My Soul: Christ's Home - With One Exception

It all began for you as a believer when you trusted Christ and He entered the door of your heart. At that moment, Jesus took up residence in the home of your soul. He enjoys being with you in every room of your soul except one. He will never spend time with you in the basement.

If the electricity goes out and someone in the family needs to go into their dark basement to find some candles, how many children do you know who would volunteer to go downstairs alone? And yet incredibly, God’s children often voluntarily venture “downstairs” all alone to enter a dark room in their soul. The Bible calls this dark area our “sinful nature.”

The Apostle Paul wrote these words about the basement of his soul: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.” (Romans 7:18) There is not an ounce of goodness in the basement of your soul.

Your sinful nature is separate and distinct from your heart and your mind. Your heart and mind only become filled with junk from your sinful nature when you bring it upstairs with you from the basement. The heart can remain pure by meditating upon things that are excellent and noble and good. (Philippians 4:8) Your free will is always choosing whether to remain upstairs with Jesus, or to head downstairs to the basement.

The most miserable people in life tend to be Christians who are spending regular periods of time in the basement. They are living in willful sin as they make deliberate decisions everyday that go against God’s Word, the Holy Spirit’s leading, and their conscience. There is no joy in their soul because a Christian will never be at peace when he is living in sin. The Lord is not pleased. The Holy Spirit is grieved. (Ephesians 4:30) The believer is dealing with guilt and shame. Everyone in the “house" is bothered by the sinful decisions of the believer's free will. The home of the Christian's heart becomes filled with tension and unrest.

In many ways, it is much easier for unbelievers to spend lots of time in the basement. They don’t have the Creator of the Universe living in their heart waiting for them to get back upstairs. Unbelievers often don’t experience much conflict between their choices and the way they want to be living. There is also no conflict between their sinful nature and the Holy Spirit because they do not have the Holy Spirit living inside of them. To read more, click here.