Day 3277 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 5:14 NIV

There’s an objectionable complexity to the following of this faith that stands as arguably the main reason so many deny or decline the invitation to follow it:

We can’t.

Life as we’ve mistakenly lived it proves that we are entirely incapable of doing pretty much any of all that He asks of us. Each and every life has a past lived in such moral degradation that for our minds to consider the correcting of our course into a consideration of His calling is akin to training penguins to clear minefields in Botswana. We know that we know nothing of what He’s created us to be as in every moment behind us now we see only our being everything He didn’t.

And so this idea of the sort of radical shift from what we’ve become to our being something entirely contrary, it’s ludicrous, laughable, lunacy, entirely preposterous, eternally promised.

Wait, what? That list didn’t read out like you’d otherwise expected, did it? If you’ve read along for any time at all you’ll have noticed I’ve an affinity for acronyms and adjustable adjectives which lend to what I daily pray a prose worth perusing. I figure that if any should starve some of their otherwise limited attention to read through these fairly lengthy, and sometimes wandering words, well then I may as well make it worth the read.

So I tossed in a random anomaly to keep you engaged. You’re welcome!

But that anomaly isn’t actually as all that anti-analogous to the rest of the list as it would seem to the uninterested soul looking always for a safe place to jump so as to not feel the need to continue learning through the losing or letting go of our pretty little preconceived notions that we feel this inherent need to safeguard as if priceless jewels there to afford our lives the meaning we’ve long thought they mean.

You see, we want to always assume that all of everything is just far enough beyond our abilities that we’re justified in declining the invitation to try. That if we can craft or create an excuse or come to some conclusion that leaves us convinced we’re unable to undertake something, then we’ll fall forward feeling no guilt for having not tried because we’ll believe that should we have tried, we’d have fallen short anyway.

So it’s not really that we’re lazy or disinterested or entirely ungrateful for the countless opportunities that God sends us to live for more than us, it’s just we know that we’re not good at that sort of thing. And so we’re really just opting for the bandaid ripping version of the same outcome. The way we see it through these eyes blinded to life and all it’s meant to be, if we’re going to disappoint Him either way, why not get it over with rather than dragging it out and struggling all the way to the same conclusion?

But you see, the biggest problem with that is that this faith is so utterly unreliant upon us and our abilities that for us to assume we can’t do it is nothing more than saying that we don’t think He can do through us what He calls us to do. It’s a close cousin to doubt, this disbelief that He can’t do what He calls us to simply because we know there’s no way that we can really help Him all that much.

And there you have it again, our lone problem that has plagued us into persistently pretending that life and however it’s to be lived is entirely upon us to understand and undertake.

We’re a people so fully invested in self-interests that if it’s not interesting, we’re not interested. It anything asks of us what we know we can’t offer, why bother? If a choice demands change, not considered worth considering. Because we’re so accustomed to our limits and laziness that we’ve bought land down here at rock bottom and laid out a nice little spread for ourselves.

But the problem with that is just what we’ve been talking about for a couple of days now. Life ain’t about us. Love isn’t about us. Faith has so little to do with us that it’s amazing we can even discuss the basic principles of what it means to trust or believe. Because the truth is that we don’t. Don’t know how. Each of us has done so little trusting in our lives and believed in so little of late that we know this path of faith would leave us looking like newborn deer trying to take their first steps should we venture even a thought in the direction of following it.

Just without the cuteness of baby deer.

No, there’s nothing at all cute about the calamitous catastrophes we’ve become over all these years spent insisting that we know what we’re doing and that we’re good enough at the doing of it that we don’t need any help or input. Just stand back and watch us shine! Or stumble. Struggle? Sizzle? Suffer? I don’t know, it’s one of those though. Maybe stumble, sounds closest if we’re honest.

But then again, we’re not. We’re not honest. We’re not upright. We’re not righteous or realistic or responsible or reasonable or really all that fond of reality at all. In fact, if we could step back out of our self-delusions for a second, we’d see that we’re actually so irrational that we’re responsible for thinking it realistic to find reason to remain so unrighteous that our reality is really just a sad reflection of God’s direction.

Like looking at yourself in the ripples of a calm breeze blowing atop a tranquil pond. Just that our personal pond is filled with mud and alligators and algae, the breeze is more of a hurricane force blasting of endless insanity as spoken through the lips of liars in love with living a lie, and the only real semblance of tranquility is in the understanding that we should probably be tranquilized so that we stop churning up the chum we’ve become.

Because friends, while we think ourselves both able to do well all what we want to do and also entirely unable to do anything we don’t want to try, all we’re really doing is spinning our wheels inside this assumption that we can’t be anything more, anything better than who we’ve been. But if that were the case, explain to me what the cross is for.

I’ll wait.

But not long as I’ve got a point to share from Scripture that squeezes the last little bit of life from our laziness. No, we can’t do what He calls us to. We can’t be what He deserves to see in light of what He’s done. Can’t become righteous, can’t suddenly fall in love with reality or responsibility. We can’t uphold the law we’ve already shattered worse than Moses did when he mic-dropped those tablets onto the golden insanity that we still worship.

We can’t do any of all that He calls us to accomplish, to understand, to undertake. But He knows that. Since He’s the One who created us, so too does He know every way in which we’ve unraveled what He intended. He is the blueprint of our existence, made in His image. And so He knows perfectly well the antonyms we’ve become.

He knows we’re lazy, foolish, unloving, unwilling, unkind. He understands that we’re ignorant, entitled, imbecilic and ungracious. He completely agrees that we are unworthy, unwanted and unwelcome. But here’s where our ever single excuse gets kicked to the curb: Jesus came anyway. The cross was carried anyway. The tomb was entered anyway. Forgiveness was offered anyway. Heaven is open anyway.

Why? Because He isn’t going to let us undo what He designed. While we’ve shown the amazing ability to obliterate everything we set out to attempt, He will not afford us the ability to decimate His intentions. And His intention for all of us, His will if you will, is to work through us. And granted, perhaps He works through us sort of like He did Nebuchadnezzar in that we bring nothing but grief wherever we go.

Either way, He will accomplish through us whatever He intends. But knowing that, why not let Him use us for the good of something? Having lost so much of our time, our lives, ourselves to the wrong side of everything, why not see what He can do to lead us to something better? Indeed, we’ve gone on long enough lounging in our laxity, why not see what it’s like to accomplish something?

But still, that fear of all this being far bigger than us stands the ever inviting invitation to keep from trying. Because again, when we see faith, as we naturally do, from out here in a way of life lived outside the simplicity of God’s sovereignty, there does indeed seem an impossible gravity to this call. Just look at some of the stuff we’re asked to do or to stop doing in Scripture!

To serve the entirety of humanity in a sort of selflessness we’ve never known to care to know? To honor God as done only in a humility that dares die to personal profit or popularity or even protection? To seek somehow to please God, a pursuit entirely counter to everything we’ve ever done? To love our neighbors when we don’t even know how to live like we live around anyone else?

We’re called to take up crosses expecting to find life upon them. We’re invited into a new life hidden inside a tomb. We receive this new heart that aches for a truth we didn’t write. We’re asked to a path so narrow we can’t fit. We’re shown a love so sacrificial that we can’t possibly survive. There is talk of a gate supposedly so narrow that even the idea of wealth as we’ve known is unwelcome.

In His Word we’re reminded of a past which proves perfectly our penchant for doing only everything we shouldn’t, which has always been everything we wanted to see, find, feel or favor. There are lions, giants, graves, grace, glory not our own, a story we can’t pretend to pen, a surrender entirely beyond ourselves which finds us right back yet again to supposedly somehow understanding how to love even our enemies.

And the list goes. And because it does, because the list of things we’re supposed to do or be or see or see now fit to let go, it’s too much. Too big. Too hard. Entirely impossible. For man.

But you see, God drafted a design that demands we decide to divide our devotion from the commotion we’ve become in exchange for the chance to choose now something new. And while that in and of itself is equally hard, it isn’t. It’s not hard. At all. Because again, God knows us and therefore understands that where we stand has left us unable to understand any of all that He asks us to do or be. And He being the kind and patient Father He is, all of the Word is combined into a request to live as He loves.

Boiled down into a call to give what we can’t keep so that another might receive from our excess of hope a joy that makes them chase the whole of Christ. And so yes, it is more than we can do or be. But the point is that if He is our everything then we’re not us anymore. And so in Him our old limits of misunderstanding and mistake are leveled leaving us now nothing but the simplicity of a reliance upon a relationship in which we were never meant to be the provider but rather the many for whom all is provided.

And what does He ask in response to doing everything and providing our every need? Love Him, love others. And while that is even likely to seem entirely impossible here inside this hatred into which we’re all born and bred, should we love God alone with the honor and reverence He so clearly deserves in light of all He has done through the Son, then the rest will take care of itself.

Because we can’t harm or hate anyone if we love God as inside our knowing the little of the little of Him that we might know now, we know that all were made in His image. And so we can’t hate another if we love God. We can’t disrespect any of His creation if we’re in awe of His creating us. We can’t bear grudges or sit as if judges when we come to the cross which is the cost that He chose to pay so as to say that He’s willing to forgive.

No, we won’t be able to hold back our love for others if His Spirit is truly residing inside these hearts that we hear beating after our hearing only the sound of our own thoughts for so long. Indeed, that we’re still alive when He proved the cost that we already owe is evidence that He still has some use for us. Otherwise why put up with our ongoing inabilities to be enough or measure up?

You see my friends, while faith and love and mercy and kindness and humility and honesty and compassion and surrender and this sort of sacrifice leading unto a new life found only in the death of us does indeed all seem pretty much entirely outside our wheelhouse, we ain’t the ones driving anymore. We’re not called to know how to do it, any of it. We’re simply asked to a willingness willing to let Him show us.

And while it all seems as impossible as it is, He died to make it easier than we imagine. Love Him. Love others. Love sums it all up!

But maybe that’s been the only problem all along. Maybe we don’t know what love is anymore. Maybe we’ve in fact forgotten so much of what love is meant to be that we can’t even honestly say that we love ourselves anymore. Maybe these lives we’ve lived in sin have left us so separate from the Son that we can’t even remember what love feels like.

That’s why He came. To teach us, to show us, to lead us to the death of us and all this unloving and unlovable chaos we’ve become. He is the Way. The Way we see, the Way we learn, the Way we love. And while what He did being as hard to understand as it is, that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t try. Just means we have plenty of room to improve. And while that in and of itself sounds an impossible burden, His patience is bigger than inability.

All of life was created out of God’s love, and so His love was, is and will forever remain the reason and purpose for all of life. Perhaps if we can make loving Him and loving others our reason and purpose as well, we just might end up living a life worth losing rather than one we’re afraid of letting go.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold