Day 2923 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Philippians 3:8 NIV

Yesterday marked the 8-year anniversary of the beginning of this little life-long odyssey through Scripture and the joyous opportunities it holds for both personal growth and also the growth of our faith. And in these 8 years of trying to find the words to describe the authoritative power of God's Word, I've learned many lessons I never knew I always needed. And among them is one that has become a foundational belief that I will hold tight to the very end. And that is this:

We have no idea of just how much we have to gain in Christ until we've let go of everything else that we've always thought was valuable and important. Because there's a priceless importance held in this opportunity we've been given to both find Christ and then spend the rest of our lives finding more of Him that nothing in this world can possibly rival.

But sadly, that fact often remains unrealized as we find ourselves amidst a humanity still almost entirely convinced that there is something in and/or of this world that holds some kind of lasting meaning or worth. To say that society's been watered down is what I believe to be a drastic understatement. Instead, I fear that large swathes of society are completely disconnected from the very essence of what life is meant to be.

We don't even have to talk about faith, as to be honest, many here simply don't and likely never will share these beliefs that we Christians have. But it's not just a faith issue, it's a lack of life in the way of life that we see many living all around us. Folks are losing sight of the fact that we've been given this time to do more than speed forward into further technological advancements. We're here for more than digital connections with people who may not even be real people. We're here to gain more than everything this world has to offer or may possibly be able to offer going forward.

We're here to find the unfindable, to finish the work that we neither began nor can complete, to undertake a calling to which we're neither prepared for not equipped to fulfill. We're here to rage toward a finish line we know in our hearts we can't find. We're here to come to terms with the fact that we're not staying here. We are in this land of the lost to help the lost find Christ as we ourselves now know the joy of having once been lost but now being found in Christ forevermore.

We are here to serve the One who made this place and everyone in it, but we cannot do so if we continue to allow ourselves to be distracted by all the things we've made of it and made in it and tried to gain from it. We are here to gain only the hope of eternal peace for not only ourselves but also for whomever we're granted the ability to interact with and therefore share the Gospel with.

We are simply here for more than what's here, and if we truly believe that He has gone to prepare a place for us where we can and should be storing up our eternal treasuries of hope and excitement and trust and faith and prayers and worship, then we ought to be living like every day is one more chance to tell one more person about that place and the One who lovingly forgave us which gave us a chance to one day call it home.

But all of those monumentally and eternally significant aspirations and abilities are lost behind the endless sea of distractions that continue rolling up on the shore that is our typically temporary perspective. We are literally engulfed and overwhelmed by a world filled with all the shimmering and glittering obstructions that mankind has created to keep us disconnected from the death that our lives owe. All because we’d simply prefer not admit that we owe it, nor that the bill is coming due sooner than we care to acknowledge.

Our aversion to the very real reality of our impending exit from this place causes our inability to appreciate the fleeting chance we have to live a life that means something. Instead, we seem to just keep running to temporal things thinking that their temporary importance will somehow manage to give our lives some kind of meaning that we don’t have to work too hard to find nor give away too much to gain.

We all want to make a life that has a meaning, but rather than looking to the few things that actually have eternal meaning, we just keep trying to horde up more meaningless materials in the assumption that enough meaningless stuff will somehow become meaningful.

Recently we spent a large amount of time discussing the gross idolization of all manner of worldly creations. It seems that if it's made by human hands then we find an easier understanding of its value than those ideas which cannot be held or bought or sold or contained within tangible items that serve to always remind us of their presence. We just keep trying to find new ways to distract ourselves from the fact that we only have one shot to live a life that means something, but that that can’t be done by giving false meaning to things in order to create an image of meaning without anything having any actual meaning.

But all of these tiny trinkets and comfortable contentments only keep us bound to a life that we're undeniably leaving behind. And that brings to mind a very important question that each of us should constantly be asking ourselves: Why are living to have or hold anything here when one day we won't be here and in fact here will be gone?

All of us have lived our lives with our eyes. We've all walked by sight and set those sights on the consumption of everything that we find pretty or shiny or appealing in any way. We've all allowed our minds to become contaminated with worldly idols and ideals. We've all fallen in love with this fleeting opportunity to have something we can hold in our hands as it offers us the ability to show it off to those around us in the hopes that our holding it will garner their agreeance that we do in fact matter and that our lives really do mean something simply because we've filled them with some things.

But the problem is that the more we focus here, the less we're thinking about elsewhere. The more treasures we chase on this ground, the fewer we're storing up in Heaven. The more this earth is allowed to be seen as our home, the less we'll concern ourselves about the big move we have coming up someday.

In all of these 8 years of posting these posts, I've tried to veer away from making them too much about me. I am not the goal. I am not the purpose nor the reason nor the outcome. I am simply the fingers that know how to hit the keyboard and hopefully spell the words correctly and put them in the proper order that allows them to become meaningful messages that point to the One who truly matters.

But, I also know that I've made many of the mistakes that are discussed within these paragraphs. And since I've made them and have gleaned hard-learned lessons from those foolish losses, they give me a certain perspective, just as your mistakes and hard-learned lessons give you a perspective that would help someone else. And that's the beauty of the community that is the church: We've all lived a life, and in that, we've all learned lessons the hard way that we can use to help one another avoid having to learn everything the hard way.

I've set out to gain a lot in my life so far. Sports collectibles, shiny CD's, delightful entertainment DVD's, framed fabrications of false importance, poseable plastic pint-sized playthings, and all sorts of other alliterative diversions from the actual significance of our existence. And though I've found some decent success in gaining all that I've learned to crave in the past, looking back I can now say with all honesty that all I really gained in the end was time lost.

Spending life seeking life in lifeless and inanimate objects costs not only money but our time, and sadly, I think that's one of the things that's managed to all but lose its value in our avoidance of just how little time we have remaining. We've forgotten that our time is priceless as it's the one thing that we cannot buy more of no matter how much money we make or how many things we have to trade.

Time is leaving us every single day. And when the big things like faith and hope and surrender are allowed to become lost upon the backburners of our minds while we remain focused on the more immediate gains we think we're making, we don't realize that our time is running out to get those big things right and in place and in proper order.

We just forget that we only have a few more days to do what needs done, and not only for ourselves and our forever, but also for everyone else and their forevers.

Looking back at all the time I lost to things I no longer have, I can't help but feel what Paul says here in this verse in Philippians. I've had to lose things in order to gain more things in their place. All of us have. We've traded our time to gain money. We trade our money to buy things that sit on shelves or in garages. We trade those things to buy bigger houses that can store more things. We purchase trashcans that hold those things once they lose their luster. And we start it all over again when we see a blank space on that shelf that demands something to fill it.

But how many things in life have we chosen to give away? Not throw away or trade away or wish away. How much have we joyfully walked away from because we knew it was only holding us back or distracting us from something better?

That's my pursuit these days. To walk away. To shake it off. To leave it behind, burn it up, break free from its confinement. Having been enslaved to a bunch of stuff that never held any meaning, let alone enough meaning to matter in eternity, I thank God for that lesson because it helped me learn what's truly important. Realizing how many worthless idols I've tossed in the trash in the past has allowed me to understand the love that refused to let Him throw me away, even while I was distracted by everything that's not Him.

Friends, the point is that He is all that matters. Christ is all we have, and if He is truly all we have then we really do have all we need. But so many things are allowed to convince us otherwise. Is not life more than clothes and shoes and houses and cars and jobs and followers? Is not our time worth more than giving it away for a bunch of things that will ultimately lose their meaning when we're no longer here to tell others how much they meant to us?

Is not the opportunity to walk through the gates of Heaven worth walking away from everything that may keep us distracted just enough just long enough to cause us to miss the narrow path that leads to them?

It's not that nothing here matters, it's just that what humanity thinks matters simply doesn't. As long as goals are limited to this earth and concerns are focused under the atmosphere, then we're living a hollow life that will leave us nothing on the other side of our last breath. But it doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to fear the fact that our impending death means only the leaving behind of everything we've tried so hard for so long to finally have in this place.

Because of the cross and a stone that rolled out of the way, we have a chance to come to see death as new life. We have a chance to live out that altogether strange idea that to live is Christ and to die is gain. Because again, we have no idea how much we have to gain until we've let go of everything that we've thought was valuable and important.

In truth, there's nothing more valuable than salvation. Nothing is more important than our relationship with Christ. And we can truly hope to gain nothing more beautiful than forever with Him in a place where we don't need anything and don't have to live convinced otherwise.

Friends, to know Christ is the only kind of life that's truly worth the little amount of time we have. Because if we know Him then we have gained eternal peace, and trading all of this temporary stuff in exchange for an unending joy is undoubtedly a good bargain! And if we know Him and the peace of His eternal promises, then making Him known to others so that they too can find themselves in that home where all that matters is enjoying His peace forever, that's all we could ever ask for.

In the end, the only kind of life that can ever really matter is a life spent seeking something that continues to pay off even after the banks close for good. So do we really see everything else here as garbage that’s only blocking our path to knowing more of Him and helping more know of Him? Or do we still kind of hope He will agree that we can bring some of it with us, or that it was all at least worth the time we spent focusing on it rather than on Him?

Scripture wasn’t joking when it said that nobody can serve two masters. We cannot be devoted to both God and this world because they’re on eternally different trajectories. So do we live to seek a life of gain in a world not interested in gaining God’s forgiveness? Or do we live like we’ve already gained all we need in the cross and the One who hung upon it, and that all we have left is to leave everything else on the battlefield of this life in the hopes of helping others see that they too can gain all they need in Him?

If that’s in any way still a question, then we should probably question what it is we really believe. Because if we really believe in Him, then how could we possibly believe that anything else is of any importance whatsoever?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold