Day 3080 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 45:7 NIV

For a people whose lives are lived entirely at God's mercy leading us through every breath we breathe, we don't show much respect or reverence in return for His clear benevolence.

Sadly, I don’t even think we care to acknowledge His benevolence anymore. Now that I said it, I don’t even think we can bring ourselves to truly even admit that He is kind to us. We’re too busy being angry and upset at how life is going against our perfectly laid plans to appreciate that this story is unfolding according to His far more perfect plans. We seem to always be caught up carrying some sort of disapproval or discontentment for the truly minor and entirely insignificant bumps along a road we didn’t have to pave by ourselves.

You’d think we’d be thankful that all we’re called to do is follow. Alas, instead, it seems as though lost in the graveyard of a life we’ve misled and left behind is the gratitude that we’ve pretty much always never really had.

Why is it that we spend our time complaining about the parts of God's will that we feel as though we don't deserve rather than being thankful for the fact that we don't deserve the goodness of God's will? As I mentioned yesterday, we have this unique blending of impatience and entitlement that's all but driving us into the damnation we truly deserve. But rather than concern ourselves with that soul-shaking reality, we often opt to focus on the delusions that keep painting our illusions.

We want only what we want, we want it immediately if not sooner, we want no hint of cost nor consequence, and we want nobody to say anything to us that may appear to our ears as being anywhere close to derogatory in regard to the wants and wishes built only upon the whims and worries of our wayward hearts.

And the most amazing part of all this is that we legitimately act as if we really believe that we are in fact entitled to anything. We live our lives as though God owes us something in return for our half-hearted unwillingness to acknowledge that He may or may not exist based entirely upon whatever situation or circumstance we may find ourselves facing at the moment. Good times: God's there. Hard days: Where'd He go?

Can we not see the sheer stupidity in this outlook of faith mangled by such foolishness and frivolity? Can't we understand the true lowliness of our existence? Why can we not accept the lowliness of our existence? Unfortunately, it seems as though we are indeed losing that ability to both accept and appreciate our true reality. Truth be told, our ego has long done all it could to convince us that we’re of greater strength and wit and ability than we know to be the case.

And sadly, we now live in a world filled with a kind of insanity that only solidifies our stupidity.

But friends, do we truly gain anything by believing this lie that has us convinced that we deserve something good or anything at all? Would we not be far better off to walk through life being able to see that everything is a blessing simply due to the fact that we deserve nothing but harm and hardship?

We're creating for ourselves these blocks not merely made for stumbling. We're building barricades to belief, barriers that keep us blinded to His blessings, chasms and caverns so deep that we can't see anything other than this lie our minds have painted inside themselves that seem to show a perfect life we're actually diluted enough to feel as though we are entitled to be living.

And through it all, every moment spent perfecting another plan we want to unfold perfectly, every second spent in anger at God not compromising His will with our own, every missed door that was ripped off its hinges leading us to a peace or appreciation that we don't deserve, all of it is done in such an arrogant way that has us in His place in our lives under the assumption that we have both the power to rule and the authority to do so

.

But my friend, we're wrong. We are very wrong.

As we talked about a bit at the close of yesterday's post, the only thing we really have any power over is how the circumstances we face affect us. All we can control is the reactions we have to life's unfolding. The only authority we have is that which gives us the choice to choose either the ability to lay down our lives and live in complete and utter surrender to God, or to choose to refuse to lose the chains we can't bear to let go simply because they're made of the sins that shine like gold in eyes that are as blind as they've ever been.

I saw a clip of an interview a while back, and the guy being interviewed said something that's stuck with me ever since. He said that Christians today are more afraid of the devil than they are of God. We're more afraid of the enemy than He who has already overcome the worst the enemy can do. We're more worried about what may happen to us than we are our mistake of letting go of the One who promised to walk with us through every trial until He got us home.

Can we really be so foolish? When you stop and think about it for any time at all, it makes no sense to have a faith in a God so big that He defeated death so that we can live and yet assume that He doesn't know what He's doing simply because what He's doing isn't what we want to be done. How mindless do you have to be to honestly think that He who formed us owes us anything more? That we have life is a gift too good for we who've lived it chasing death.

How much more do we feel we're still owed than the Christ who came to this earth to lay down His life to atone for the fact that we've not done the same?

If His blood, His misery, His suffering, His pain isn't enough, what can be? If we can look away from that gift and find reason to gripe over such temporary and miniscule things such as a hard day, heavy traffic, or the harshness of the hatred around us, then friends, we don't have any right to claim any share in what He's done. If what He did upon that cross is so insignificant to us that we forget it in an instant as soon as life goes sideways, well then I'd say we still deserve every bit of the death He took for us.

Simply because we've the audacity to equate it with a moment of discomfort or displeasure. How dare we treat Him with as much contempt and as little reverence as we so often do!

Have we honestly just forgotten who He is and what He can do? I'm afraid we've lived for too long among those who either assume God an invisible drive-thru worker simply waiting to take our order or who just deny Him altogether. And those perspectives are beginning to appear in our own understandings of what this faith is, who He is within this story, and what we're owed as a result of our clear hesitation to do anything other than what we’ve always done.

We find ourselves accepting a lie that sounds like faith simply because it uses the right words that sound close enough to leave us little reason to assume something might be off. The prosperity gospel, progressive Christianity, videos of 'miraculous healings', messages aimed at only affirmation of our chosen infirmities. It's all about us, just as it always has been.

Expect that it isn't.

Like I said yesterday, God doesn't work for us. He's not on our payroll being paid off with hurried prayers and half-hearted petitions. He needs nothing and so we've nothing to offer Him that's of such worth that we can convince Him to change His mind, alter His plans, reverse His paths or hurry His promises. And yet, it's those very things that encompass the vast majority of what we want out of this faith we've grown to see as a contract.

Friends, God does whatever He wants without regard to what we think we need. Truth is that He knows what we need and we know nothing. And the sooner we come to terms with that the sooner we find ourselves a little closer to what faith is actually meant to be. It's not about believing God to be there to soothe away our pains or blow away the rain. Faith is trusting in God to do what needs to be done because we understand that we don't know what to do.

We've grown so high on ourselves that we live as if we're able to look down on Him. Like He owes us. Like we deserve something. Like Christ and His work on the cross was a nice first gesture on His behalf to earn our trust. He doesn't have to earn a thing. We owe Him everything, and if we can't understand the difference then we've got some massive issues that we'd better line out before our line runs out.

Our God created this earth and all that is upon it. He fashioned and formed every living creature, you and I included. He stretched out the cosmos and tells the sun when to rise sending those stars back to sleep for the day. He holds everything in His hands and makes it all work as He alone knows it should. He can end us without a word. With a single breath, our entire existence could be gone, having never even happened.

And yet, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

That we are alive, that our lives are overflowing with the many things we so often take for granted, that we've been given this day to do something better than we did the day before is a gift of such magnitude that it ought to change our attitude. But whether or not it does is entirely up to us. And if in fact we choose to lose sight of the gifts He's given us, then so too will we choose to refuse His offering to lead us to a place in which we don't even deserve to hope.

All because we instead hold to this idea that we deserve something that we don't.

How childish to live in fear of not getting our way. How foolish to hope only that today goes how we want it to go. How shortsighted to ask Him to do for us what we'd never do for Him. How arrogant to live as if it's He who should have faith in us rather than the other way around.

"The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread."

We shouldn't simply honor God. Shouldn't merely respect Him either. We should not limit ourselves to only living in fear of our Father. We mustn't settle for simply assuming He's nothing but kindness. We should dread Him, not because of what He will do, but simply because of what He can do. But instead, seems as if we only care to consider what we want Him to do.

How idiotic can we be to live our lives as if they're our chance to put Him to the test, knowing that we ourselves have already failed to be anything close to anything we've ever thought ourselves able to be?

I think it's time for us to stop everything and get back to the basics of how all this is set up. We're not owed anything. We deserve nothing good. Our sins have separated us from God and pointed us toward death. Our pasts have proven that we've no struggle in denying His strength. Our opinions pose an obvious danger in that they are built inside our preferences as opposed to upon His promises. And our arrogance, our ego, our vanity, our pride and the entitlement they bring to life will indeed only bring us down the depths of the darkest place we cannot begin to imagine.

Safe to say we'd probably be wise to cut the nonsense loose before it causes us to lose it all.

God's not playing, and even if He were, we cannot compete with the kind of power that defines the difference between light and dark, right and wrong, good and bad, truth and lie, life and death. We can't do any of what God does, so we should probably stop living as if He's only there to do as we want done and instead learn to appreciate the very fact that He's not done with us after all we've done against Him.

We deserve death, and that He offers life should be enough to leave us eager to lay down everything else in order to lift our hands in endless gratitude for such a clearly undeserved gift. How about we stop worrying so much about what we do or do not want in our lives and instead pour ourselves out as offerings unto the One who has given us a little more time to learn to give ourselves to something other than just thinking about ourselves?

Our ego has us convinced that we can poke a bear and win the battle because we think ourselves at least fast enough to run away from the fight we didn't see coming. We've been told of the battle that's on the way, and He's even so kind as to promise how it will turn out. We can't run away from the One we can't see. And we can't outrun the death we've been running toward all this time.

All we can do is stop doing as we've done and instead agree to let God be God while we simply hang on the hope that His kindness and compassion will save us from far more than a rainy day or a hard life.

While we may arrogantly want this life to be both easy and filled with only what we want, truth is that this life will only go as God has ordained. Now, we can either fight against that or learn to appreciate it. Either way the road is the same, only the journey will change based on our abundance of humility or our lack thereof. God will do as He sees fit as He alone has the power to not have to answer to anyone. You and I on the other hand, we will answer to Him.

We will bow, we will confess, we will honor and respect the Name that was, is and will always be whatever we think we’re able to make of our own. And it’s probably wise to learn to respect Him before that day comes.

Because it is coming soon and this is one lesson we cannot survive learning the hard way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold