Day 3234 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:22 NIV

The unoriginality of this way we've made as marked by minutes and moments accomplishes little more than an odd expectancy of something novel around every corner.

And yet when that new never comes in the measures upon which we allow our sense of entitlement to insist, we tend to find ourselves otherwise displeased with where we are in life as it's both not where we'd like to be as well as pretty much still where we've always been. Indeed, there's a radical mundanity to all of this that we've gone so far as to even originate holidays in order to somehow stifle.

Like New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, this great door that allows our hopes to swing into a freshly undisturbed calendar whilst simultaneously slamming shut the dissatisfactions of the past twelve months of mistakes made now into memories. Because be them good or bad, that is pretty much all that's left to rehash of the past, just reminders of things now over.

And too, no matter how prosperous or miserable the past year may have been, there's always a strange hope that with the new comes something new.

But the problem in all that wishful thinking is that wishes get us nowhere. Daydreaming of ideals investigates only these many inklings we have of things we'd like to change, but perhaps not yet. No, save it for the holiday. Make these positive movements manifest in the new calendar year so that it might start off better than the past year this present day is bringing to a close. Plan on a better path toward our own imagined ideal of perfection, a sort of plan we ought to be able to follow as we’re the ones who made it.

Resolutions, a revitalizing revolution revolved around realizing that radical transformations are really needed, but best saved for up ahead. A stern insistence upon improvement, just in a moment. Hold on one more day before letting go the chains that to loose or lose today would somehow apparently seem silly. Yes, wait to make the changes of which we've the chance to choose until they're made in a new year that will help such newness seem the victory that the old failed to bring.

I don't get it. It hit me first thing this morning as I awoke to this final day of 2023. 2,023 years having now come and gone between Christ's coming to leave with us such an impossible opportunity at mercy that surely we should have understood it by now. I mean, what are we waiting for? Will 2024 be the year we finally get the picture? Or is it to be just another portrait painted by plans we've painstakingly put off so as to not offend our preference of immobility today?

We live our lives in so many ways one day , one week, one year at a time. I'll ensure that what's still ahead is the best there is. But by the time this time of the year rolls around next December, we'll set down to rewrite all the ideas we failed to act upon in the year to come. Why? Because through it all, we've missed most mistakenly the freedom found in the salvation Christ achieved.

Missed it.

It's hidden behind everything anymore. From the cell phones we resolve to stop eating away our attention to the TV shows that have clearly gained an unreasonable divide of our devotion to the relationships that we want to have or those we can't wait to leave, it's all just this incessant discontentment. Because deep down inside we know time is running out and that we're not at all good with the directions we've gone.

And so it's not that resolutions are bad nor that making changes is unnecessary, just that we're a people who trade one misplaced expectation for another. We're so very much this people still in search of greener pastures beyond every boundary we've set up for ourselves! It's always greener somewhere else. The next year will be so perfect that the past won't be heard from anymore.

Yes, in the days and weeks ahead as we rush into the newest new we've known with this raging resolution to resolve all our issues, we'll finally find the way to free ourselves from the mistakes we've made and the unhappiness that they've instilled inside these hearts that have come to rely on tomorrow always being the day that we've been aching to help us find peace again.

Missed it.

Because life's meaning isn't in what we make of it. Thankfully! Our time here isn't made for us to count our time here. And yet we do. We measure our lives in so many ways, all of which are supposed to help gauge success and thereby ensure growth. But we're now so lost in the numbers that we're all but numb to the simplicity of simply living in freedom.

We don't have to make resolutions that are saved for tomorrow. If you feel the need to change something, do it! We don't have to sit around and evaluate the potential reasons for the unhappiness or unhealthiness of our lives. If you're not good where you are as who you are, that's a perfect sign to start moving! We needn't make an itinerary toward improvement as if we're the ones who can find it.

WE CAN'T!!!

That's why the cross. We can't fix what we've done. We can't find inside ourselves a sternness to undertake all that we seriously need to understand. Neither wisdom nor courage nor sobriety nor weight loss nor the resolve to realize them are to be found in us. All manner and medium of improvement and growth are inspired by this relentless voice that speaks up from amidst our complacency to remind us endlessly that we were made for more than we've settled for.

So resolutions are great, but why wait? Changes are needed in a greater frequency then we tend to agree. We've each so much room for so much hope that every single day should feel like both Christmas morning and New Year's Day rolled into one amazing opportunity filled with the encouragement to make improvement and the blessing of a couple more hours to finally start trying.

But alas such hopeful outlooks come but once a year as we're still very much enslaved to so many things that we can't dare bring ourselves to see. So many ideas and social constructs have constructed in us this ongoing sense of expectation that does nothing but point out where we're falling short and thus need to be ashamed. But we just keep playing along assuming that there's eventually bound to come some sort of success if we do.

Yet how can any feeling of truly hopeful, let alone meaningful, success come inside a way of life that is so lost trying to perfect this life that we’ve no time nor interest in caring about the free gift of eternal life? Can you see the insanity in this yet? That God has freed us from who we’ve been and in doing so has given our lives a singular purpose that effortlessly makes our every prior plan seem the stupidity it always was while too giving us an endless resolve found upon and fixed within the promise of forever should we stop being distracted by all that’s temporary.

You want to get really weird with your resolutions? Look beyond this life! Think about the grave and what all you need to bury so it no longer keeps you dead in this life He redeemed. Sit down and study yourself with such a disdain for mediocrity that you find nothing of yourself in which to take pride. Yes, make a resolution to stop allowing life to revolve around you and what you want and what you hate and what you feel as though you should do because of it all.

That's not merely an interesting resolution to boast about before all your friends. No, that's a revolution that will afford for you a freedom that none of us could possibly know any other way.

Because He died for freedom, in the full. Life in the full. Faith so filled with so little of us that to waste our time thinking about how to improve ourselves so we feel better about who we are seems a complete loss of opportunity to serve the Name that was, is and will always be above all we've tried to think we could ever possibly, plausibly make of our own.

We should be free from such standardized expectations and popular misapplications. We should be free from feeling this obligation to come up with something to tell someone else about what we aim to do to make our lives seem better to those who likewise have only eyes focused on the mirror. We should be free from always looking at ourselves through this vanity that assumes we're our own makers who can now make ourselves something better than we've been.

Sure, we can come up with some changes that we'd like to make, maybe if we're so bold to be honest even some we need to make. But without the grace of God and the tenacious determination that He alone can provide, we'll be nothing more than the mistakes we've made with this endlessly hopeful outlook that somehow we can be the ones who save the day even though we're the ones who chose the mistakes that made the past something from which we cannot wait to move.

If we're the ones who picked the paths that made the past so pathetic that we eagerly await every December 31st to map out all the new routes to the perfection we didn't find, what makes us so sure we'll be the ones who find it up ahead?

It's madness. This is one of our own versions of chasing after the wind. And please understand that I'm in no way against resolving to make things better, to make healthier decisions, to evaluate poor choices so that we all might come to our senses and start making far better selections. But we need to stop waiting to plan it all around a calendar change.

God didn't wait for some special day with a nifty sounding number in order to call Lot out of Sodom. He didn't hold off inspiring Noah to build the Ark until the seventh Thursday of October, as had He done do, Noah wouldn't have made it because there is no seventh Thursday of any month we've made by ourselves. He didn't aim for New Year's Day as the day when Christ would walk out of that tomb securing forever our chance at a new life.

He just did it. Had an idea and acted. Saw that we His people were, are, will be forever if left up to ourselves and our plans and our ideas, in need of being set free from slavery. So He came. He fixed the problem. No waiting. No planning. No nothing. He just did, just does, just will if we will allow Him to be the One that leads the way.

All this stuff we keep coming up with in order to inspire ourselves is just us leaning on ourselves for the inspiration we can't care less about the rest of the year. See what I'm saying? Why are we waiting for hope? Why are trying to plan for peace? What has us so willing to want for better without the fortitude to take it today?

That's the freedom we have from God, to take hold of this day, this one right here, as the gift it is and use it for something bigger and better than the many we've wasted upon ourselves in the past. But in order for us to do that, we have to embrace this impossible understanding that we can't do it alone. We can't be our own leaders as all we'll ever know the way to is being lost.

But if we trade off all the enslavements we've chosen to all these ideas we've created and allow for once our Creator to be the only One to whom we're enslaved, we will find a freedom that finally finds foolish all that is done by those who are perishing inside their false fabrications of freedom to do as they see fit, a freedom that finds them only always wishing for changes that they simply don't want to actually have to make.

We don't want to change. We don't want to let things go. We don't want to leave bad relationships because to be lonely would probably feel worse. We don't want to lose weight because working out gets us all sweaty and we can't eat as much as we're used to. We don't want to stop drinking because we've still left a couple of emotions that aren't quite dead yet.

No, we're so happy to stay the same today as we were yesterday that our way of life echoes the complaints of those who, having literally just seen what God did to the Egyptians at the Red Sea, still longed to return to Egypt!

I didn't mean to finish this year trying to burst anyone's bubble, but honestly, all we've ever truly managed to accomplish by ourselves is to make of ourselves this sort of twisted mix of insanity and laziness that knows we can do better but also knows of a dozen reasons why we shouldn't. And simply put, that's exactly why nothing will change until God is allowed to be the One sitting on the throne of our lives.

The only One.

Friends, if you're one that's all about New Year's Resolutions, good for you. Honestly. I mean that with all my heart as I truly do believe that all of us should constantly be seeking ways in which we need to grow and change and improve. I do. But please understand that without God being the main foundation of anything we do, the house will fall. No plans we make no matter of how perfect they may sound will matter if anything we do is done without the Son.

That's my hope for everyone on this earth as we move into whatever you think of tomorrow while leaving behind whatever you may think of today and however you may feel about the past year. It's that we break this chain that we've forged upon ourselves and instead tie our hearts, our minds, our lives, our plans, our preferences, our opinions, our dreams and desires and demands all upon God being God and us being nothing more than His messengers.

Because that alone is the only way we can ever find our way to the will He alone has for our lives. And it's also the only way that we could ever find the promise of this life not being ours to either save or lose but just a drop in the ocean that is eternity.

Please don't follow your plans into next year. Follow Jesus and let Him handle the path.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold