The people of Israel have had a revival. They cleaned out the filth, the impure things which had no place in God’s temple. Then they sought to obey God’s commands that they knew about in the best way they could figure at the time. They didn’t get it all right, but God forgave them because their hearts were in the right place in trying to obey His command to hold a Passover feast.

After their feast and gathering to remember their slavery and the Lord’s deliverance, they then set out to set things right.

They had started with cleaning out the temple, the centerpiece, but now they are going to remove the filth from the land, from their cities, from their territories. They don’t go back home, they don’t rest, until it is finished.

We talked about removing the filth from our own lives. That’s the cleansing of the temple. It’s a work we do together with God, but it involves choices we must make.

If your heart can’t make that choice, then that is the place to start. Ask God to change your heart and to cry out over your sin of choosing a love over God, not loving Him with your whole heart, mind, soul, strength. We’re to love Him with everything.

But once we’ve given ourselves over to the Lord, we need to stop thinking about ourselves. We need to turn ourselves outward.

God doesn’t bless us just so that we can be blessed. He blesses us so that we can bless others.

We may not have the authority to change what’s shown on TV, but we can turn it off in our homes. We can stop paying the people that create the filth and send it into homes. We can remove the music that glorifies evil. We can get it out of our homes and cars.

We can control the “scroll” or remove the apps that draw our minds and attentions from the Lord. We can help those in our families walk away, by God’s grace and power, from the things that once entangled us.

We don’t make a law that we expect everyone else to follow, but we can be an example, a shining light of what life can look like if it’s fully given over to the Lord.

We also destroy the high places, the things we turned to for a false sense of comfort, support, security, peace, joy, love instead of finding Jesus to be our all in all. And when the filth is removed and the high places destroyed, we have rest.