In 2017, I wrote a book called Renewed: How Jesus Transforms Your Mind. This is part of a series of articles based on that book’s content. Hope you find them helpful.
You don’t have to clean up to come to Jesus — but you can’t stay as you were.
Anyone who has lived somewhere long enough knows that clutter happens. Even tidy people have drawers and closets where the debris of life collects — they just hide it better. Life makes messes, and occasionally those messes have to be cleaned up if you want to keep living there.
“Come as you are” is true. You don’t have to clean up your life to be reborn; Jesus came for the sick, not the healthy (Mark 2:17). The new birth happens in the middle of our debris. But the most common misstep made after being born again is to stay as you are — not by keeping the obvious sins, necessarily, but by never undergoing a change at the core. You swap one coping mechanism for another. Instead of drinking your stress, you eat it. Your soul is saved, but your life isn’t fundamentally different because you’re still handling old problems with old solutions. That’s just reshuffling the deck. What’s needed is a clean sweep.
What drags us back into the pit is almost always the old: old patterns of thinking, old ways of resolving stress and conflict. So there must be a constant, conscious effort to cast out the old — out with the old, every day, in every way. A friend who ministers to addicts once told me the number one reason for relapse is relationships. Your crowd determines your crave. “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33), or as an evangelist once put it, show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. After salvation, your choice of peers may be the most important decision you make.
Two men show us how to clean house. The first is Abraham. “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house’” (Genesis 12:1). Go from your country: Abraham’s homeland was saturated with moon worship, too familiar to leave him unchanged, so God got him out of his bubble. Are there places and situations that consistently set you up to sin? It boils down to who you love more. Go from your kindred: this is the hardest part. If the people closest to you keep pulling you back into what you’re trying to leave, you may need new kindred. That doesn’t mean burning bridges — make a graceful exit so you keep an inroad for the gospel later — but be honest. Staying “to be their light” can be codependency dressed up as love. God is their sufficiency, not you. And whatever you lose for his name’s sake, he promises to restore a hundredfold (Matthew 19:29). I’ve moved away from family and friends twice following the Lord, and my deepest friendships today are the ones he gave me on the far side of obedience.
Go until I say stop: God told Abraham to head for a land he would later show him. If you need everything mapped before you’ll move, following Jesus will be hard, because God seldom hands us the whole itinerary. Out of all the people from Abraham to John, only a handful received detailed prophecies of the future. Most of us walk like Abraham — trusting step by step — because God wants a relationship built on unshakable faith, not empirical certainty.
Moses gives us the other angle. Raised in Pharaoh’s house, he never forgot he was a Hebrew, and one day, watching an Egyptian beat one of his people, he faced a crisis of belief: who is he really? His decision to side with his oppressed brothers cost him his citizenship in Pharaoh’s house (Exodus 2:11-12). Many of us, especially in comfortable nations, live in Pharaoh’s house too. Cleaning house may mean being willing to lose comfort, reputation, even standing, in order to stand with the people of God.
All of this is daily work. “Consider yourselves dead to sin… do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness” (Romans 6:11-14). Every day your flesh will try to reassert itself, so every day you consciously choose: you’re dead to me. I’ve fought this honestly — with my eyes, with my mind, with old grooves worn deep like the gutter on a bowling lane. My advice when something keeps sending you to the gutter? Just don’t go bowling. Cleaning house, casting out the old, considering yourself dead to sin — this is half of the discipline. The other half is what we put in its place.
