Christmas Lights

      Most of the people in my area have taken down their Christmas lights and displays.  I put up much less these days and so don't have much to take down,  Have you ever noticed that putting away Christmas lights goes much faster than getting them out and putting them up?  It is easy to pack them in boxes only to find next year that they seemed to have intertwined during the year and have become a useless pile of light bulbs and wires.  Once you decide to take on the task, you begin to work one strand at a time, weaving the line of bulbs through this loop and another until they are all free.  It takes time, but if you work at it just one strand at a time, you soon find that the mess is straightened up.  Our Christian lives often get like that pile of Christmas light bulbs.  We begin to stray from God's direction.  We don't spend as much time in His Word as we should, our prayer life gets bogged down and our coming to church for worship gets sporadic.  Colossians 3:5 says "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:" 
        You could use this verse or the verses from Ephesians that speak of our Christian walk or the promise from Philippians 1:6 that God is still working on us and is not finished with us yet.  Wherever you go, you soon realize that God is working on our spiritual lives and is getting things straightened out, one strand at a time.  While the punishment for sin is taken care of and if we were to die we would go to be with the Lord, it is still true that the sins of our past are not undone.  We don't get a clean slate and an opportunity to start over.  If you committed murder before you were saved, the victim doesn't come back to life.  If you drank so much that your liver got diseased, you don't get a new liver in an instant.  Your enemies don't automatically love you just because you became born again.  Actually, you may find more problems than before.  The difference, however, is that now you are aware of the grace of God and His mercy in your life.  You suddenly realize that you are a new creation according to Second Corinthians 5:17.  You have strength and power that you didn't before.  You have a special spiritual gift and your desires are changed.  A lot of things happen, but sometimes the strands of life are still a little bit twisted and it is God who is untangling the mess.  So, be patient and praise God for His working in your life, even if it is one strand at a time.