An Unoccupied House

Introduction:

We had such a great time during our revival services last week with Robby Mitchell.

There were many great things that you mentioned and spoke about, but probably the thing that stuck with me the most was his teaching last Sunday morning about us removing our Asherah pole from our life.

He said that everyone of us has something in our life that Satan uses to tempt us with.

That might be sex, money, drugs, alcohol, hobbies, or anything that keeps us from being sold out to the Lord.

Some of us fall into Satan’s trap and are living in that sin as we speak.

We get so used to putting on a mask when we come to church that we get good at hiding these things from the very people that we should be able to be open with so that we can pray for one another.

I want to constantly keep this before us so that we are all reminded that if we want more of God we need to clean up our homes.

We need to rid our personal lives of all the junk that we have allowed in so that the Holy Spirit can have full reign of our lives.

While we need to get our lives clean and put into order with the help of the Lord, we also need to fill it with the presence of God.

Will you open your Bibles with me to Matthew 12:43-45

Point 1: We need to clean our house.

Jesus mentions here that when an evil, or unclean spirit, leaves a man..

The first thing we need to do is to clean our house.

Jesus is talking here about our bodies but I think we can also look at this too as our physical houses.

There were a bunch of us that answered our Evangelist’s altar call to repent of some things and to go after God.

We said that we are going to clean our house because some of us probably have some demons hiding in places throughout our houses.

I always say that unless I am with you everyday I really don’t know how you are living.

I have an idea of where many of you are spiritually by the church events that you attend, the words that come from your mouth, or by just knowing from conversation with you.

For the most part though, many of you could put on a front like all is well but when you leave church all is not well.

I want to tell you a very deep revelation from the Lord—you can hide your personal life from me, your friends, or even your spouse, but you cannot hide anything from the Lord.

The Bible teaches us that God is Omniscient meaning that He is all-knowing.

God is also omnipresent meaning that He is everywhere all the time.

This means that if God is everywhere and He knows everything then there is NOTHING that we can hide from Him.

Adam and Eve sinned and tried to hide from God, but He found them.

I believe that He found them because He desired to be with them.

He will find you because His desire is to be with you, so He will not ever leave you alone.

Its not because He wants to know and be in every detail of your life so you will live in fear that when you mess up He will strike you down.

HE is following you because He loves you and wants all of your heart.

Pastor Bill Johnson says, “What would you do if you had a dove on your shoulder and I tried to get you to walk to the back of the church without have the dove fly off your shoulder. What would you do?”

You would take every step with the dove in mind.

Every single step we take through life should be done with the Lord in mind.

Every action should be with the Holy Spirit in mind.

If we are about to make a decision about something and we are wondering if we should do it or not we should ask ourselves, “Would I do this is Jesus was with me?”

Guess what? He is with you by way of the Holy Spirit.

He is not just with you but living in you.

Christ in you the hope of glory!!!

I completely believe that a born-again believer that has truly repented and turned to God can be possessed by a demon.

There is only one spirit that we are and should be possessed by and His name is the Holy Spirit.

We need to make every effort to rid ourselves of everything that would hinder us or our family from running the race that God has for us.

Point 2: We need to fill our house.

This passage in the Bible is so important because it describes the life of a person that tries to get clean without God.

We cannot ever do this thing in our own strength.

I guarantee you that if I tried to quite my life of partying and didn’t fill it with God, Church, and fellowship with other believers, I would be back where I was before.

Not only that, I have had times in the past when I wasn’t seeking the Lord how I should have been and I almost felt like I could have just went out and started the drinking again.

When I had those thoughts it just seemed like it would have ben way worse.

Almost like 7 worse spirits than the first one.

I’m telling you church that this is not a game.

The spiritual battles that are warring around today are so powerful.

There are spiritual beings, demons, that have been designed to destroy what God is wanting to do.

The very first step that we all need to take to continue to grow in the Lord is to clean up our house.

When I speak of “cleaning our house”, the house I’m referring to is our bodies and also our physical homes.

The Bible refers to us as being the temple of the Holy Spirit.

This means that God resides in us as He did in the temple years ago.

WE need to strive to live a holy life that is pleasing to God.

We also need to clean up our physical homes.

Robby Mitchell mentioned that we spend more time in our homes than anywhere else.

We need to clean our homes so that we have no open door for the enemy to get his foot in our house.

We can invite Satan into our homes by many different ways like:

Watching bad things on TV

Listening to bad music

Through drugs or alcohol

Through lying

Through unforgiveness

This is a big one.

And other things that go against what God would want.

Its important that we clean up our house, but we also need to fill it with something.

Have you ever visited a house or a building that had been vacant for a period of time?

When we were in our never-ending house hunt, thank the Lord that is over, we visited some homes that were sitting there for a while with no one living in it.

Those kind of houses seem to have a different smell to them and a loneliness feeling about the.

We visited one house where the previous owner committed suicide in the house and it had been vacant for about 6 months.

The atmosphere in that house seemed really weird and I’ll be honest, it was creepy.

Houses are built for a reason and that is to be lived in.

God created us, our bodies, not just to be busy bodies but to be a habitation for Him by way of the Holy spirit.

We cannot just clean up our lives, ridding it of all the bad things of our past life, and just walk through the rest of life without filling that void.

I’m telling you right now, please listen to what I’m about to say because it is so important.

We house will be filled with something.

You need to fill it with God.

James 4:7 says to:

1st submit yourself to Go.

Then, resist the devil and he will flee.

I think too many times we try to resist the devil without submitting to God.

I’m going to change my life.

I’m going to break this addiction.

This year I am going to work on my marriage and love my wife more.

All of these things are great, but first we need to decide to submit to God.

Submitting to Jesus will change your life, break the addictions in your life, and will fix your marriage and family.

Our main passage today here in Matthew is very powerful, but if we look back at the beginning of this section we see that Jesus is going back and forth with the Pharisees.

Remember, Jesus rebuked this group of religious people saying that they do everything to be seen by men.

He said that they do everyone to clean up on the outside but on the inside they are dead.

Jesus casts a demon out of a man in verse 22, but the Pharisees still argue with Him.

He then rebukes them and begins to teach against them.

We then get to our passage and see this illustration Jesus gives of an evil spirit leaving and then coming back worse.

If we look at this in context, I believe that Jesus is saying to us today too as a church that we should never try to do church without Him.

I think Robby Mitchell mentioned this and I would have to agree.

People inside the church can be mean.

I have seen and heard of things going on inside of churches that is way worse than something outside the church in the world.

If we try to clean up our houses, our bodies, our houses, and our churches, without filling the void with God we will be religious like the Pharisees and full of all kinds of evil.

Conclusion: