The Cluttered Room

Have you ever invited someone into your home when you weren't quite ready for company? The dishes piled in the sink, laundry draped over the couch, yesterday's mail spread across the kitchen table like a paper avalanche. You usher your guest in with a nervous laugh, perhaps offering some apology about "the state of things," and you watch as their eyes scan the room. You hope they're listening to your words of welcome, but you suspect they're cataloging the mess.

And worse: if you were to begin lecturing them, in that very moment, about the importance of tidiness, how would your words land?

They would die in the air between you, swallowed by the clutter that contradicts everything you say.

This is, in a sense, the predicament Jesus addresses in the seventh chapter of Matthew. We tend to read His famous teachings on judgment, on the speck and the log, on asking and seeking and knocking, as separate sayings strung together like pearls on a string. But they are not separate at all. They are deeply, intimately connected.

They form a single movement of the heart, a single spiritual logic.

And at the center of that logic is the condition of our own interior room.

 

The Logic Jesus Builds

"Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get" (Matthew 7:1-2, NRSV).

The Lord begins not with a prohibition against discernment, for elsewhere He commands us to judge rightly (John 7:24), but with a warning against the particular kind of judgment that issues from a heart unwilling to examine itself.

Then comes the image that has lodged itself in the imagination of every reader for two thousand years: "Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3). The Greek word translated "speck" is karphos, a tiny dry stalk or piece of chaff. The word for "log" is dokos, a beam of timber, the kind used to support the roof of a house.

The hyperbole is almost comic. Yet Jesus is not merely being funny. He is showing us that the very act of judging another while ignoring ourselves is grotesque in its disproportion. It is a vision so blurred by our own self-deception that we cannot even see what we claim to see in others.

And then, almost without pause, Jesus moves to: "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you" (Matthew 7:7). Why this sudden turn? Why this pivot from judgment to prayer, from the speck and the log to the door that opens?

Because they are the same teaching.

 

The Two Doors

Consider what it means to knock on a door. To knock is to ask for entry, to request that someone on the other side recognize us and welcome us in. When we knock on the door of the Father's heart, we are asking Him to receive us as we are, to draw us into the warmth of His dwelling, to make a home for us within His own life. "In my Father's house there are many dwelling places" (John 14:2), Jesus says elsewhere, and we long for one of those rooms.

But here is the question that Matthew 7 forces upon us: how can we knock on a door we will not open ourselves?

The interior room of our soul has two doors. One faces outward toward our neighbor. The other faces inward, opening onto the infinite dwelling of God.

These doors are not independent. They are joined by the single chamber that is our heart. And whatever passes through one must pass through the room before it can reach the other.

If we close the door to our neighbor, we are also closing off the only passage through which the love of the Father can travel into the world.

We become a sealed room, no light entering, no light escaping.

This is what makes hypocritical judgment so devastating, spiritually speaking. When we judge another while harboring our own unconfronted sin, we have not merely failed to be charitable. We have barricaded the room. We have made the dwelling of our soul into a storage closet rather than a sanctuary.

If we are hoarders of earthly attachments, when we encounter others, all they'll see is our mess. They won't see through the room to the Father's love because we've filled our hearts with the love of worldly things.

Saint Augustine, reflecting on this very passage, observed: "When, therefore, we are about to administer a rebuke, let us think carefully... whether the fault is such as we ourselves have never had, or one from which we have now become free; and if we have never had it, let us reflect that we are men and might have had it" (On the Sermon on the Mount, II.19.64).

The point is not that only the sinless may correct, but that all who correct must do so from a posture of profound humility, aware that they too dwell in the same fragile humanity.

 

What Our Neighbor Sees

When we open the door of our heart to a brother or sister, when we welcome them past our defenses, they will look inside.

This is unavoidable.

To be seen is the cost of being known, and to be known is the cost of love. 

What will they find when they look in?

If we have cultivated an interior life, if the room of our soul has been swept clean by repentance, ordered by prayer, and made luminous by the presence of God, then our neighbor's gaze will pass through us. They will see, through the door we have opened to them, the other door that opens onto the Father's love.

We become transparent. Our lives become windows.

The light that fills us streams out through us, and the one who comes to us seeking love finds not us, but Him.

But if our interior room is cluttered, if we are hoarders of grudges, of resentments, of secret indulgences, of self-righteousness piled high in every corner, then our neighbor will see only the mess.

They will not see past us to the Father. Our judgments will ring hollow, our exhortations will fall flat, our witness will collapse under the weight of its own contradiction. "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye" (Matthew 7:5).

Notice the order: first the clearing, then the seeing. First the interior work, then the exterior ministry.

Hoarders make horrible house cleaners.

If you were going to hire a house cleaner, and you went to interview them at their home only to find a room stacked full of old magazines, fast-food wrappers, broken appliances, and so much junk you could barely find a place to step, would you hire them to clean your house?

They might be able to do the job. They might have the capability of treating your house better than your own. The might be able to do your dishes and vacuum your floors. But if you knew the condition of their own home beforehand, would you have even given them a chance?

So, too, there are many theologians, many people with a lot of "biblical knowledge" who know the right things. They know what is evil, what is good, and can diagnose someone's sin accurately. But on the inside, their souls are filled with pride, lust, a host of cherished vices and innumerable depravities. They might be able to accurately point out your flaws, if for no other reason than that one easily recognizes what's familiar to oneself, but they will not be equipped to guide you? What good is a diagnosis if you do not have a physician who possesses the cure?

Not every diagnostician is a good surgeon.

Not every "theologian" makes for a good spiritual director.

 

Why the Saints Cleaned House

This is why the saints, all the saints, in every century, gave themselves so seriously to the cultivation of the interior life.

They were not navel-gazers. They were not selfish recluses preoccupied with their own perfection.

They were people who understood, with a clarity most of us never reach, that the only way to love their neighbor as Christ loves them was to first allow Christ to take up residence in the inner room.

The mystics speak of this room with reverence. They call it the "ground" or the "center" or the "chamber" of the soul. They knew that until this room is cleared and consecrated, every attempt at apostolic work is hampered by the spiritual debris we drag along behind us.

A soul that has not been quieted cannot speak peace to others.

A heart that has not been forgiven cannot extend forgiveness convincingly.

A life that has not been opened to God cannot open others to Him.

Notice that Jesus, immediately after the teaching on asking and seeking, says: "Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?... If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" (Matthew 7:9, 11). And then, the so-called Golden Rule: "In everything do to others as you would have them do to you" (Matthew 7:12).

The movement is from the Father's generosity, to ours; from God's open door, to the doors we open for others.

We become channels of what we have received. We extend outward what has been poured into us.

 

Persistence and Purification

The verbs Jesus uses are continuous in the Greek: keep asking, keep searching, keep knocking.

The interior life is not a one-time housecleaning but a daily discipline. The room gets cluttered again. Have you ever busted your tail to clean house only to find a day or two later it's in the same condition as before? If we do not persist, if we do not keep up the house, it won't do much good. If you have an uninvited guest, and they step into your mess, and you tell them, "Well, you should have seen this house two days ago, it was pristine!" will it make them feel any more comfortable in the environment now?

If we do not keep knocking, the doors begin to swell shut in the humidity of our distractions. We must, again and again, return to the work of opening.

And here is the great mercy: the very act of persistent asking, seeking, and knocking is itself the purification.

We do not first make ourselves clean and then approach God.

We approach God, persistently and humbly, and the approach itself cleanses us.

The light that streams in as we crack the door open is the light that exposes what must go.

The presence we seek is the presence that orders the room.

This is the saint's secret. They were not perfect people who then prayed. They were people who prayed and were, by that prayer, slowly remade.

 

Living This Today

How, then, do we begin? Let me offer a few practical movements for the week ahead.

First, before you offer a correction to anyone, even a child, even a spouse, even a friend who has wronged you, pause and ask: What is the condition of my own room right now? Not as an excuse to remain silent, but as an invitation to humility. Examine yourself before you examine another. You may still need to speak, but you will speak differently when you have first sat with your own log.

Second, identify the clutter. What is hoarded in your interior room that should not be there? A particular resentment? A habit of contempt for a certain person or group? An old wound you keep rehearsing? Bring these things, one at a time, to the Lord in prayer. It is hard to clean a dark room. Often, we require His light to show us what needs cleaning. If you try to clean a cluttered room in the dark, you'll probably step on a Lego. As such, the more we persist in prayer, the more we become aware of the mess that remains. This can feel counter-productive at times, as though the closer we draw to God the more we're aware of our sinfulness. This is all a part of the process. Remember, only when light shines through the window can we see in that beam all the dust that's been floating there the entire time.

Third, do not be paralyzed or overwhelmed. Do not try to clean the whole house at once. Pick up one piece of clutter today and offer it to Him. If you've ever let your house get "out of hand" you know the feeling. It's tempting in that moment to just throw up your hands, ignore the mess, and sit in it. The process of cleaning house is always the same. You have to pick up one piece of trash at a time, scrub one dish at a time, dust one shelf at a time. This is why the spiritual life requires persistence. We do not grow from spiritual infants into spiritual maturity in a day. We grow, little by little, almost imperceptibly. I've seen this happen with my oldest son. He's only twelve, and almost as tall as me. I don't notice often how quickly he's growing because I'm with him every day. But when we encounter someone who hasn't seen him in a while, they almost always comment immediately on how much he's grown. In this way, our spiritual growth often feels slow, we don't notice a difference one day to the next, but that's the only way one grows. Trust me, if you're doing the daily work, others will notice. Not that we're trying to impress people, or growing for the sake of receiving recognition (heaven forbid!), but our growth will serve as a kind of testimony to the love of Him in whom we experience all growth.

Fourth, when you sense yourself rushing to judgment, practice the discipline of the open door. Imagine the person you are judging walking into the room of your soul. What would they see? Is there anything they would notice that contradicts what you are about to say to them? This is not paralysis; it is honesty.

Fifth, knock daily. Make a small, persistent practice of presence. Five minutes of silence before the Lord in the morning. A returning to Him at midday. A simple examination at night. The room will not stay clean on its own, but neither will it stay cluttered if you keep opening the doors.

And finally, remember: the goal is not your own pristine spiritual interior.

The goal is that the love of the Father, having found a home in you, might shine through you to the one who comes to your door. The goal is not a "better self," but a deeper union and relationship with God through Christ. You are not the destination. You are the passage. And when the room is clean, the light passes through.

 

God Bless,

Judah