Day 3218 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:13 NIV

Minds wandering through misplaced priorities cannot possibly imagine how much danger is coming.

Because though it’s what He here calls us to focus on, and for good reason, He’s not only bringing grace.

Sadly we tend to see sobriety as a specialized symptom of someone selecting to stop selecting the sauce. It's considered deselecting a dependency upon drunkenness. But no, to be sober is in a sense a sort of salvation, it’s something for which we all need to strive. It's a reevaluation of repressed or recessed standards which require a return back to the senses that all manner of drunkenness is designed to dull.

And while our own particular problem with drunkenness may be due to the drink, it may too be delusion or division or dissention or just a disinterest in divine intervention. But all manner of sobriety is a soul's selecting to evaluate itself so as to then elevate itself closer to the example that it had long pretended wasn't there by which to measure.

That's a way in which we've all walked. Extensively. Exuberantly. Exclusively in fact. Each of us have known drunkenness in a great deal of different displays. If at any point any of us have in any way been at all distracted, we've then been drunk. Perhaps on love, maybe on lust, possibly on popularity, definitely on delight. Yes, we've all well-known a way that's led us away from our right minds down the wrong roads.

And from those broken beliefs and hollowed hopes we're now to turn and return to the considerations our concessions couldn't accept inside those nights spent living like the day was the enemy as our deeds would then be on display. But having hidden so much of our hope as it proved hollow to the point of hazardous, that we now have a choice is a sort of first fruits of God's grace.

What choice? To weigh whether or not we're now ready to realize that our irreverence has only led us to all that hiding we've long felt the need to do. To sit with the shame we've inadvertently sought and decide if that sort of delusion is worth a continuation of the deception that made it long seem such a delight. To for once look in the mirror and wonder what we might have seen had we not seen all that we now wish we'd have never known.

That's drunkenness my friends. It's a distraction from the fact that we're still making decisions that, as with every other decision, carries a weight and consequences from which there is no escape. It's just done in a way in which we don't waste time on things such as responsibility, reasonability, reality or irrationality. No, insobriety has inspired in us a gross lack of understanding that where we're standing is still a selection we ourselves settled upon.

In short, just because we find something to dull the senses just enough to allow for us to feel unashamed for having decided to delve into our sinful insufficiencies does not in any way render us free from the aftermath. But yet, in regard to our failing our Father in exchange for following further our futile foolishness, the here after isn't merely a headache wrapped inside a hangover.

No, should we continue to pretend we're numb to knowing better, our very souls will be all that are hanging over the hope that His grace can catch what we can't bring ourselves to stop dropping.

Because in all reality, as we talked about yesterday, all of this isn't nearly as difficult as we've decided it to be. To be holy isn't the heavy-handed expectation that we assume inside an arrogant entitlement that's left us certain that nothing much is expected of us. To revere God by fearing God isn't the fearsome follow up to falling into fellowship with the truth that came to set us free.

No, all of faith simply seems so strange because we've lived lost inside a life so drunk that we've lost every memory of whose image in which we were made. We've forgotten that we're capable of more, and that as such, we're called to more. Because to whom much is given, both much is required but so too should much be offered. And therein lies our lunacy:

God isn't asking us to do something He didn't create us to do but rather reminding us that we weren't created to the chaos in which we've chosen to unravel.

Again, this is all our choice, and though things like lust and greed and everyone's favorite gluttony are indeed rather powerful pulls, our choice to give into them are just that, our choice. Because you see, the Spirit we've been given isn't one of timidity or torpidity. No, as we're in His image, we are given traits such as power, love, and wait for it... self-discipline.

Ah yes, the age-old arch-nemesis of all of us, discipline. Be it self or social, to be disciplined is to be destroyed as far as we're concerned. It's a defamation of delight, a great affront to our efforts to enjoy our life as we see fit. To be disciplined is to shoulder a measure of responsibility of which we've convinced ourselves we're not ready. And because that is in every way a lie unacceptable, we've set out to find things that help us to accept it.

And we drink ourselves drunk on every irrationality we can reach for.

But that's what grace is for. It's a preceding generosity offered unto prodigals whom the Father always knew would walk away toward every kind of nothingness they could find. He knew before we were that we'd be what we've been. Lost, lazy, looking for lies that make both seem logical. Yes, God knows well who we are, but as unlike we He hasn't changed, He still remembers who we were made to be. And that's who He calls us to return to going forward.

Because you see, life doesn't stop just because we've stopped living it. Faith doesn't fail simply because we fail to follow it. Truth remains untested as our best attempts have thus far managed to fall well short of changing His mind. No, thankfully we're not at all powerful enough to alter God's intentions. But at the same, we are powerful enough to reconsider our own.

And whether or not we do as such is for what we'll be judged.

See, it's not just our sins that have earned for us a judgement day. It's our choices made after we're made aware of them. Do we continue them? Do we indulge a little longer? Shall we allow our lives to remain as they've been? Or, having been called to betterment by He who proved Himself above all names, do we agree to set out for that better?

We'd better. Not because it's easy but because we've done easy long enough. We've settled for stopping short long enough. We've agreed to arrogance instead of reverence for long enough. And while that cross does stand to condemn such folly, it also calls us to now follow the footsteps of the Father made Son who won back our chance to do just that.

But while we've been offered that hope, where our hope is placed is our choice alone. And sadly, the path back toward sobriety is one marked by a measure of mayhem and misery as we will inevitably find ourselves messing up from time to time. That's because once eyes are opened, can't really unsee what He's shown. We can't go back to being unaware of where we've been and just how wrong it is. We can't be unconvinced nor unconvicted of what He's called us to consider.

No, there’s just no going back even though the road ahead is going to be hard.

What we need to understand is that He's not dumb. That's our part. He doesn't have the same mental incapacities we've come to embrace. He has seen our struggle and thus knows we're pretty prone to it. Hence the grace. It's an unmerited divine assistance given to humans for their regeneration or sanctification, a virtue coming from God. Indeed, a choice chosen by God to be given to help clear the way for those who so choose to choose again the choice unchosen.

He chose us to show us that our shame doesn't have to keep us from choosing Him. Forgiven is bigger a moniker than we can imagine, which is precisely why we need to learn to believe bigger. But simply put, we can't believe at all if our minds or hearts are resolved to remain weighed down by the weight of wrongs we've wrought upon ourselves.

Which is why He calls us to put down the doubt! Let go the laxity. Surrender the shame and walk into the rain knowing that He's poured such purity upon all who come to Him needing as much as He can offer. He gives us that exact measure of mercy, just as much as we need. Just like those in the desert gathering manna every morning, those who gathered little didn't have to little nor did those who gathered much have too much.

He works all things out for the good of those who love Him, and so maybe we should become those who love Him rather than all the lusts we've loved instead.

In the end, doesn't matter if your drunkenness comes from a bottle or is found in your belly. Matters not if we've been wasted on want or worry. Mercy isn't different for the one who needs healing or the one left homeless. He is sufficient no matter our disrepair, because that's right where He will meet us when we agree we need to move on. And then, once that courage has been decided, He will then walk with us toward what He has in store for us.

Through every fire we've yet to start and every time we're still to fall apart, He will be there. Because He has promised to not stop this good work He's begun in those willing to begin again. Yes, we will basically have to start all over back at the bottom, but hey, having been drunk on depravity and despair for so long, we're already there anyway. Just now we've found the hope that gives us reason to move on.

Friends, this faith demands clear minds not clean hands. We can't offer the latter but the former we can work on. We can begin to clear away all the chaos that's defined us. We can learn to take thoughts captive and crucify them on the crosses we learn to carry. Indeed, we might just find that those crosses become the friends we always thought our sins to be because those crosses bring us freedom from the shame whereas those sins only brought us freedom to pretend we weren't ashamed.

The whole promise is that He's coming back, and where our hope is found will be about all that determines that day. It will go either immeasurably good or unimaginably bad all based upon what we did in light of His grace having been given to we who can never possibly deserve it. It's never been about deserving it as that's not what grace does. No, grace is designed to reignite hope placed where it should have been all along.

Not on the assumption that He either doesn't see all or doesn't care at all about what we've done, but instead that hope is placed again on the Son who proved a love able to overcome what we didn't know we were doing. "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Luke 23:34

But we know now, and that we do as He knows us to, we've left no reason whatsoever to reject again the gift we should understand we can't live without. It might hurt to lose what needs lost, but it will hurt far more to lose it on that day when there's no grace left to gain for those who lived refusing to accept the hope that calls us home.

The bottom line is that we don't have to stay lost looking at the struggle. No, He came that we may focus instead on the horizon and race for the Son. And He entwined sobriety inside the sanctification of salvation for that very reason: To remove what’s kept us from going so that we could get going from all of which we need to now move on toward the better that’s always been there, hidden just behind the horizon we never learned to hope for.

And there you have it, a chance to have a change in hope doesn’t merely change our lives, it saves them from what’s sunken them in that drunkenness that is depravity.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold