I Wish I Only Had to Clean It Once

I’m currently 38 weeks pregnant and have been “nesting” like crazy - which includes doing a weird amount of cleaning. Even though my belly is the size of a small planet, I’ve been hustling around our house with yellow gloves on my hands and a crazed look in my eyes, attacking dirt wherever it can be found. I’ve scrubbed the grout in the shower, the dusty corners underneath the couch, the carpet of my van and every ounce of clutter in every cabinet. You know what the “problem” is, though?

I also have small children. 

I’ve heard that “trying to clean your house with small children around is like trying to brush your teeth with oreos,” and that’s pretty true. My efforts are almost always instantly futile! If I mop the floor, 5 minutes later one of my beloved children spills milk on it. If I wash the windows, they instantly get smudged by tiny hands. Even in non-kid spaces, when I do something like dust, I’m going to have to dust that space again in a few weeks. Nothing stays clean forever. 

How nice would it be to clean something once and then never have to clean it again?! I would love to deep clean the whole house, slam down my broom, yell, “It is finished!” and get to live in a perfectly tidy home forever. No more scrubbing out the oven. No more vacuuming the carpets. No more dust building up. No more mess - just a peacefully clean house for all eternity. 

That’s a fantasy, but also a reality - that’s what Jesus did for us! 

Me cleaning my house day in and day out is a bit like the priests of the Old Testament, offering sacrifices at the temple day in and day out to wash the Israelites clean from their daily sins. No matter how many bulls and doves and lambs were slaughtered and burned, the next day the people would have sinned again - and would therefore need to be cleansed with another sacrifice. Day after day, year after year, the sins and the sacrifices and the priests and the people would go around and around in a seemingly never-ending dance of sin and repentance. 

That is, until Jesus stepped onto the scene. Jesus was a new kind of priest, the only being to be both God and man, both eternal and finite. He stepped out of eternity and into earth’s timeline to live the perfect life we never could as our substitute, and sacrificed himself - not over and over again, but once, for everyone, for all time: “Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.” (Hebrews 7:27). 

Jesus lived his whole life, was crucified on a cross, yelled “it is finished!” and died, for your sins and mine. He rose again after three days to prove his victory, and just like that - the whole human race was cleansed from sin forever! As it says in I Peter 3:18, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.” We can have confidence in our cleanliness in God’s eyes as the Bible proclaims, “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (I Corinthians 6:11) and “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Isaiah 1:18). 

Blood isn’t a good cleaning agent for my house (ugh, could you imagine?!) but Jesus’ blood was the perfect cleaning agent for my sins and yours. Because we stand clean in his eyes, heaven is ours when we die!

Despite my best efforts, my house is going to get dirty again. Try as we all might to avoid it, every day we are going to dirty our souls with sin. Thanks be to our loving Savior, who cleaned house once and for all to bring us into eternal joy with him and all believers in heaven. I can’t wait to see how tidy it is there, in the light of God’s love - and to never have to clean, literally or metaphorically, ever again!