Day 3225 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 9:2 NIV

It's hard to reconcile our efforts unto religious devotion as darkness, but in truth, all that keeps an attention turned away from Christ is indeed just that.

Because He is the light, and as the only One shining so high as for all to see His love laid out upon our many crosses, should we continue to approach faith as if it's something we can factor, figure or formulate, we'll only find that we're forever distracted from the design He already set inside that stone rolled away. Indeed, every attempt to lessen the death demanded is nothing short of a sin, as sin is missing Him in the moment.

But again, we don't see it as such. I mean, religion is supposed to be this outline that lays out the path upon which we can walk to ensure that we're heading toward where we want to be. It's a roadmap filled with mile markers that make for us an ongoing and measurable certainty as to where we are along the way. And so what could possibly be, go wrong with these many checkpoint rules that afford us a measure of our sanctification's status?

We don't need them, at least not if we made them.

You see, rules are meant for the rule breakers. Laws are an attempt to quell lawlessness. And so is salvation saved for those who need saving. But when we set our sights and souls upon this assumption that rules will suffice instead of surrender and sacrifice, we're only allowing ourselves to have a say. Yet as those in the wrong, what grounds have we to say we've any idea as to what is right?

No, all that belief can become is a deeper measure of the darkness we're already in.

Because it keeps us looking away from the light trying to instead find a way that we can do right while still lost in the dark. No, our efforts given unto designing religion require we be the ones who determine what’s right, which is quite impossible when all we've done thus far has been proven so fatally wrong that Christ Himself had to bear the weight knowing that should we be the ones left to shoulder it, to survive would be the last thing we could ever achieve.

Fact is that our sins will crush us, and having known that as He made sure we would, so too do we know now that something must be done, changed, added in order to stave off the suffering we've bought.

But rather than agreeing to the guilt that comes in seeing Christ take our punishment for us, no, we've set out to write a way which affords us the ability to say we had no part in it. Rather than admitting it was our fallen choices that cost Him that cross, we've given our efforts over to working on religions that show us the saints our sins say we could never be. Because we don't want to be who we've become. But nor do we want to walk away.

It’s this endless ebb of flow of hope mixed with heresy as that described in Paul’s confession of such insanity found in Romans 7:15. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” It’s a heaviness that weighs a soul so low that the darkness of ideas born inside misconceptions becomes the only surrounding we notice. Yes, having been so lost so long, we simply don’t know which end is up nor how to right any of the wrongs we know are wrong yet still sometimes think okay.

And thus the light which pierces our penchant for preferential proclivity poised upon this position of our assumption that though He said there exists but one way to the Father, surely there's a plan B for all who fall short of that other He speaks of being the necessity.

What's sad is that He made all of this clear in Scripture; that it's not on us to find the way as our way has long shown a gross inability to consider anything outside ourselves. And therein lies the problem, having been stuck so long inside ourselves, we assume salvation lies within as well. Because we're used to being the ones who find the way, who find the will, who want the win and do whatever it takes to hoist it high.

But having fallen so low into these sins now friends, and a darkness surrounding that stops all chance of our selfish satisfactions proving actually satisfying, it matters not what we win, what we lose, what we have, what we hold, how high it's held nor how hard we hold it. Ephesians 4:18.

"They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts."

Sin has left us certain of everything that is not God nor found within His will for us. It’s led us so long along paths so wrong that all that is truly right in His light is seen as foolishness to we who are perishing without the courage the stop the bleeding and reach for life beyond the darkness of this death we’ve always known inside the sins that have always led the way back into the shadows.

So you see, as our Savior said Himself, "for they know not what they do." We've no idea what we're doing because all we do is done from this understanding that we can do something that means something despite a past that proves that all we can do is done wrong. All we know is wrong. All we are is wrong. All we do, all we know to do is wrong. Because again, sin is a friend and bad company has corrupted whatever character we think we may have once had.

It's gone.

Which is why He says in Mark 7 verse 20 that “What comes out of a person is what defiles them." Here Jesus is locked in this battle of wits with those so witless as to assume their religious piety will prove the Savior mistaken. Pharisees and their hypocrisies, our hypocrisies. We are they and they still us in that we've partaken of their leaven inside these rules we've held to so tightly that we can't see that the Son of salvation from our sins has come to set us free.

No, we see but the rules, the requirements, the right ideas we've assumed right for so long that to go against them, to walk from them would be wrong. And now that these rules we adore have taken up residence in hearts so hard as to harm the hope of Heaven, for us to think that something we come up with can prove us absolved of all wrongdoing is doing nothing but keeping us so lost in the darkness of misplaced devotion that we think ourselves right in His sight.

But there's one problem with that idea, this idea that our religion is so sufficient as to be acceptable in God's eyes:

"I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps." Amos 5:21-23

It's not the songs we play nor how many times we repeat the chorus. It isn't the clothes we wear nor how impressive they look. We don't please Him with our offerings of things we can do without. We won't win Him over with rules written from ideas that are found next to those that have left us with no idea of what we're doing. Even David got this.

"You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise." Psalm 51:16-17

Described as a man after God's heart, safe to say we've plenty to learn in that the only thing pleasing to God is heart so broken that it begs He be the One to keep it beating. Be my breath or bring my death. Him or nothing because we've nothing without Him. We are nothing without Him. And as nothing but the sinners we are, darkness is all we've known. And as darkness is all we've known, how dare we think we can write a rule that will lead us into the light?

No, doesn't work that way. Can't work that way. Blind leading the blind, us leading ourselves, foolishness following folly can only fall further. And so we need another to light the way, and honestly, who better than the Light who is the Way?

We read over in Acts 26 the shifting of Saul to Paul and the point of the change. See, Jesus appears to Saul in the midst of his latest religious persecution of those not of his religion. Stops him, blinds him, binds him to a radical transformation. Why? Because He has a new direction for Saul to go, so different that the old name he always knew wouldn't do any longer.

"To open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me."

How is it that forgiveness of sins is received? How does one go from the darkness we know to the light we don't? Where is this path to be found that leads us, frees us from this enslavement to Satan to living as servants of God? "By faith in me." Not in a list of rules. Not in some elaborate religious procession. Not seen in some fancy looking clothes or heard in smooth sounding rhetoric.

No, God's always had this thing against too much leaven. Started in Egypt, was used as a warning against what the Pharisees were getting so wrong as to miss the Son, and yes, His instruction indeed still stands even for us today. We need not religion as it's merely human ideas that come from inside a humanity so lost inside inhumanity that immorality is mostly unseen. We can't see the way when our ideas are allowed along the journey.

We can never, will never find salvation nor the sanctification which corresponds in any place, any idea, anyone other than where Jesus Himself said it to be. “Faith in me.”

That's why the transference from death to life, dark to light. We've so much to let go that the only real way to do it successfully, fully, is to simply join Him in that tomb and pray He can still roll the stones we deserve to have stuck sealing our fate forever.

Thankfully a light has dawned, something we celebrate inside this holiday which is coming, an opportunity every year around this time. Christmas. A star shining brightly in the middle of the night, middle of nowhere. Seen by only those looking for it, waiting for it, excited for it. But it wasn't the Pharisees who went running to greet this gift. He wasn't found in the elaborately rich dwelling of a king. He was turned away by those who had no room and grew up to be denied by those who still couldn't clear a spot in their hearts.

Too much darkness inside. Too many rules in the way. Too much of ourselves assuming we can do this without Him. "Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil." Proverbs 3:7

For so long we've missed the Savior for sake of selfishness. We've gotten ourselves lost inside the forests of foolishness so entangled within our own efforts that we didn't see the walls closing in around us. Indeed, we've done so much to gain so little that it's only left us even more lost. All because we keep letting things we think of get in the way.

Friends, He doesn't need our help. We can't polish the Commandments. We can’t erase some of the lashes from His experience here. No, our attempts to follow rules and requirements we assume will be pleasing to Him only keep us from the humility that is actually pleasing to Him. Because it's that humility that precedes faith. Can't truly believe in all Christ is if we think we can come up with something close.

And now's the time to stop pretending that that's not exactly what we've been doing.

We've been trying to live a life that's worthy of life simply because we can tell Him how good we did at following the rules we came up with. He hates our rules as He just wants our hearts. Now we can keep trying to make this complicated all so we can claim we did it well. Or we can admit we've done nothing good and seek shelter in the Son He sent.

What do you think is more pleasing to God? Hiding ourselves in His Son, or hiding our sins behind a bunch of ideas that say we didn't commit them?

Fact of this matter is that His mercy is found only by hearts so done with sin that they ache to leave behind the life it left them living. And because He knew a few might someday find that feeling, afraid and failing, He sent the Light that is the Christ to shine hope into the holes we’ve dug inside ourselves seeking what was never there. His light has dawned in our darkness.

All that’s left is to turn and run, not back into what we know nor think we can come up with, but toward the Savior who doesn’t ask us to figure it out but instead to simply trust that He already has.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold