Dirty Socks

I have to preface this entry.  God has laid a lot about sin on my heart lately – as you could probably tell from my last few entries.  I jotted this dirty sock theme in my notebook awhile ago.  Sunday morning in church our pastor gave a sermon that talked a lot about these sins that we may not consider sins.  It was a great sermon; I continued to have ‘epiphanies’ and jot the notes next to my ‘dirty sock’ theme throughout the sermon.  I want to thank Pastor Rob Wheeler for contributing to this entry in his sermon.  I also want you all to know I am not thinking that just everyone else needs to hear this.  Sometimes I worry that others will think I am conceited and should give advice.  NOT TRUE.  This hits me as hard as it may hit anyone.  I am determined to follow through…. Read on, enjoy, God wants you to hear this, just as he wanted me to hear it…:

DIRTY SOCKS

I do not like dirty socks.  It isn’t that I dislike doing laundry – actually, I find hanging out clothes to be relaxing – I just don’t like FINDING dirty socks.  It is a special little source of aggravation to me.  A quick button pusher I guess.  Finding dirty socks isn’t going to make me rage in anger, but it will make me growl a bit.  Three of my four kids have a sock issue… they don’t stay on.  It’s like they wear them for a while, then they must have some kind of severe allergic reaction to them, because they will take them off through the course of the day.  No big deal – I too am a barefoot kind of girl.  BUT –this is a really big but, I think it bears repeating – BUT, my kids are to… preoccupied your pick) to take them to their rooms or the dirty laundry.  They stick them somewhere.   Nowhere special.  They used to just leave them laying around until they got in trouble to many times.  Did they learn?  NO!  Then they just started stashing them (mostly my youngest daughter, but I will occasionally find them from my youngest son or oldest daughter – Thank you Cort for leaving your socks where they go!).  I will find them tucked under the edge of the couch, between the couch cushions, in the coffee table… wherever they think they can get away with it.  There is no feeling like sitting down to relax and find you are sitting next to someone’s nasty used socks!  Or cleaning out the vehicle and find them stashed under the rear seats!  I throw them at them, I stuff them in their pillows, I try to find a consequence that works.  We even have a household phrase -‘On your feet or in your room!”.  Although the incidents are becoming rarer, I still find them.  The hiding them really bothers me because that is just plain deceitful – an open disobedience.   I think my next step is to keep a sock bag, and when they are out of socks they need to buy them back from me – or maybe wash every dirty sock from all five laundry baskets by hand!!!

Now, most would not think of stashing your dirty socks somewhere as a sin.  BUT, they know they are not supposed to stash their socks.  They KNOW the rules!  If they are stashed somewhere, it means they did not just space it off, it is deliberate.  Deliberate disobedience of a rule IS sin.  I want us to contemplate the equivalence of a dirty sock to sin.  Both are gross, both are repellent (one to me, the other to God), both can be small or large, no one likes them (although the cats love dirty socks, that is often how I find them), and both stink!!  Sometimes we sin without knowing or thinking about it.  Sometimes they seem so insignificant that we feel it doesn’t matter.  I know very well my daughter feels it is a silly rule, and not important.  To God, every sin is important!  Every dirty sock we have stashed away hurts God.  He sees them.  He knows where we keep each and every little nasty sock.  We aren’t hiding anything from Him!  It’s the small ones, the sins we don’t think really matter that get us.  They are the ones that will bring us down.  They are the ones that will come out and begin to change our lives and turn us away from God.  Soon we would live in a room where you couldn’t sit without a dirty sock touching you, and then you wouldn’t be able to get out from underneath of all the dirty socks.  , busy, lazy (take

Galatians 5:19-21 says “When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these.  Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”   There are so many things that are against God’s will that we don’t even think of anymore.  My entry from a few days ago lists many more than this Galatians verse.  How often do we argue, feel unjustified anger, wish we had a car like so and so, let our anger get the better of us (I admit sometimes a dirty sock stashed under a couch cushion will ‘not have a pleasant effect on my personality’), give all our time to money, treat others without love, use a ‘bad word’ when we stub our toe… Hurts doesn’t it.   Sometimes we need to clean up.  Sometimes we need to hunt down each and every dirty sock and scrub them clean and new.  Or just throw them out!  God is ALWAYS willing to help us find our dirty socks.  We just need to ask. 

Psalm 51:7 – 12  Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.  Oh, give me back my joy again; you have broken me – now let me rejoice.  Don’t keep looking at my sins.  Remove my guilt.  Create in me a clean heart, O God.  Renew a loyal spirit within me.  Do not banish me from your presence, and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me.

Remember, it is never fun.  Going on a dirty sock hunt with God is NOT fun.  But you feel so good when all the dirty socks are clean and OUT of your life.  The peace of sitting on a sock free couch, God can give you that.  God can’t sit on a couch with dirty socks tucked in the cushions.  They stink up everything.  Remember if you have a dirty sock sin that you think doesn’t matter, it is an un-repented sin.  A sin that has not been cleaned, a sin that you have not repented of; it’s a stinky dirty sock stinking up your relationship with God.  Jesus DIED to take away our sins.  He SUFFERED and DIED that we could be right with God, with NO sins to come between us.  It hurts him when we sin.  It hurts and offends him when we try to hide those ‘little’ sins beneath the couch.  He knows they are there.  He knows we are trying to deceive him.  If you have kids, you know that deceit hurts more than any sin that would be considered ‘huge’.  Trying to ignore or hide the dirty sock (sin) is worse to God than a ‘huge’ sin (in my thinking), because it is paired with disrespect and deceit.

So now it’s time!  Drag out all your dirty socks – God can help you find them.  PRAY!  Tell him you don’t want the dirty socks any more – tell him you want to wash them – that you want to bleach them white again, that you want to get rid of them and get them out of your life – so that you can have peace.  Tell him – and be honest with him and yourself – that you will not stash your dirty socks anymore!!!  Do this so that you can have a relationship with God that is open, so he can reside and STAY in your heart.  Like I mentioned before; God can’t sit on a couch with dirty socks tucked in the cushions… and the Holy Spirit cannot stay in a heart with sin.