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Is Your House Empty? • Jul 01st 1984

The Silent Danger of an Empty Christian Life- How to Stay Filled With Christ (DCLC1984)

New Testament Prayer The Gospels

What happens when a Christian life looks right on the outside but becomes empty on the inside? In this powerful Christian message, Gene Edwards explores Matthew 12:43–45 and the spiritual danger of maintaining an outwardly ordered Christian life without remaining inwardly filled with Christ.

Jesus described a house that had been swept, put in order, and left empty. Gene uses this striking picture to challenge believers to consider something deeper than outward morality, religious activity, or simply avoiding sin. The Christian life was never meant to be merely clean and orderly—it was meant to be filled with the living presence of Jesus Christ.

This message speaks especially to Christians who have experienced spiritual dryness, disappointment, church hurt, or seasons when their former joy and intimacy with God seem distant. You may still believe. You may still live according to Christian principles. You may still appear spiritually healthy to everyone around you. But what is happening within?

Gene’s encouragement is simple: don’t leave the inward house empty.

He shares personally about seasons when sermons and even reading Scripture seemed unable to reach him, yet something as simple as spiritual music helped keep his heart turned toward the Lord. From there, he offers an extraordinarily simple practice for returning your attention to Christ: become quiet before God and lovingly speak the name, “Lord.”

You do not need an elaborate spiritual technique. You do not need to manufacture an emotional experience. Begin by becoming quiet and turning your heart toward Jesus.

Fill the empty place with your Lord.

This message is an invitation to move beyond merely maintaining the outward results of your Christian faith and rediscover inward fellowship with Christ.

SCRIPTURE:
Matthew 12:24–45

IN THIS MESSAGE:
• The meaning of the empty house in Matthew 12
• The spiritual danger of outward religion without inward life
• How religious devotion can become legalism
• What happens when Christians experience spiritual dryness
• Recovering from spiritual wounds and disappointment
• Learning to become quiet before God
• Loving Jesus through the simple speaking of His name
• Keeping your inward life filled with Christ

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Now, I have told you the simplest thing in the world. Now, where was the Lord’s fellowship in all this? I really don’t know other than that He looked in the face of those Pharisees and He remembered the day that they touched Him, and worshiped Him, and gave their lives to Him, and He once knew them. He recognized at that moment that He was full of His Father, as He had been the day they touched Him and He touched them, and that in this moment He was still filled with His Father and His house was safe. Not well ordered at all. If it had been well ordered, it would have matched their house. There was no dust in their house. They obeyed the Sabbath. They did all the right and good things, and He was breaking them right and left, but His house was full, and their well-ordered house was empty. He knew that He was filled, that His house was filled, which is its proper status. Well-ordered is not its proper status. That’s its dangerous status. He knew that His house…His internal house…would remain filled to the very last breath He took. He knew that he would see them one day crucify Him because they had a well-ordered and empty house; He just had a full one.

You’re going to leave here, and you and I are pretty close to being without excuse. Is that not true? I believe most of you have to say, when you get in your car tomorrow and leave here, that you’re better equipped to flood that house with water or to see it flooded with water coming from the floor up. Not from the mouth down particularly; from the floor up. Not something you have to put in, but the Lord. I know that many of you have had an empty house well-ordered for a long time. I want to exhort you as we leave here to start putting something inside that house besides a dust mop.

You know, you can have a house that’s full; really, truly full. You got a handle, brothers and sisters. You were given a handle – the God-breathing of Scripture, and tonight you got another handle just as great: a Name to love in the quiet of your inmost being.

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