Matthew 12:44
Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.
The verse belongs to the account in Matthew 12:22-50, given also in Mark 3:20-35, that leads to the teaching on who are Christ's brethren. It belongs to Jesus' warning that rejecting the Holy Spirit cuts off the channel through which God brings people to repentance and faith, so that when the Spirit is finally rejected there is nothing more God can do for the soul.
The empty, swept, and garnished house is the soul that has heard Christ gladly, been impressed, and been for a time set free from Satan's control. The person has broken with Satan and refused to do his work, put old habits aside, and made an outward reform, pictured as a house cleaned and put in order, but the heart remains vacant because the Holy Spirit has not been welcomed to dwell within through surrender. The vacuum left by that cleaning must be filled with the Holy Spirit, with the love of God and the graces of the Spirit, with Christ dwelling in the heart through faith in His righteousness. This requires full, continuing, daily and moment-by-moment surrender to God and to Christ, vital connection and union with Him, personal acquaintance, continual communion, and cooperation with heavenly agencies, with the soul cleansed of false teaching and harmful practices and grounded in truth. Freedom from evil must therefore be joined to daily surrender to Christ, for outward reform without full surrender leaves the heart empty.
The soul must inevitably be under the control of one of the two great powers contending for supremacy, so destruction comes not only by resistance but by neglect. Merely leaving off bad habits and parting company with Satan for a time leaves the heart empty for him to reclaim as his abiding place, and a merely negative religion will not keep a person in the family of God. If the heart is emptied and cleaned but left unfilled and uninhabited, Satan returns with seven others more evil and takes possession, and the last state becomes worse than the first. Old habits then return with evil gaining a stronger hold, the person becomes wholly dominated and overcome by self-love, self-indulgence and temptation to sin and does the enemy's bidding in the end.
An unguarded, spiritually empty life allows evil spirits to make it their abode and inherited and cultivated evil tendencies to develop. Those who are reproved and warned but are not yet converted, not established and settled and fully yielded to the guiding power of the Holy Spirit, remain open for Satan to return, since he is not yet fully cast out of their minds and very little will bring back the evil conditions that existed before; without thorough conversion people cannot conduct God's work in right lines. Keeping the heart inhabited requires being emptied of self, for holiness is wholeness to God in life and character and no one can be happy apart from God. Without connection to Christ the soul remains unsanctified, without use of the reservoir of power at command, dark, cold and sunless in unbelief and unable to catch the bright beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and only Christ's indwelling keeps the soul as His fortress impregnable to Satan. The garden of the heart must be cultivated, poisonous Satanic plants uprooted, the soil prepared by the Word of God and seeds of truth sown and tended, with continual watching unto prayer, because knowingly sinning against God destroys the peace and joy that Christ's righteousness brings in the Holy Ghost and drives away the Spirit, and Christ will not accept a divided heart.