What’s that one thing you despise on your to-do list every time you see it? For me, it has always been laundry. It almost never gets marked off of the to-do list because the basket is never-ending and the need for clean clothes is ever-present. Each morning I get dressed and then place the soiled clothes into that bottomless basket with the rest of our family’s dirty clothes. With a husband and a two-year-old we go through several loads of laundry every week, sometimes one load per day. Once one load is dry and eventually folded a day or two later, the basket is full and the process needs to be repeated.

If we were to add up the tasks that make up the days of our lives, most of them would be mundane, repeated, unexciting everyday tasks. We often live for the brief moments of being out of our humdrum routines, but it is in those day-to-day tasks that God brings to completion the work of sanctification in our hearts. Daily chores, such as laundry, cooking, scrubbing toilets, and taking out the trash, become an avenue for knowing Christ more fully if we allow God’s scrubbing brush to have its way in our souls rather than resisting His cleansing.

Soap Suds and Scrubbed Souls

My husband and son have a knack for getting tedious stains on their shirts and pants that I have to work hard to clean. They can’t just be thrown in with the load and come out clean like the rest. These items require extra time, elbow grease, and care. The other day I felt lazy and decided to throw my husband’s shorts into the wash, ignoring the grease stain on the hem. When I pulled them out of the dryer, the stain was still there, requiring me to then take the extra steps to clean the shorts—the steps that should have been taken in the first place.

I find myself doing the same thing in my soul’s sanctification. I would much rather take the easy way out and hope God can get the stains of sin clean without me confessing my need for Him, receiving His truth, and replacing my sin with a gospel way of living. Sanctification is never an easy process, but always worth the steps taken to become more like Christ and see Him more clearly in the ebb and flow of everyday life (1 Thess. 4:3). When we embrace our daily, repetitive, seemingly never-ending tasks with a willing heart to know Jesus in the midst of them, rather than in spite of them, the soap suds not only scrub our clothes, but they scrub our souls as well.

Shifting to an Eternal Perspective

The hard truth I’ve come to know is this: how I view mundane tasks and responsibilities (like doing the laundry and tidying up the kitchen after every meal) reveals more about my heart than how I do ministry in public. God sees what is done in secret, and He values our behind-the-scenes affections for Him more than our public affirmations (Matt. 6:4, 6, 18). Small becomes great in the Kingdom of God when these tasks are done for His glory (Col. 3:23). It is not the task that matters, but rather the heart’s motivation behind the task. And there is always a bigger picture to what we do. Keeping that in mind, however, is a discipline we must learn and perspective shift we must make each and every day.