Day 3237 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Exodus 20:2-3 NIV

The singularity of our Savior and the sacrifice within which He secured our salvation shows the severity of an undiluted devotion.

Because within His one choice to selflessly endure that one act was accomplished for all the opportunity to witness the love of our one Father who chose said mission, a message, a meaning meant to make in us an awareness of just how far we'd fallen as well as just how far He went, how far He came to lead us back to the beauty of the radical simplicity of a relationship founded in and fostered by a faith no longer in ourselves.

But that's the very definition of life as we seem so clearly to have chosen it. It's this outlook that looks out only for our selfish glory. This idea that we're here to make something of ourselves, a feat accomplished only in making something for ourselves, by ourselves, seeking the ingredients to such vanity obviously within ourselves. Yes, we ourselves have become gods unto ourselves.

Thus the need to turn and seek again the senses that had to have been sacrificed in order for such foolishness to be possible.

Because in truth, there is nothing we've done, nothing we've found, nothing we've made nor nothing we've become that is in any way worth our lofty opinions of ourselves. Nothing. We've created nothing, accomplished nothing, achieved nothing, become nothing. Because whatever we have said or done or thought or found was only realized because God granted us both that opportunity as well as that result.

We are nothing in and of ourselves as within us there isn't found the ability to create ourselves. No, I'm afraid that reality is far contrary to that belief. We live as if we either have or can soon make something of ourselves, but no, no as our pasts have eternally proven, seems all we can do is destroy ourselves.

And we are very good at it at that!

So good at breaking ourselves apart searching for something we simply aren't that we've made a life out of that outcome. We've created this obliviousness to our weaknesses that is indeed the only way that we can actually think ourselves what we think of ourselves. We can only see all these lies in the mirror telling us, convincing us that we're everything we aren't because the truth in which we were made was forgotten and forfeited long ago.

Indeed, our downfall was found long before you or I grew into this current dishevelment which is but a foolishness that took over the reins to these reigns upon these egotistical thrones from those who taught us how to sit upon them by living as if God isn't there but rather simply an idea meant of our making of ourselves into whatever our arrogant entitlement has us trying to be. Yes, we've been told, taught, led into near certainty that the only true divinity in our lives is this ideal life which we feel ourselves alone are capable of both defining and finding.

And ever since we first heard such a story filled with all our glory, we've looked high and low, long and hard to find all the materials which would afford for us this masquerade of majesty behind which we must hide daily the defeats and disappointments that have always come and will always remain inevitable within this assumption that we know what we're doing and that we can therefore do it well.

Because the undeniable and yet endlessly disputed fact is that no my friends, if we truly see ourselves as gods, then we know nothing and will therefore never manage to accomplish anything of any worth as that very idea telling us that we are the only judge to whom we'll answer is alone enough to cause in us an unending divide spent apart from the only reason we have these lives and the only hope we have of not irreparably destroying them inside an eternity spent getting everything we’ve been asking for from the Father we can only pretend isn’t listening.

But He is! Always has. Scripture defines that He’s seen our every deed, heard our every word, known our every doubt and paid for our every moment spent finding out the hard way that our way was, is and can only ever be only always worthless. In fact, He knows us so well that He died to help us know ourselves, or more specifically what we’ve mistakenly made of ourselves unto what is, or perhaps was, our glory which demanded a rather gory turn to this story we had spent years trying to write just right.

And yet that’s just what was needed in order for us to finally find that what we’ve always needed is something outside of ourselves if we’re to ever live beyond these lives we lived by ourselves, for ourselves, mostly of ourselves as we ourselves have always only shown that we’re the only ones we care to consider, acknowledge, revere or value.

Therefore the beauty of the Gospel is that salvation from the selfishness made manifest in our sinfulness is in fact offered unto all as all in fact need it most dearly. But the weight of the Gospel is that until we embrace the work done by another in choosing for us to deny Himself, to destroy Himself, nothing we do can or will ever matter. As all we set out to become is simply an idea born of ourselves, reliant upon ourselves, and so certain of ourselves that we'd never entertain the input of our Father.

Just like we’ve always done up until the cross came as a crossroads calling us to consider a change that we can’t really deny we need anymore.

Because within that path spent pursuing anything and everything that allowed us a furthered measure of assuming ourselves gods, upon which we've all wandered away from the Way that is the Life, all we've found is ourselves having built kingdoms made of broken ideals, all slammed together inside this assumption that we had either the right or the ability to actually build something that God Himself didn't design or ordain.

And the only fact to be found at the end of that effort is that we've made ourselves a mockery of that perfect image in which we were made. Because it's only from that image that we've fallen in all this effort to make something we feel will find us something better in the end.

But the question is, what better are we assuming we're capable of accomplishing or becoming? How do we suppose, propose to improve upon the flawless? What is it that we can craft or create with such certainty that it bridges the battle scars our pasts and their many sins have left behind? What is there within our better intentions that is truly better than God's creation? What is there here that we’ve made by ourselves or of ourselves that is in any way an improvement upon the perfect image in which we were made?

Can we truly make something that can accomplish what God already did? Can we turn to silver or gold and find within them the materials to make life as we’ve the opportunity to live it? Does breath exist in bank accounts? Is there truly eternal worth in worldly possessions? Does it seem in any way wise to hold something in our hands and assume that our hands came from it?

Did we learn nothing from the Golden Calf?

Because the fact of the matter is that we're doing nothing but fooling ourselves, making fools of ourselves if we truly believe that we can better what He began. Because honestly, if His path and His plan were of such beauty that He died to rebuild all we've broken, can we dare say the same about our selfish undertakings? Would we readily die for what we're trying to do? Would any of us lay down his or her life for something we’ve made out of earth or sand?

Do we see enough worth in the workings of our hands that we’d lay down our lives knowing well that nothing we’ve made could live or breathe or be on its own as there is no life found within the lifeless undertakings we’ve forfeited a large portion of our lives trying to bring to life? Do we even have the courage to admit that we’ve wasted our lives on all that’s only dead or able to bring death in the form of an attention aimed into on unto all that isn’t the Giver of life?

Or is it rather that all we're doing is nothing more than that we're just trying to do everything that might keep us from facing the fact that we are in fact dying, and thus on a collision course back to the Father we've only failed to honor?

And if we are headed back to the beginning, is what we've been building truly enough to cover the cost we've incurred in this way that's only left us wronging He who started all this? And if we have done anything against He who gave us His image, offered us His Name, brought us a new beginning, bought for us the forgiveness needed to let us begin again, will He then somehow be impressed with anything we've done if any of it was done without reverence of all He already did?

Or again, are we just setting ourselves up for failure upon the ivory towers that we believe are better the streets of gold that await beyond gates of pearl?

See, we've been told plainly that there's found but one way to and through that promised inevitability. There's one road, one path, one gate through which we must go if we're to be where we've lost the welcome to come. And it's narrow. There is no room for our ideas. No room for our intentions. It isn't wide enough for our wants, nor can our wishes try to come along either.

This way is so thin that but a single row of footsteps can follow it. Perhaps they should be those of the only One who died to show He is the Way?

And if we're to follow Him as He's long asked us simply, a command seen here in His trying to get through to those He just broke free from their enslavement in Egypt, such can only be done when He is the only One in whom we trust. There can be no other, not if we're to end at the promise He began upon our place upon our cross chosen to pay our cost in order to save our souls from what we'd made of ourselves.

But still, this fact demands clearly that we now come to deny ourselves. This is what He proved the cost to be, is it not? Because I mean, if we can't be the one who save ourselves, as seen in His saying that no one goes to the Father except through He who bore our death, then it's safe to say we need now to learn to stop leaning on ourselves. Stop looking out for ourselves. Stop serving ourselves. Stop even considering ourselves. No, having seen what our way required to once more be made right, how dare we go forward as if we can somehow be enough?

We aren't, we can't, we won't. Problem is we'll still try. Because we think we can. And there's the part that needs to die if we're ever to hope to live again.

Because we’ve had not only another god before Him, we’ve had every other god before Him. We’ve chosen every idol before Him. We’ve tried every idea we’ve idolized before His. We’ve done all we could to be all He is all so that we wouldn’t need Him to be all He’s been. Our entire lives have been lived as if life is something of our own doing, an undoing of all He’s done to bring about the fact we’re here able to do anything whatsoever!

We’ve had every god we could imagine, insist upon, choose to craft or try and create all this time all because all we’ve done demands we agree that none of it should have ever even been considered, but that not only have we considered it, we’ve served it. We’ve worshipped it. We’ve loved everything we’ve made, everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve been, which all only means that we’ve been denying God the worship He’s worth because we’ve been giving it to everything and everyone else instead.

But can we do it? Knowing now how wrong we’ve been, can we do it? Can we make this change? Can we agree to this cost? Can we lose what all we've already lost and embrace the chance to change our ways so that our ways are no longer of any worth in our eyes? Can we break away from all we've become and set our sights now upon being nothing more than His daughters and sons? Can we possibly agree that what He did on the cross was worth our surrender too?

And if we can, as we can and truly should, might we then come to see that we can't then be gods ourselves?

Indeed, what if we could be so bold as to turn from what we've built and return to the One who bestowed upon us the beautiful blessing that is just to be? A brash and bright burning of every bridge in which we've come to boast so that we might not make it back to this place where all we want is a trip back to the beginning, back to the peace we've only found that we've lost?

Because therein lies the heartbreaking reality of this way of life we’ve been building. We’ve surrounded ourselves with skyscrapers and success stories that have become to us seemingly undoubtable proof of our glory, and yet there always seems this inescapable realization that it isn’t enough. Because we keep building. We keep trying. We keep looking for other ideas, other idols, other ideals in which we begin believe as the next hope that eventually becomes the next god before which we bow.

How much longer will we continue getting this so very wrong? As we talked about yesterday, He made all of this rather simple. We shall have no other gods before Him. Yet what seems to keep it so complicated is that we’ve so many gods that we don’t even know what to begin getting rid of in order to find our way back toward any semblance of His simplicity.

From our material possessions to the dreams we have and the ideas they inspire, our lives are filled with a great many things asking for our devotion. But all of them share one thing in common: They’re not God. And that’s why we need to stop living like that are, but the only way to do that is found inside a selflessness that is all but impossible for us to find.

Thankfully, God isn’t limited by what we think we know to be impossible. Because while to be selfless is something we clearly can’t be, the cross proved it’s what He’s always been. And that’s why He needs to lead the way, because He alone knows the path paved with the sort of surrender that holds God alone as the lone priority He always should have been.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold