Don't Just Cut Bad Out, Replace It with Good
How do we improve ourselves? It's all about how we replace things. In so many diets and personality techniques, the focus seems to fall on stopping doing something. While it is useful to put a limit on the amount of carbs you're eating and keep yourself from cutting others off, if the extent of your self-fixing is to simply remove things from your life, you will certainly end up failing or at least not reaching your potential. We see this in a more extreme example in one of Jesus' stories concerning a person who had an unclean spirit (a demon) removed from him or her: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation” (Matthew 12:43-45).
In this story, we see that some time after the unclean spirit had been kicked out of the person, he returned and found the person's house (his soul) "empty, swept, and put in order." How then does the demon end up returning and making the person's situation worse than before? If everything was in order, why was the demon able to wreak havoc?
My belief here is that while his soul was clean and tidy, the person had not replaced the evil that had been dominating him with goodness. Instead, he took whatever was already within his soul, reorganized it, and made it look nicer. Maybe he even fluffed the pillows. But why wasn't that enough? Shouldn't the efforts of a person to improve themselves keep them protected from being filled with evil again? Well, this story was almost certainly directed at the Pharisees, who followed the law as closely as they possibly could. Their downfall was that they had not replaced the evil in their hearts with goodness. They continually acted as if they loved God by following the rules, but Jesus saw their nearly empty souls and said this about them:
"They pile heavy burdens on people’s shoulders and won’t lift a finger to help. Everything they do is just to show off in front of others. They even make a big show of wearing Scripture verses on their foreheads and arms, and they wear big tassels for everyone to see" (Matthew 23:4-5)
They attempted to remove the evil in their hearts by doing what appeared to be good things but were really just organizing the weakness in their souls that could never be enough to allow love to spring up in their hearts to help others.
If you are now realizing that what you've mostly been doing is trying to kick evil out of your life and move around the rest of the traits in your soul to become good, I have good news for you: Jesus, who was the only good man to ever walk the earth, has given each one of us the opportunity to receive his goodness that can fill our souls with the life that will always repel the evil that can be cast out of our souls. We simply need accept his help in repenting of the sins we've committed, rejecting the tendencies inside of us that led us to sin, inviting Jesus to implant his righteousness into our souls, and then letting Jesus' goodness expand in our hearts until there is only room for goodness. It's all about how we replace, not just how we cut out.