Today we cleaned because Grandpa is coming. Actually, clean isn't the right word. No, tidy is more like it. Clean and tidy are two very different words. For Grandpa, we tidied. You know, cleaning the downstairs bathroom for him, making up his bed, vacuuming his bedroom, folding the blankets, arranging the pillows. The thing is, for Grandpa, he knows us and our house, so we don't have to completely scour since we know he's coming. If he surprised us, it would be no trouble, because our house is already clean. We'd just need to do a quick tidy.
Huh.
Isn't that kind of like our hearts? If we knew that Jesus was coming this afternoon would we have to completely clean up our hearts, quickly stuffing things under organs and squeezing "secrets" (even though we have no secrets from God) behind cells? Or would we just have to give it a tidy (we know that our hearts will never be perfectly clean while we're still on this earth)? Would we be different people if we knew Jesus was coming in ten minutes? Or would we be the same person? Would we have to purge our hearts of sin, or would we just have to give it a sweep? Are you prepared for the Lord to come at any moment?
"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed." -- 2 Peter 3:10