Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Cleaning House | Historical Books | 2 Kings 12

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

What leaves your heart unattended? Where do you need renovation? How does God bring growth? In today's episode, Tanya shares how 2 Kings 12 reminds us that spiritual transformation is sometimes painful but always worth it. If you're listening on Spotify, tell us about yourself and where you're listening from! Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: 2 Kings 12

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. So today I just titled this episode at the top when I was working on it, Cleaning House. That made me think of one of my favorite novels that I read whenever I was younger and then I used to teach it when I was a teacher. Bear with me, I promise this is only like 30 seconds this part. If you don't like novels, just stay. We're not going to sit in this very long. but maybe you have experienced or read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

In that, there's a character. Oh, maybe you've watched the movie. There we go. See? Okay, so great expectations. There's a character named Miss Havisham, and she lives in what was a once beautiful mansion called Sat's house. But after her heartbreak, she shuts herself away.

And the clocks in the mansion are stopped. The furniture is draped in cobwebs. The wedding feast sits rotting on the table, and it's untouched for decades. What should have been a place of life and celebration becomes like a museum of decay because it was just neglected, left untouched. In the same way, busyness, heartache, success, even just the passage of time. These are all outside happenings that can leave our hearts unattended, kind of like Satas House, like that mansion. These outside factors impact the attention we give to the conditions of our own, hearts and ultimately our relationship with God. Left and attended for me looks like missing out on

corporate worship. It looks like missing out on time in my Bible. My eyes get less in tune with God's mercies in my life. My heart grows more critical and self-righteous. My mind grows more comfortable living out my own story. Left and attended, our hearts can resemble Ms. Havasam's house. Neglect leaves a mark. It's not neutral. But we don't need a fresh coat of paint. We need the deep renewal that only God's spirit can bring. Today we're talking about a neglected temple. And this is the image that we see in 2nd Kings chapter 12.

King Joash looks at the temple of the Lord and he finds that it's in complete disrepair. The place that was meant for God's presence had been neglected and it needed to be renewed. And at the time of Joash's reign, the mix of God-centered and pagan worship had gone on for so long that no one felt urgency to restore the temple. It had become status quo. So the restoration project had sat dormant. People were just comfortable with the temple being left like this. Isn't that how it also happens with us? We become content with the way life looks around us. Everyone else lives a certain way. Why should we be any different? But the spirit convicts us about certain habits or sins. And maybe we shrug them off because no one else seems bothered. And over time,

our sensitivity doles, we stop noticing. And then quietly we move on to the next thing and the next thing. But when Joash in this chapter set up a plan for restoration, something shifted. A chest was placed at the temple entrance. Offerings were collected and suddenly the project became top of mind again. and the dust and the cobwebs were swept out of the temple, the broken joints were remortered, and pagan idols were cleared away. The gold and bronze were polished until they were shiny and ready to present again. The very work of cleaning and rebuilding revealed how far the people had drifted from God, and at the same time, it revealed how merciful God was to give them a chance to start again. So here's the transition. If the temple

of the Lord needed restoring, how much more that temple made of stone, made of gold? If it needed restoring, how much do our hearts, the living temples of God's spirit need renewing, need restoration? Paul reminds us in 1st Corinthians 619. He says, do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? What you just to think for a minute? If your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you. What is the condition of that temple? What does it look like compared to what I just described to you with Israel and King Joash? Neglect doesn't just leave a little dust in the corners, but the joints in the temple needed

remordered, the gold needed polishing. See, neglect can disrupt the very place that God desires to dwell. The Holy Spirit, however, the Holy Spirit steps into our foreshunders. false contentment. Not to make us restless like someone on a treadmill, but to make us spiritually alive and aware, to push beyond our comfort zones into conversations that are filled with grace and truth, to push us into relationships that are marked by forgiveness, to push us into daily rhythms of humility. Think of what Paul says in Romans 12, too. He says, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

God is renewing, reshaping, and rebuilding us. But of course, we know that following Jesus is a daily choice. It's not something we can just do ones on walk away. It's not something that we do just on Sundays and neglect for the rest of the week. It is a daily choice, a daily rhythm. When I think about that phrase, following Jesus is a daily choice, I like to picture the disciples literally following Jesus. Like each day they woke up, they were confronted with the truth that they are with Jesus, the Messiah.

They are confronted with the truth that he is the better healer, the better teacher, the better Savior, that he is better than anything else they knew. They learned to walk alongside him, to serve people older and younger, people richer and poor, people Jewish and Gentile, people who were believers and skeptics. They learned how to pray and they learned scripture. sure. That is what it look like to daily follow Jesus. And if we don't make that daily choice to follow him, our inner temple can drift toward disrepair. Jesus himself said in Luke 923, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. I don't know how you feel about that verse or praying for that verse, but for me it seems to imply that there will be some discomfort. Some discomfort probably from the outside.

and some from within. C.S. Lewis explains this in mere Christianity. He says, imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He's getting the drains right. He's stopping the leaks and the roof and so on. You knew that those jobs needed doing, and so you were not surprised. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. Throwing out a new wing here, putting an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace.

He intends to come and live in it himself. The Lord comes into our lives. He tears down the walls of pride. He sweeps out the cobwebs of self-reliance, and he builds something far better than we imagine. A temple worthy of a king. So how should these word pictures that God gives us, how should these cause us to live? How should this story of the Israelites and the temple? How should it prompt us to learn more about God, to love him more deeply, to live out our daily lives? Well, kind of what I just said. It should

cause us to love God more deeply, knowing that his mercy never ends. He doesn't simply patch up our broken places, he restores us to be worthy of his glory. Living temples. It should prompt us to obey him more freely, because we can trust that even when his work in our lives hurts or confuses us, he is building something far greater. Joash's people restored the temple so that God's name would once again be honored, and that he would receive all the glory. And we, living temples of the Holy Spirit, are called to do the same thing, to let God just clean house, not just on the surface, but for from the inside out. Where in your heart have you let caught webs of neglect gather?

Where are places that you've grown too content to notice that they need God's repair? And what daily practice? Prayer, scripture, worship, fellowship with other believers might be a way that the Holy Spirit can speak truth into your life. I mentioned that I feel the power of the Holy Spirit when I'm in God's Word, when I'm worshiping at church. Have you thought about where you experience the love? and presence of God. And if so, have you made that practice part of your rhythms? If you feel stuck

today, will you stop for just a moment and pray this first from Ephesians chapter 1, verse 17 to 18 with me? From Paul, he says, I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called. you, the riches of his glorious inheritance and his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. Amen.