Day Ten

My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.                                                                         Galatians 2:20 NLT

How often do you take out the trash? This may or may not be on your list of chores, but trash has a way of piling up if you don’t take it out on a daily basis. How much trash or waste do humans make in a year? On a worldwide scale, we produce 2.6 trillion pounds of trash per year. The U.S. produces 268 million tons of waste — 140 million going into landfills — each year, with the average American tossing 4.5 pounds of trash per day. In fact, we send our trash overseas to other countries, but some of those countries have banned foreign waste. It seems other countries are tired of getting our trash. What can we do to limit our trash production? It is simple: use less trash and recycle.

Paul was concerned about the spiritual trash piling up in our lives. The trash comes from the deceitfulness of our hearts. The trash is sin and it’s piling up in the depravity of our own hearts. The prophet Jeremiah said, “the heart is deceitful above all things, beyond a cure. Who can cure it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) The cure is found in Paul’s words to the Galatians, “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The cure is God. God took out the trash of our human depravity and gave us new life through Jesus’s crucifixion of our sin. We no longer live for the desires of our old selves but have died to our sin to become alive in Christ. Paul said I live in this earthly tent by trusting in the Righteous One who loved me enough to take out the trash in my life.

This news should bring about a revolution in how we approach our Father God in prayer. This good news should reshape how and what we pray about in the mornings. Listen, It’s revival time. It’s time to pray for revival for the sake of hearts and souls. It’s time to take out the trash.