I want to tell you about a great lesson I didn’t truly learn until this most recent Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread.

I grew up being taught this way of life. I have cleaned leaven out of my living space and eaten unleavened bread every year. Each time we first go through the house and get leaven out and then we buy and make unleavened bread to eat throughout the week. On the Last Day of Unleavened Bread this year I was having a practical discussion about putting sin out and taking in the unleavened bread of Christ. This talk made me realize that the physical process of removing leaven is actually backwards from the best way to remove spiritual leavening.

A good friend of mine started the discussion with a question to help explain his way of approaching what has always been a very intimidating process to me. How do you remove air from a room? You cannot push, pull or suck air out. It will continue to seep in and replenish itself. The way you remove air from a room is by placing people or things in it. When you add something solid to a room, the space it occupies can no longer be occupied by air. You can also think of taking air out of an empty glass by filling it with water.

If you continue to try to remove air from a room or a container instead of replacing it, you will fail over and over again. The same goes for our lives. We cannot attempt to remove sin and then add righteousness once the sin is gone. That is not only an enormous undertaking for any individual but it’s also relying on our own abilities to remove sin from our life.

What we should be doing is putting righteousness into our lives and therefore crowding sin out. We must replace our sinful habits with righteous ones. If we do not replace the sin, it will only come back like the story of the man with a demon in Luke 11:24-26. We can find these righteous habits throughout the Bible, especially in the red letters (Christ’s words). We have to work on adding these to our lives every day, not just during the Passover season. Doing this is putting Christ first and relying on Him to fill our lives until there is no room for sin.