so that, room by room, it might become a place shaped by his presence.
So, when he opens the next drawer, perhaps I don’t need to become defensive. When he points toward the next closet, perhaps I don’t need to hide the key. And when he decides the furniture needs rearranging, perhaps I can trust that he sees something I don’t.
After all, the house isn’t mine anymore. I still live here, but thanks be to God, I don’t live here alone.
Until next time, keep looking up…
If any of my reflections encouraged or challenged you, follow Not the Perfect Pastor on Facebook for more conversations about faith, ministry, and becoming faithful disciples of Jesus.
