At the end of each academic year here at Emmaus Biblical Seminary in Haiti, we do a deep clean of the cafeteria kitchen. My ministry partners have spent the past three days washing, scrubbing, bleaching, mopping, wiping, painting, and bleaching again every inch of the kitchen. The food prep tables, the refrigerators, the cold closet, the hot water tank, the stove hood, all of it!
It’s important that the food and food prep areas are clean!
Related to this, Stacey and I have a lot of guests in our home throughout the year. It’s rare if we ever go longer than two weeks having just our immediate family in the house. We have visiting faculty, missions teams, friends, and family members all coming and going all times of the year. This means we have the privilege of feeding them all! This also means that I get the wonderful job of doing all the dishes! Let me tell you, we wash a lot of dishes.
This got me wondering. Why is it so important that all things related to food need to be clean? Why do we spend so much time scrubbing, wiping, washing, and wiping all those pots, pans, dishes, refrigerators, counters, freezers, etc.? In fact, why do we cook our food before we eat it? Why not just eat bacon raw (don’t do it guys, it’s nasty)?
It’s simple really. Our bodies are living, yet fragile. We need to consume just the right things to survive. If we don’t eat, we don’t make it! Furthermore, what we consume can not only nourish us, but it can also harm us, or even kill us. We have to be very careful about what we put in our mouths, or else we’ll pay.
You know, I suspect that our minds and hearts are not that different. They are organic, living, and fragile. This makes me wonder why we’re much less intentional about only putting clean things into our minds. The data the the world wants to download into our minds is often times (not always) toxic. Some of that stuff can really harm us, and even kill us if we’re not careful. In the same way that we have to be very careful about what we eat because our wellbeing depends on it, we need to be careful about managing our hearts and minds well. We need to keep it clean, pure, washed, sanitized, healthy, and life-giving.
Paul says in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Jesus Christ, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (NLT). And he says again in Colossians 3:1–2, “Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’ right hand” (NLT).
Paul is not teaching us to escape the world, he is teaching us, however, to be careful and intentional about leading and life of holiness that is set apart from the defilement of the world. Peter sets the standard high with this, “But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy” (1 Pet 1:15, NLT).
