Day 3222 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:2 NIV

A lack of hope displays a concrete divide from He who is our peace, and yet we wonder at the distance.

Because blinded eyes can't see that it's merely a making of our many wanderings always away from the Way in which we were made and to which we're now called to return. The entirety of our time has been wantonly wasted on wanting only what wastes. And having now found all we've wanted to know of the little we've chosen to become, here at home inside this deplorable depravity of our delusionary design, we're only to come face to face with the fact that we've caused His face to turn away.

How could He continue to look, to listen, to hope? It's not that such is impossible as we're told that with Him no things are, but so too does there come a dance with destruction that carries with it a point in which an onlooker looks away so as to miss the carnage constructed within the calamity and chaos. That's by and large all we are, all we know to be. We're just creatures who have the appearance of the Father in whose image we were created, but still entirely lacking the character that defines.

No, we're more than perfectly content to continue this corrupted collapse of character's content that we've chosen. Why? I reckon for no other reason than that we've chosen it on our own. It is our own. These ways in which we walk want for all who see to agree that we are indeed all our own, creations of our own creation. And rather than accept the contempt that such has caused, we've apparently no pause to purchase the last grasp of reality from which we're rapidly falling.

Sadly, we seem to live inside this idea that it's a show God wants to see, a performance our self-perfected piety can potentially put on in which He can take pride. Yes, we've walked away from faith with arrogance held high and set off in search of religious devotion that we can only pray will atone for the tone in which we've toiled for all that's left His blood boiled.

But asinine assumption aside, no, it's not a show He wants to see but rather our soul He wants to save. He's not interested in our attempts to be something our pasts have already prevented. He's more interested in altering our hearts to where our present now proves that our future is to be wholly unlike who we've been as a result of where we've insisted upon it all going our way, which has always been just wrong.

And yet within what we've come to know of faith as exchanged for religion, we seem content to keep putting on all the religious performances. Ensure the clothes look right, Sunday bests and whatnot. Make sure He sees our hands moving during the three-song broken record that we repeat every weekend. Maybe even shed a tear during testimony time so as to show that our hearts are broken over the fact that that's all we are anymore.

But truth is that we're only selling tickets that He's not buying. We're wearing ourselves more wicked inside this assumption that our actions are all He sees. All of these rules we write and insist others adhere to are merely ideas turned ideals that prove we've no idea as to who He is nor what He loves. Perhaps it's the Old Testament sacrifices that we still assume will appease.

Christ on a cross changed that, ended that. Why do we carry it on then if not only because we can force our penance upon another, just preferably not a person? No, as we've lived liked dogs, seems we believe that much isn't needed to right us in His eyes. Just a sorry. Toss out a cheap confession in some group somewhere, yet not one heard in a change of heart with no one around.

Yeah, call on Christ, but only to ensure safety, not yet as our only hope for salvation.

No, maybe we can get there another way. Maybe we can come up with a few more rules we ourselves know we can abide by in life. Sing an extra song. Perhaps hit up a Wednesday service as a show of sincerity. Boxes, find the boxes and check them off quickly as if that's all it takes to turn His mercy back upon our messes.

But no friends, what we see in the foundational image of a cross risen and the Son embracing that disgrace is that Christ paid the cost we needed to be made right in God's eyes. We can't make that happen on our own. In fact, everything we do without it done in Jesus' name is just noise unwelcome in God's presence. It's a few more clanging cymbals chiming out a tune out of tune with His truth.

That’s truly all our lives have been thus far on the way wrong side of right. We’ve done all we’ve done before knowing of the Son without the humility or reverent respect seen in the Son. Every choice we made before the cross was a choice that cost the cost of the cross. Every wrong turn, every foul word, every wicked want and foolish follow through is what He came to overcome. We are who He came to overcome, God’s many enemies living in enmity against Him.

But it seems that even though the cross still stands for all who’ll humbly kneel, our hearts still tend toward denial of His destruction and why it was needed. Because we don’t want to admit that who we’ve been and what we’ve done is actually what caused that sacrifice to be necessary. And so we risk sadly standing outside the fire that came to refine simply because we think we’re doing fine on our own.

Yet, so long as we remain pridefully outside of Christ's sacrifice and therefore have no evidence at all in us of the change it was done to inspire in us as seen in a consuming fire collapsing every blasphemous bridge we've built to better find 'our way', we'll be lost outside of His compassion as that cross is our last gasp for grace.

Because what is it that we've actually shown Him outside of disinterest? What does He see within our day-to-day decisions and the deeds that follow them? Is He to be pleased with our hearts chasing after a million passions, all of which are all but void of Him? Do we truly believe that He's somehow impressed with us pouring our time, our energy, our hope into building yet another tower to the heavens which will only crumble leaving us broken when we fail to find Him that way again?

Babel?

Can we actually earn His mercy by living in a way, speaking in a way, thinking along all these wandering ways in which we weary ourselves wanting everything but His mercy? Fooling ourselves is all we know to do because we have nothing, can find nothing, can offer nothing that is of any use, any worth other than whatever happens to be left of the shattered souls and fragile hearts that we've yet to sell off.

But those are the last things we're willing to give, aren't they? We're fine running right up to the edge of actual requirement. We'll follow every rule that we've written to assume religion, but alas we've thus mistaken religious for righteous. And no, by no means are the two the same. We've done a great many things religiously. Folks tune in to cheer on their favorite team religiously. We patronize the same eating places religiously.

We repeat the same hollow habits religiously.

Is He pleased with our reverence to repetition? Do we honor Him by adhering to these human constructs we've created to afford us what we assume to be, hope to be, insist to be a passing replacement for praise? Is He possibly glorified by our going after all these worldly things that only help us glorify ourselves? Will He truly be amazed by our adoption of some list, however long it may be, of rules or rhetoric that revolves around an obvious irreverence of His Son?

The fact is that we've been running away from Him for so long that we don't realize we're running on empty with nothing left but a desperate need for Christ's intervention, intercession. And we show this still in some way every day in that we incessantly do things which demand that intercession. And yet, if we live in this assumption that religious performance is sufficient to overcome our sinful insufficiencies, then how dare we say we've surrendered to the Son that did just that for us?

We clamor about equality and then continue to live in a way unbecoming His coming for us. The Bible tells us that we'll answer for every wasted word we speak. "But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken." Matthew 12:36

Empty. That's what our lives have been as we've lived filling them with everything that is wrong to Him. We're hollow, helpless, hapless heathens that keep on heaping up harm for ourselves and our souls as sin remains in far too many ways a friend from which we're obviously afraid to walk away. What have we left behind? See, so much of life is about what we find, what we gain, what price we pay in exchange for getting whatever we believe worth that cost.

What has our hope cost? What price have we paid for His promise? What sacrifice have we made now that we know of His?

He didn't do any of all He did without reason meant for, made for all of us. He atoned for every empty word, every misplaced step taken along every wrong path, every crooked idea cooked up in our corrupted minds. He carried it all and then literally gave it all so that we might follow, just like we're called to.

Do we still not get that? We're called to follow Him, and He's not just talking about being nice, washing feet, giving to the poor. He died, and so part of us should as well. Like the parts that have caused His misery. The parts of our lives that have demanded His demise. The parts of these paths we've paved that have only led us away from Him and left us so lost that we stopped looking for Him.

We've done so many things that are so wrong that He doesn't want to see our show anymore. We've said so many falsehoods and fallacies that He's not interested in hearing what we've left to say. Why should He be? Crying wolf. Call out an apology enough times and the Forgiver must start to wonder why sorry is supposed to suffice when actions don't follow suit.

Are we calling His bluff or just simply ignorant of intercession and why it exists?

Christ died that God might see us through Him, a kind of love that lays down itself for something good. Because we've not shown Him that. No, all God has seen in us is an insatiable insistence that we're gods ourselves. Arrogance and avoidance. Hatred and hollowness. Denial and depravity, denial of depravity. What do we expect Him to want to look at anymore? We live like we're entitled to Him hearing our prayers and then giving us everything we want.

We don't deserve anything but death, and until we understand that, we'll be standing apart from the only One who offered the close the gap we've created between here and home.

To assume that we can please God, impress God with anything we do is an idea that must discount all we've already done. He knows that part too though, and that's the problem. He knows who we are, sees all we do, hears all we say. But if we can't agree that all of that is very bad news for us as we've done nothing, said nothing, been nothing anywhere close to anything good, then how can we ever ensure our salvation?

How can we praise Him if we don't appreciate His intercession? How can we honor Him is our words and actions don't insist on it? We can't because outside of Christ all we will ever be are abhorrent sinners who show Him nothing but an irreverence for all He is and all He's done. Jesus is our only chance because He is everything we can't be. Perfect. Spotless. Selfless. Righteous.

No, our best hope is that seen in Abraham in that we delve so deeply into this faith that we follow wherever He leads to do whatever He asks knowing that our complete and utter surrender to His will is all that can be counted to us as the righteousness He requires. And we can only do that when we realize that we've simply never done anything else right enough to be considered the righteousness He deserves.

Friends, we are separated from God because our sins insist upon it. But we don't have to stay apart as He invites us to redemption, but choices have to change on this new side of mercy. If we accept Him, He will come and retake the throne of our lives. We just have to get off of it first. And that is the sacrifice He deserves.

Because it's the only thing we can show Him that will show Him that we finally understand just where we stand and just hopeless it is without Him in the middle.

Every sin was our choice to choose something other than God in that moment, and even just one renders for us a guilty verdict with a sentence of suffering. Christ did what needed to be done to change who we’ve been back into who He made us to be. But we have to understand just how different those two really are. Night and day doesn’t even come close.

No, there should be nothing left of all we’ve been on this side of His forgiveness. Because all we been is everything that made that forgiveness so expensive that He had to die to achieve it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold