Forged By Faith

Colossians 1:13 NIV The rupture Don’t know if it’s something that comes for us all, albeit at different times due to our different walks through a world diverging from what each of us may have once hoped life here could have been but so severely hasn’t become, or if it’s something that only a few of us ever manage to meet and muddle through. Shoot, for all I know it’s something that’s already dawned upon most and I’m just late to the game as is played by our walking away from what is the place that it still seems as if most haven’t so determined to leave. Either way, it feels as if there’s a coming day, or a day that already came, in which our minds finally find that we don’t feel as if we belong here anymore. Again, that may just be me and something that’s been on my heart for a while now in this life lived in a world that’s falling apart. It might just be that I might just be tired or frustrated or afraid even. I don’t really know how to explain it or much less when it began but the ...

Galatians 1:4 NIV The rescue From what remains a place in which most still seek their refuge inside of what is veritable refuse because many here refuse to admit they’ve lived to lose what was the life they’ve now never known thanks to our all having known what isn’t a life at all. Indeed, the normality of what’s now commonality amongst all of humanity is so contrary to that for which we were created that the Creator himself had to come down among us in order to, from within us, die just to lift us up and out of what we’ve become. Meaning then that what we remain is nothing but a people who curse the rain for making our food grow, who detest pain for making us grow, who loathe that which is plain because we think we’ve better ideas toward which to go all while we go exceedingly nowhere but rather seem to deepen daily in our delight to deprive ourselves of life here inside what remains a place in which that which was present then has never changed. For the evil remains. Yes, there is st...

Titus 2:14 NIV The reason I think one of the hardest, most profound, most confusing and yet most common questions in all of Christianity is why. Why would God do what He’s done in sending us His Son knowing that we’d made a life out of trusting in lies to lead what became and still remains the way that most here are walking, aimed only away from the Way that He made? Why would Jesus do what He did, enduring the scorn, the shame, the suffering for what is a people who mostly cheered it on? Why would He, as we discussed yesterday, even go so far as to promise to restore unto said people all the time and life and hope they’d lost to what’s amounted to nothing short of a self-continued plague as has made all of us so cantankerously confused that still the vast majority live only to lose what is everything from His love to the everlasting life offered within it? What is His reason? And I know this is something that all of us struggle with because there so often just doesn’t seem to be one. ...

Joel 2:25 ESV The restoration Of that which His army has taken in what’s been His war as remains waged against the wages of sin and death for which we here still seek to win in what’s been a now longstanding enmity against He who created us in love only to watch us determine to lose our lives thanks to our having lost our minds in this thinking that it somehow makes sense to stand still against Him who came to this earth in order to lay down His life so that we might take ours back up in the form of crosses carried which carry with them the opportunity to bridge where we are with wherever Heaven is. And indeed, it is a strange battle to behold as those who hold souls sold to what has long been every lowest bidder that has always only offered the meager measure of whatever it happened to be that we thought mattered in what’s since proven a moment that means less and less as the amount of time we’ve left grows only the same. For yes, the truth of time itself is that we’re all running out...

Galatians 3:13 NIV The redemption It’s the active expression of what it is to redeem which is defined as either: 1- To compensate for the faults or bad aspects of, i.e. make up for or make amends for 2- To gain or regain possession of something in exchange for payment, to exchange 3- To fulfill or carry out a pledge or promise, to make good on one’s word 4- To obtain the release or restoration of, such as from captivity, by paying a ransom 5- To make someone or something seem less bad, to improve 6- To free from a lien or debt by payment of an amount secured thereby 7- To deliver from sin and its consequences by means of a sacrifice offered for the sinner And what’s amazing, or at least ought to be curious enough to inspire in us a willingness to read of Him is that the Gospel of Christ Jesus is built upon the completion of every single one of every single aspect, idea, intention, direction, decision, devotion, determination and definition listed above. He accomplished on our behalf ev...