Day 3110 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 John 2:16 KJV

The combination of how we've grown due to where we've grown amongst whom we've grown has meant that we've grown so vastly crooked that we simply know not the life for which we were born.

In fact, all we know of life is the way of life in which we've seen everyone else walking and racing and hiding and trying and pretending to not be hiding or trying nor feeling the need to despite the obvious need to. Indeed, down here everyone puts on this show selling this image of inhibition that while seems the epitome of freedom will eventually turn out to be only the opposite of freedom.

Which is a truly crushing feeling that all of us will find once we find no reasons remaining to keep running or hiding from the fact that we’re both not living right nor living at all.

Alas, sadly, running and hiding manages to keep us going until we slam into that crushing feeling, a collision violent because we were only racing against the inevitability of its arrival in front of us. Yes, what we eventually find is that worldly freedom knows nothing of freedom because there is no liberty in lives lived by hearts attached to anything which cannot last past the date upon which we shall pass.

And yet, this world in which we live and the cultures of which they've sought to create are all cohesively and consecutively and upon a day soon coming, consequently constructed in the temporality of all that's fleeting. Why? Because all that's fleeting is just too pleasing to our feeling this need to be pleased and pacified whilst we remain in and sadly of this world that we ought to know we're close to leaving behind.

But that's a lesson we've failed to learn from looking to a world so vastly lost within itself that it’s simply unable to teach us. No, this world doesn't care to consider the hands of time that are hastening us all toward the hands of Him. All it seems everyone cares about down here anymore is whatever brings the quickest reward and the deepest sense of pleasure, which are both entirely entangled within our misaligned and mishandled minds.

And like it or not, each of us have indeed gone astray down the path paved with sin's pleasure. Simply because that's the path upon which we've been pointed by those who scream that they know the way to the place we're supposed to be in order to be all we've learned to wish to be by the masses which assume life a puzzle in need of figuring out as opposed to a line meant to be walked without need of sight or sound.

Because sadly even though Scripture calls us to walk by faith, that’s nothing close to what we know of the way of life we’ve learned. No, here we measure our steps so we can track our success in order to ensure we arrive at the destination we desire with the ability to show the whole wide world that we won the game. Because we've taught this is all just a game wherein the rules change as the days do and as they do me and you are left to either keep up or find ourselves lost and left behind.

There's such an immoral disregard to the fragility of the human existence, and this is shown in how we handle our children, even ourselves as the children we still are in many ways. As we discussed yesterday, all of us have gotten older without growing up along the way. We've been hurried into a way of life we were never meant to live the way we've been taught and told to live it. But naivety and gullibility and a blind trust in the image portrayed by those putting on only a performance has cost us things we'll never know.

I find myself thinking about this all the time anymore. What have I lost over the years spent thinking I had nothing to lose? What experiences didn't I get the chance to remember as I instead spent my time staring at a screen or scrolling through a phone? What conversations weren't I a part of because I was busy listening to this message planted inside me telling me that I was meant only to hear the world and how it runs so I could stay in the race along with it?

I've no doubt that the way of life we learn from a world that knows only the death of sin has indeed cost us the way on which we we're made to walk. Scripture tells us in Ephesians 2:10 that, "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." God planned out our path before our feet knew how to walk along it.

But it seems as if the world in which we're caught has long had other plans for us instead.

And as God gently whispers His wise leadings into hearts that aren't taught by their surrounding societies to listen to His voice, all we know to hear is the noise of a world racing away from His grand plans and perfect promises. No, as we get old without growing up inside, we lose sight and sound of He who made us because the world wants us to be made like them instead. And the sheer amount of impact and influence this world has stolen has stolen us away from His path.

But thankfully He's never been one to simply concede defeat in response to humanity arrogantly thinking themselves His equal.

No, He just keeps whispering, waiting, wanting us to realize that it's only He who does truly want us. The cold hard truth is that this world only wants what we can give, what we have to give. And in truth, this cold hard world will take as much as we’re willing to give away. But all along, running quietly underneath all the noise is the truth which teaches us that God simply wants back what He's given us.

He doesn’t want our fame or fortunes, castles or accomplishments. No, He merely wants our hearts, our minds, our souls, our lives. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give back to God what is God's.

And friends, that’s exactly who we are and all we’ve ever had to give. We are God's children, God's creation, God's masterpiece now made maligned due the mangled mindset manifest in us by a world monumentally messed up inside misconceptions and misunderstandings. And as replicas of the fallen, so too have we fallen in line behind the rest of the blind being blindly led by those blinded themselves.

It’s so bad and so sad that all that now defines us, now that we've forgotten that it's only Christ who paid to define us as He alone hung in our place to find and refine us, is all that the world has done in opposition to Him. All that we are, all that we know, all that we know to know about all that we are has been taught to us, handed to us, forced into us by a world that demands from us complete submission to the sinful outlook shared by the scornful.

And it for that reason that we all just give up and go along. Because we're made clearly aware of the cost should we not. We will be hated, laughed at and lambasted if we refuse to lose all that He entrusted into us, all that He designed into us, all that He planned for us in order for us to fulfill all He designed for us to be. Indeed, the world makes it clear that He's not welcome, the cross so brutal for a reason:

To be a message we can't help but hear shouted by those who think power exists in volume of delivery mixed with intensity of image as opposed to the content and truth of that which is delivered.

Friends, we've learned only all the wrong lessons as we've learned that we must be like the world in order to be liked by the world. This place has sold itself as our home, as our friend, as our forever. And as we've bought those lies hook, line and sinker, turns out we've only agreed to play the sucker who has fallen for the oldest trick in the devil's playbook.

Make it look good, make it sound nice, make it feel wonderful, build it filled with deception and the hearts built by deception will come. And all of us alike have indeed bellied up to the billowing pile of blaspheme bought and sold by souls being bought and sold as if they're naught by commodities meant for consumption.

Yes, we’ve been tricked into leading a life of excess as the world sells us everything we don’t need in exchange for everything that makes us not need of the world. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? We’ve lost our souls in this search for all we’ve been taught to need in order to fill the holes left by our thinking we need something other than Christ.

Lust, greed, addiction, confusion, delusion: Such wonderful prizes presented us in exchange for the priceless we had already been given.

And what have we found in return for those souls sold? Heartbreak and haughtiness. Anger and sorrow. Regret mixed with guilt drown out by noise not loud enough to make us stop feeling the hurt caused by all these lies into which we’ve poured our hope, our trust, ourselves.

It's a strange thing to find yourself half-way through life only to realize you've only got half left to unlearn and lose the half you got wrong the first half. I don't know all the mistakes I've made as I'm still learning how to do this all better than I have. I don't know the words I've misspoken as He's still teaching me the point and purpose of Ephesians 4:29. I don’t know the opportunities which awaited behind the countless doors slammed shut by the breeze I built as I raced past them chasing something that gave me nothing.

No, I don't know what I never knew I needed to know because I thought I only needed to know what the world claimed was enough. But I do know, and now for certain, that if this world sells it, the price is the soul we carry inside. And as I'm finally growing up this long after getting older, I can now see just how hefty a cost that has been as I've been increasingly reminded the many missteps taken down the wrong path I've taken thinking it was right only because someone else said so.

This world claims and claims to believe that everything they do is fine, harmless, the road paved toward happiness. We're told from an early age that it's okay to chase your dreams, to follow your heart, to do as you please because being pleased and pleasing others is all that matters anymore. And we buy every bit because this world is the only home we know, and sadly, when we're young we don't know the dangers of trusting those only pretending to be neighbors while remaining intent on only remaining strangers.

And the sadness is that it's all led us to being estranged from our Father. Souls lost in a flood of filth and frivolity furthered by the foolishness which races along as the undertow underneath. Minds maligned by media and mediocracy into accepting only mundanity. Hearts so cold and hard they know not the beat of the song for which they were written to sing. Lives so lost that many will only ever think themselves unable to be found.

But as it's all been learned from the world, then that just it, it's all from the world. It’s not from God. He's never said we're too far gone. He's not agreed to lose the souls we've learned to lose. He has never handed His truth over to the media in order for its dispersal. No, His truth doesn't need society to agree with it or accept it. His truth is just the truth, and that truth says that He can make all things new.

And while the world thinks the cross foolishness as they understand only death possible upon it, we know of a stone rolled out of His way toward proving this world knows nothing.

Yet, for us to find the new life He’s died to live in order to give for us to live, the demand is that we decide to take Him up on this offer. But that demands that we agree to let go of all the lessons we've learned wrong that have led to these lives mislabeled and misled. Yes, He will make all things new inside of me and you, but that promise understandably requires and rests upon our willingness to let go of all we've found thinking we've found something in this world that knows nothing.

All of our lives we've lived looking to and learning from the world in which we walk. But friends, when we realize we'll not walk here forever then we ought to start looking toward where we're going and how best to get there. Heaven is a promise, but the path goes the other way from where we've been pointed, from where we’ve been heading. Time for us to turn around and burn to the ground all that's been built by the blueprints handed us by a world fanning the flames higher and higher.

The choice is easy, remain in and of the world or come out and walk away forever. We already know what we'll find should we stay. And the promise of what we're to be given if we leave this place behind makes this choice the easiest we'll ever have to make.

Granted, the follow through may be a challenge as to be a Christian in a world chasing His antithesis is indeed a daunting dilemma, but that He managed to walk away from what this place thought His end proves He can overcome whatever they throw.

And so yeah, leaving the world behind to walk against the grain toward our home above the rain may be a trial for a while, but with Him it's one we'll not face alone.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold