Day 3075 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 12:6 NIV

How sad it is to have become a people so willfully blinded by the rebuke that we've no longer the ability to see the reward.

In all of our “advancements” and “progressions” it seems as though we’ve finally arrived at a place where we fully misunderstand and mishandle basically everything in life. From truth to reason to responsibility, the very fundamentality of morality, it’s all just this endless cavalcade of sinking ships being torpedoed by a vanity and stubbornness so deep that we’ve agreed to let them define our very identity. Folks today literally even believe in a version of love that mustn’t correct or warn or encourage as those things have been assumed as harmful to the feelings so widely cherished.

As a result, there's something about even hearing the word 'discipline' that sends chills down the spines of nearly every human being alive today. It's been given this weighty connotation that has us unfortunately equating it to something more akin to punishment or even persecution. We've sadly grown to see only the pain it poses to our pride as said pride is the idol we worship most severely anymore.

And as this tide of the most tumultuous foolishness continues to rise as the eyes remain affixed to only that which we perceive as beneficial to our preferences, I fear that our ability to find our way back to embracing the opportunities for growth we're continuously given will eventually agree to stay drown.

I do understand it though, this mindset set on clinging for dear life to this assumption that we've both done nothing wrong and in turn are undeserving of being corrected. We've come to almost embody the old adage which says that if something isn't broken then it doesn't need to be fixed. And considering our incredible ability to refuse reality and how that ability is only increasing in order to keep pace with our growing egos, it only stands to reason that most will go on thinking they're not broken, at least not yet to the point of needing to be fixed.

But my pondering veers into wondering what we gain from all this unwillingness to move. What is the benefit of staying where we are, who we are? Is what we've already found and who we’ve already become all we really want to find or be in this life, in the next? Are we truly content with having to find more reasons to slap away the hand that’s reaching out to help us just so we can avoid the struggle of striving for something that demands we admit we’re nothing without the guidance of the One who made us?

Why continue to downplay the sweetness of the reward found within the promise of an endless peace waiting for us in exchange for needing to continue hating both the sternness of the correction and the One who lovingly keeps trying to help us find our way to the place we don’t really deserve to be?

Sure, we don't have to work or move or change or admit that we need to do all of the above. We won’t have to sit with our failures and let the sting hurt so deep that we find an inner resolve to refuse their happening again. We can even add a few more things to our list of stuff to complain about, which, we all know just how much we love feeling sorry for ourselves.

But is feeling sorry for ourselves really the best way to find contentment in life? Doesn’t seem like society is doing all that well down that path. Everyone is living as if there are on consequences, simply because they don’t want there to be as any consequence might accidentally point out the flaws in our picture perfect plans toward the living of our “best life”. But doesn’t seem as if much peace or hope or meaning is being found in all that foolishness.

Indeed, what makes our struggle to understand God’s correction even worse is that we've learned the wrong concept of consequence. We think that pain or struggle or uncertainty are the foremost things to avoid as they all bring only discomfort. But what if we could see that comfort is perhaps the most detrimental of all dangers? What if we could understand that staying put only afforded us an endless array of missed opportunities? What if we could allow ourselves to hope beyond ourselves and accept the undeserved help we need to live beyond ourselves?

We just might learn to appreciate that God's not willing to compromise.

Why are we? To avoid the embarrassment of needing help or forgiveness? To skip a couple of hard days that we could have spent sitting on the couch watching life scream by? To hold tight the hope of an opportunity to boast in something we accomplished on our own without any help? Have we ever done anything on our own without God first giving us that open door then the ability to walk through it?

My point is that we've got this barricade built up in our minds that refuses to let us come anywhere near pain or effort or even humility. We've lived so long under the control of our ego that we can't let ourselves be the loser, the beggar, the damsel in distress that needs a hero outside themselves to save the day. We always have to be our own success stories, and that compulsion is causing us to miss living the story He wrote for His glory.

A long time ago we set out to leave Him and His ways behind. And though few will ever admit it, at least on this ground, the fact is that we've all found nothing doing this our way outside of a list of regrets, a story of scars, a past piled high with shame and a mountain of mistakes no rug exists big enough to keep them swept under. Why keep avoiding the help our incessant selfish failures prove we need?

Well, because it's not fun. Doesn't feel good. It demands a kind of surrender we think saved only for those so weak that they shouldn't have ever even tried. And we just can't bear the thought of looking that pathetic. So instead we keep doing things that prove just how pathetic we already are from all the years spent ignoring the help we tried and failed to pretend we didn’t need? It's a confused ideology only logical to minds so tainted by sin and stupidity that they've no concept of logic remaining.

What I think we're all so quick to forget is that we're going to deal with all we've done at some point any way. Sure, we can put it off and avoid the embarrassment, but doing so only accomplishes two things: 1. It keeps us living life on the run afraid of the shadow we can never actually leave behind or break away from. And 2. It ruins the chance at salvation and replaces it with eternal judgement.

So where's the gain? Where's the win we assume to find in ignoring our failures, denying our flaws, puffing our chests and mocking the very idea that God has the right to call us out for living a way that's going to get us killed? The wages of sin are death, so are we just looking for this sort of blaze of glory kind of story? Are we trying to prove we can be the ones who prove Him wrong?

What is it? How did we get here? Maybe most importantly, where do we go from here?

Sadly, many will indeed stay behind simply because they refuse to accept that they can move forward. Many will continue cherishing their momentary reprieves just hoping they last as long as possible. Many will do all they can to deny God, reject God, hate God because of the fact that His ways are higher than those of our own which our arrogance says are as perfect as we’ve always tried to make them seem.

But we'll all still come before God one day. Do you really want to do so as a person who lived your life shaking your fist at the hand He held out to try and save you from the suffering you couldn't see a reason to leave behind? What a sad end to a sad life half lived.

That's what we often choose to misunderstand about God's correction and why He does it. It's to lead us to life, a full life, a life so overflowing that it spills joy into the vicinity of others that they too might find reason and courage to spurn their denial and set out in search of the hope we found in Him. It's not to make us feel bad but to teach our eyes to see the things that are making us feel bad as the enemy they've always been.

We learn this fact a few verses later in Hebrews 12:11. "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

And there’s the point: We can’t truly know peace if we’ve never lived through pain. All we can ever know is an idea of peace, a concept of what it would be like, our own version we think a replica of the real as we’ve no basis by which to determine what peace truly is without turmoil having been endured.

The fact is that we don’t need things that are pleasant as our comfort, to Him, isn't the biggest priority. As to why it's always our main focus, that's a problem for us to realize we need to work on. But once we find the spine He placed inside of us that gives us the strength to move forward and leave behind the laziness that's sinking us, well, He's more than happy to do what's necessary to help us find our way to being something more than dust and ashes sucking up air waiting to die hoping it's painless.

Lest we've forgotten, and judging by how society is clearly choosing to live, we have, "wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses." And He’s calling us to something much deeper than friendship. He’s inviting us into adoption, kinship, relationship built on and bought by the blood of His Son. He’s asking us to be His children, and no good parent intentionally wounds or rebukes or admonishes their child without a reason aimed at the betterment of that child.

Yes, He wounds but only so that we can heal. He corrects so we don't keep living a lie. He invites us into the tomb wherein we die to everything that's happily killing us so that we can walk out into a new life no longer hindered by our lesser human instincts which have always been corrupted by our human penchant for comfort and laziness and all other things which soothe our ego and bolster the pride that driving us into death so deep there’s no walking or waking from it.

He offers to walk with us through the fog of chaos we’ve created out of all the lies we’ve believed in order to stay convinced we’re not doing anything wrong and don’t need any help. No, He’s not just going to take away all the messes we’ve made because we’d not learn anything if He worked that way. Instead, He forces us to face them so that we learn from them. But He walks with us through them so that we learn too just how deep His love for us really is.

Because that’s what love does. It corrects. It teaches. It never settles for less than improvement.

To chasten is to "inflict suffering upon for purposes of moral improvement." To "make someone understand that they have failed or done something wrong and make them want to improve." And easily my personal favorite definition, to "prune of excess, pretense, or falsity."

We’ve come to live a life of excess, both material (as in things like three dozen pairs of shoes and homes with five bathrooms) and intangible (such as all these foolish ideas we think add value to life even though they only strip it of its meaning). We build lives based on pretense assuming we know what we’re doing when in reality our pasts prove we’ve not the foggiest idea.

And yes, we embrace falsity in every possible manifestation we can come up with in order to make our lives spent living a lie seem a reasonable choice to have made, and to continue making.

God just wants us to realize how simple a decent life really is, how important a decent life is to live, and how much He loves us despite our past efforts which have always proven anything but anywhere close to decent. He wants better for us and He will cut away, burn away, starve away everything that's keeping us stuck in a place we don't belong but have chosen to stay. Why do we want to stay?

And even deeper than that, why do we want to stay so badly that we hate God for His love, simply because that love asks us to try harder to do better to become more?

We have the opportunity to not merely be welcomed by the God we left behind and lived to deny, but to be accepted as His children. Not servants, not friends, children. He loves us as His own because we are His own, created in His image to do good things that honor His Name and help His people. When will we get to being who He made us to be? And when will we accept that we need His help to get back there?

There is no life that has any meaning outside of the one He created for us to live. But we cannot live the life He made us to live unless we admit we've lived outside His design through the sins we've served and that we need to be broken so that He can put us back together again.

It's not fun. Not easy. Not something that's going to bring with it a trophy or a crown or a story we're itching to jump on a stage and tell everyone else about. It's going to hurt. It will be embarrassing. We will discover things that will bring a new kind shame we've never considered possible before.

But we'll be better for it. We will be better for it.

I dare you to have the courage to press into the pain brought about by His disciplining us. There is purpose in every pain. Sometimes it warns. Sometimes it corrects. Sometimes it heals. In this case, it does all the above. Let Him do what needs to be done, because we'll never be anything better if we keep thinking we can't be more.

We can be, but do we want to be? That's the question. Our life is the answer. What are we saying?

Please understand that He doesn’t correct us, rebuke, admonish us to make us feel as if we’re not His children. He does it to help us finally realize that we’ve been living as if we weren’t. And He wants better for us, wants better from us. But again, do we want the same, or to just stay the same?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold