Day 3263 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 9:16 NIV

Salvation by success.

It's an assumption found within all of us so lost we think ourselves able to personally procure our own promise of perpetual peace. An idea, a selfish inclination of sorts, a guess in all honesty, thinking that we who've thus far agreed to lose all that's left us lost might somehow turn the tides of our minds into where we now become the finders of a faith we've so far failed to find.

Insanity as an ideology leaves ideally a people bound to ideas of their own invention.

That's what faith has long been to most, all in some way. It's this investigation into belief, a sort of searching for what we can find. But therein lies the struggle. It's impossible for us to find what's been long considered a failure. Once we’ve decided that faith is foolishness, it takes a miracle to unwind that mistake. We can't make changes that big all on our own. Can't go from persecutors of grace one day to being prisoners of said grace the next.

But it just so happens that we know a guy.

Yet do we? I mean, we’ve been told of such a hope. We’ve heard the Name of such a miracle. Plenty of people post quotes from this really old book that talks about this sort of impossible life change, life-saving change in fact. But the dilemma comes in that it’s a choice we’ve not chosen before. It asks a humility we’ve not wanted to know before.

In fact, His path is one paved entirely away from all we’ve always wanted.

But you see, that's the entirety of every hope we might hope to have. It's found in whether or not we know Christ as He alone can invoke the kind of change needed to flip hearts back to beating again. Only Jesus can inspire in us a willingness to alter so much of us that who we are is not at all who we've always been. Saul to Paul.

But still it seems that many of us have missed our Damascus.

We've not yet stumbled upon that road in which we're so blinded by His light that our blindness even runs and hides. We haven't allowed ourselves to live a faith that offers us the opportunity to simply be so utterly reliant upon God that we don't even try to take a step without asking first if it's the right foot with which to lead down a path we don't dare to pick as our pasts prove now that our choices are not worth trusting anymore.

No, we don’t even agree to breathe until we ask Him to remind us how.

And yet we're clearly not quite there. Perhaps not even at all anywhere close. It seems that for most faith remains a burden, a blindfold, some sort of billowing building asking us assumedly to keep building where we're going as if we've any idea. We don't. Never did. Proven in every single past that's ever been lived.

We haven't the foggiest as to where we're going, what we're doing, how to make it, what we're making, if we can make it, or how to go about it. It's all so entirely outside of our ability and understanding that we shouldn't dare even attempt this lowering of His design into our comprehension. We shouldn't keep trying to build bigger boxes into which we hope He will finally fit.

He won't. We can't imagine big enough. We can't work wide enough. Our minds are simply incapable of encompassing all that He's beginning, doing, ending and promising. We can't make it to even a glimpse of understanding.

So how then are we to accept this idea that salvation is based upon success?

Is not such merely another vanity? Another attempt on our part to play a role we should know we're unable to perform? Can we truly look at the cross and still come up with ideas as to equal the outcome? Knowing of the scars He wears, need we still live this life to wear ourselves out assuming we can make it up to Him via these little personal prizes our prides try to prioritize?

Rather, is not living in any way still focused on anything we can do or try or change or imagine not only an undermining of His far grander design?

See, I get the gist, I assume we all do as it's something we all do. We're a people so half-heartedly hearty that we think we can beat the odds. It's just this doctrine of dilution into which we've grown indoctrinated down here. A thinking that it's all on us to prove ourselves, to provide for ourselves, to take pride in ourselves, to profit of ourselves, to perhaps even prevent for ourselves what we've already earned for ourselves.

But that's the problem. It's always been our ideas and efforts that have achieved for us the greatest fall from intelligence that has ever happened. It’s our efforts undertaken alone that have built a blindness unable to see the necessity of His leading the way. It’s our understandings that have left us standing in the rain angry that we’re wet, unable to realize that it’s been sent to wash away what we’ve become.

You see, when Adam and Eve took that fruit, they passed down to every offspring a wider breadth of knowledge than any of us were meant to have. Now granted, such is something they shouldn't have started as God asked them only to not do what they did. But still they did it anyway, and because they did, well, here we are.

We're a people born into the sin of knowing more than we ever needed to. In true simplicity, all we ever needed to know was that God is God, that God is good, and well, that pretty much concludes the lesson. Pride wanted more. And so, being the obliging God He's always been, more has thus been given.

But to whom more is given, yep, more is thus required. Paraphrased, but you can see the actual over in Luke 12:48 if you're so inclined.

And so since we've each been born here into this chosen knowledge plucked from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we've left nothing by which to prove we didn't know. We've known every time. Every sin. Every choice has been just that, a choice. And the damnable reality of our choices is that we've both been the only ones to have made every single one of them, but too, that every single one of them could have been done differently.

But we didn't. Despite an awareness of the difference, we've all chosen evil over good to infinity. Yes, so many mistakes we cannot count them all as we still can’t quite allow ourselves to see them. What sort of stupidity assumes then we'll suddenly just manage to get everything right enough to be right enough in the sight of the One who we've wronged all this time? How dare we settle for slapping Him in the face with our attempts to earn salvation as if our success is satisfactory?

Our future accomplishments cannot erase the fact that our pasts have achieved only all of that for which Christ had die to atone.

And our ongoing attempts to try and appease Him anyway only keep us continuing to miss entirely the entire point of His Gospel.

It's not about us paying Him back. It's not about our making our own mercy or some manner in which we can make Him feel we're deserving of His. The cross doesn't call us to count the cost as if to cover the expense. No. It calls us to acknowledge we can't afford what we owe, but that since He died for us so that we didn't have to, then the least we can do is change everything so as to show Him we get it.

He calls us to take up crosses, not more hammers and nails as we set off to build another blaspheme that proves we’ve still not gotten the picture. He’s had more than enough of our hammers and nails!

That’s why He reminds us here that it’s not up to our strength to reach where we can’t. It’s not on our courage to rise to the giants we’ve invited to keep us living in fear of change. It’s not our willpower that will overpower our lack of our power to surrender. It has never been our lot to repair our loss.

And yet still we live a faith that seems to show that we assume it has anything to do with our strength, our courage, our understanding, our appearance, our accomplishments, our achievements, our advancements. But friends the point is that it can't, because if any of those things mattered, Christ wouldn't. Do we not see that? If anything we could do could matter, Christ couldn't.

Because if our salvation, our forgiveness, our atonement, our sanctification were in any way reliant upon our undertakings, then we wouldn't read that there is no other name under Heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. Our names would suffice. Our friends would be an option. The pastor at the church we say we go to would be on the list. But no, He is the list. The first and the last. Alpha and Omega. Beginning and end. Before we were, He is.

And so we aren't.

We're not able to measure His mercy, which is honestly all that I think we're trying to do. I think we know deep down that we can't earn it. I think we know for certain that it's not our part to prove ourselves. I think we're so well aware that we've nothing to offer as God has no needs. But still I think that our ego demands we try to dilute the severity of salvation so that our guilt is allowed to subside, even just a little.

Because honestly, our awareness of our falseness is so miserable that we're all just resorted to looking for any way we can find, create, think of to lessen it. It's crushing. And yet, what makes miserable matters far more maniacal is that His mercy meets us. Right where we are, as broken as we've been. He comes flooding into our folly and just asks us to walk by faith.

As only a Father would.

You see, that's what a Father does. He provides. Protects. Promises and proves able to fulfill every word He's said. Even when we choose to lose what He only wanted us to keep. That's the tragedy which we keep trying to turn down. It's that we've all lost the purity of His promise. We've forgotten the fullness of His faithfulness. Lost sight of His sovereignty, and since sought to seek such in our selfishness.

We traded God for a life spent trying to be Him and falling short with every breath.

And because we've lost so much, we loathe the necessity of the prodigal's path as it leads us only back to where we have to admit we don't deserve to be. No, we know we've lost the image in which we were made, and so how dare we face the One who put so much love into giving us what we've given away?

But that's the point of God being allowed to be God. He chooses what stays lost and what doesn't. He chooses those who remain separated and banished and those who return. He knows those who are His from the many who can't see they are. But for those few who do agree to humble themselves to this humiliation we've chosen, to them He pours out His mercy afresh every single morning.

Indeed, as we awaken to the chance at newborn eyes seeing life from a very different lens than that of the blindness which has defined us in so many days before, He rains His mercy upon us constantly through the Christ who stands to intercede endlessly. And so then, since His grace is always being poured into this place so as to cover our ongoing dance with disgrace, it's not whether or not He is merciful unto all.

No, it's just unto all to look up and see the shower falling from Heaven to wash us heathen.

Because, as it does depend only upon His mercy alone as we ourselves cannot atone for the things we ourselves chose to do that have caused us to dive so deeply into living so far away from Him, still we can take heart. Because, as we hear Him say to Moses in the verse just before this, He will have mercy on those He so chooses. He will forgive whomever He chooses to forgive.

And while this sounds terrifying as we all know well He's no reason to choose any of us to receive His mercy, Christ came for all. Both Jew and Gentile. A promise of provision given to everyone who believes in Him. Deuteronomy 7:9

"Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments."

There you have it. Simplicity. A singularity as it were. God is God. God is good. The gift of that Garden from which we're still falling. That it's not on us to understand Him, to appease Him, to repay Him, to even impress Him. Because we can't, because we haven't. But He knows that. And that's why He chose the path that Christ paved with the cross.

Our example to follow, a most merciful gift we shouldn’t even consider trying to compete against. Because we’ll lose, even more than we already have.

No, He chose mercy when He chose to come show us the only thing we can do. Dying to self as a show of surrender to His mercy and the will which wants for all to just come to a repentance away from our sins back toward the simplicity of simply doing what God asked of us right from the start. To have no other gods before Him but to instead revere Him as the only Lord and Savior, the only Name given to us by which we must be saved.

Because He knows that if we can do that, which we can, then every other problem we've become will take care of itself. Because if He alone is God and we agree how desperately we need His mercy, then with eyes opened to His goodness, we will see such grace rain down from Heaven every single day. We will find ourselves racing into the rain as we know it’s a chance to wash something off of this world that’s been allowed for too long to define us, to divide us, to design us into the darkness we’ve become.

And then, seeing His mercy truly new every morning, we won't have to work to find reasons or ways to want to serve Him, to honor Him, to worship Him. It will just become our new nature.

No longer human, just humble.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold