People who live in the United States along the Central Coast of the Gulf of Mexico will probably never forget August 29, 2005.

On that Monday morning in August hurricane Katrina roared ashore. While the Mississippi Gulf Coast took the brunt of the wind damage and the storm surge, the city of New Orleans faced the devastating flooding.

The headlines of the news programs proclaimed that New Orleans had dodged a bullet. In actuality the levees had been breached and the bowl that is New Orleans began filling up.

Over the next several years people along the central Gulf Coast understood the word renovation.

Many houses – and most all houses in New Orleans – had to have some renovation.

The most extensive renovation meant you left the framework of the house and renovated everything else. You would see houses with a roof, a foundation, and the exterior framework of the house. Everything else in the house had been “gutted”, a word with which we became very familiar.

That’s what renovation meant to us.

A famous expositor called holiness the “renovation of the soul.” It is the internal change that God brings in the life of a person so that his mind, affections, and will are renovated.

God wants to do his work of renovation in our hearts. He wants us to live holy lives, lives in which God has changed the mind, the desires, and the will.

The change of the mind means that we look at the world and its affections differently.

We begin to understand sin and its awful reality. We start hating that which is evil and begin loving that which is good.

What we want out of life changes. It becomes vastly different. Our desires – our affections–are completely renovated.

Finally, the will – our will – begins to conform to the will of God.

Then finally we have the renovation of the soul, and we begin to become holy even as He is holy.

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