Day 3297 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Deuteronomy 30:15 NIV

A chance we shouldn’t have due to a choice we’ve already always gotten wrong.

Yet such is the enormity of God’s divinity. That He alone is able to pacify the past, paying inside a surrender of immorality the debt owed by the many who lived as if they themselves were immortal, invincible, indivisible from these destructions we’ve made within many a misspent moment making that choice incorrectly because of a misplaced gravity. Indeed, for the entirety of our stay within this world, within this way, we’ve chosen to follow our own as if it held such a hold on us that we couldn’t dare disappoint the desires in which we’ve found dreams apparently worth dying for.

And yet there’s the counter to God’s kindness, a promise of allowing each to choose for themselves the outcome they receive for the way of life they chose to live.

Problem is that we’ve all but devolved into this declaration that we’ve no choice to make. We live our lives, both individually but that because of the collectively, in such a way that seems to say that we don’t know that we have such opposing options from which to opt. In fact we’ve all become universally rather undistinguished in terms of opportunity, each living a life that we claim is best for us while still wading through the mundanity of a monotony of days coming filled with potential only to drain untaken into a past that reads so much the broken record that to reconsider our missteps has become entirely too boring an undertaking for us to understand.

We don’t want to sit with the realization of chances we missed, choices we misunderstood and therefore allowed forever, or at least for the moment to remain unmade. No, because such is the definition of failure, a foolish finding of any reason within reach to forget the fealty we once claimed to the One who came to make a way for us to be something more than we’ve been best at being. That is by and large our only concern in life anymore. We’re here only to be good at things, leaving then the things with which we struggle to go unknown and thus never grown.

No, we refuse to be seen as souls struggling with anything in this world that’s taught us that the only choice we need to make is to hide whatever anyone else may see as imperfection or lack of concrete direction. And so everything which causes us confusion, concern or contradiction to our tradition of such an insistent consideration of only what profits personally, professionally, publicly or politically is left to suffer the fate of our social failure to care about what makes us look and/or feel and/or sound anything but the image of ideality which we’ve sold ourselves to an eager public more than willing to buy such a lie.

Why? Because again, as we talked about at length yesterday, we’re very much a people still trying to please people. Whether that people we’re trying to please is the populace around us in this place or this person inside this mind against which we’re trying to outrace, the outcome is entirely the same. Be our lives lived to please ourselves or our neighbors, our devotion is therefore devoid of any real direction other than outward toward the assumptive expectations of a world without any recollection of God’s directions being the only gauge by which we’ll be weighed.

No, we’d rather be judged by people who are in no way any different than us than to live in such a surrendered reverence as such seen upon the cross and within the Christ because we see well what such a reliance cost Him. And truth be told, there’s not a single one of us who actively ache to die to anything, much less life itself as it’s come to be lived inside this world so filled with prying eyes diving inside our every single day seeking something to either further induce the jealousy or render us finally unworthy of such appreciation.

And as such has become the shared aspiration among almost all of mankind anymore, seems none too easy for us finally break down into accepting the invite to die slowly the death of a million expectations forced upon us from this world we’ve settled for serving in only the way they want us to serve. Yes, we have played right into the hands that aren’t reaching for the hem of Him who came to save us from us. And within such a pursuit, well, seems we’ve come to only prioritize doing as everyone else does that we too can become what everyone else is.

Because they get the love, earn the likes, find the followers and hold them dollars! Everything we’ve come to crave in a life so depraved as to assume we can’t die if we just make enough, have enough, please enough.

Oh but we will. We most certainly will my friends as death comes for each of us. The only difference then found in our choosing both when and how.

That’s the choice we see set before the Israelites in this passage found during their passing toward the Promised Land from the land of punishment and pain from which they’ve just been saved. Life and prosperity, death and destruction. Seems an altogether easy choice when seen from the surface. Problem is that God’s always proven Himself entirely counter to this culture. What we see is the opposite of what He sees, tables turning all the time. Indeed, death becomes life, poverty produces a promise of eternal prosperity, suffering inside surrender invites us to dinner at a table from which we’ve no business eating.

And yet He came to remind us of such a promise just to produce in us a willingness to go ahead and jump to the death of this death we’ve been living so that we might enter and possess the promise for which He laid down His life to purchase on our behalf. The promised land of Heaven which holds eternal life for only all those few who die to this life and live out these last few days inside a growing agony over everything He so kindly shows us isn’t welcome in Heaven, and thus should no longer remain welcome in us.

See, that’s one of the most profound principles of the Gospel, but sadly one that we can’t quite seem to see. It’s a coin of sorts, a two-fold promise proven both now and forever in that yes, He died to get us into Heaven, but friends, so too was it to get Heaven into us. The presence of God, a peace so powerful that it leaves us so entirely unconcerned about worldly life that we rarely slow down to live it anymore. He died to live inside of us, and His presence is the promise of Heaven.

Sadly, here inside this world of dollar signs and signing our name to the bottom line of everything that promises to produce silver and gold, well, we look forward most to the pearls and prosperity as assumed from gluttons of greed always wanting more than we need, a lesson so obviously learned from a world that offers everything one could want without a single thing anyone needs. Which is why I feel this fight every time I sit down to write that leaves me incessantly trying to contend against what we’ve become and this wicked world which has insisted upon the furthering of our always getting wrong this simple choice.

Life and prosperity, death and destruction.

I reckon perhaps the problem is found in that all of us do in fact chase after the first, a clear priority in this place. Yes, here we love all the l’s and p’s. Life, love, liberty, laxity, latitude, leverage and laziness. Profit, prestige, popularity, power, politics and platforms. And yet we can’t see that in all in our trying to obtain all of all the above, we’re making this choice upside down. We see His offer of life and prosperity, things we want more than we can say, and yet because we love to use His blessings incorrectly, we go about trying to gain our own versions of all the above.

Leaving us then choosing the first, the life and prosperity, but doing so within this unseen dance with the second, death and destruction.

That’s what we talked about yesterday, our unbridled indifference to this decision between life and death. We’re told clearly that a mind governed by the flesh is death while a mind governed by the Spirit if life. But alas we’ve served the flesh for so long that we’ve singed our very understanding of what life is, leaving us all but eternally unable to choose life as we’ve no idea how as a result of our forgetting what we’d be choosing as we’ve no idea anymore what life even is.

No, down here life is but a numbers game. It’s measured in years, calculated in excitements, made apparently of memories and, most recently, figured in followers. And because we can see the growth of numbers, well, it’s easy to see why we’ve settled for such an attempting to assume our growth is meant to be calculated rather than continued. Indeed, numbers are easy as we all have calculators which can equate the sum meaning of our existence when based upon likes and followers, good days found in higher number than troubled times.

And well, spiritual growth doesn’t offer such simplicity of calculation as it’s not linear nor quite as lazy.

Indeed, sanctification is much a minefield we fail to navigate whenever we dare try it on our own. We can’t find all the pitfalls as we’ve become a people unwilling to admit our inabilities. We have no idea the fullness of His will, but ours, well, we know it rather well! Yes, following His way is exponentially more demanding of our undivided devotion as without eyes firmly fixed on Christ, our pasts prove we’ll all but instantly miss the meaning. But when life is lived via fans and followers, we can make up the meaning as we go so as to always be whatever needed to keep the love coming.

Yes, by now you should know that I loathe social media and what it’s made of us. Because it’s our daily, hourly, minute-by-minute choosing death instead of life inside a devotion to cell phones and celebrities as opposed to an utter surrender to serving Christ alone and seeking only to know Him and make Him known. No, we want to be the ones known. We want to be the ones loved. We demand the devotion of people giving us the glory we assume we’ve written into a story we’ve written to please the readers.

Thus Christ is left on the outside of our hearts as there still seems no room at the inn here inside a life lived looking around rather than above.

You see, we’re told that clearly as well, a further assistance to this decision between life and death, prosperity and destruction. Set your minds on things above. Not on things in our pockets. Not on things shown on TV. Not on collectibles we bid and buy on ebay. Not the kind of clothes we wear nor the logos and labels they share as such cannot define us, unless like everyone else we allow for such a discount identity. Alas, we do just that because everyone else is, and again, they’re the ones we’re trying to please.

A life lived to please people is indeed a snare that keeps us from following Christ as when appeasing people is our passion, as Romans 8:8 says, “Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.”

And yet because such is considered not merely acceptable but entirely expected, we just go with it. We allow this world to make such a crucial choice as this for us, just so they’ll be happy with us and give us the warmth of a welcome as preferred from a false friendship over the obvious severity of a single salvation. I mentioned that yesterday, our fear of a single salvation. We seem more the people to spread our eggs across several baskets, leaving us then the proverbial basket cases that have no idea what we’re doing, who we are, nor therefore where we’re going.

Because we don’t want to admit where we deserve to be. Can’t bring ourselves to the admitting of our allowing our arrogance to choose for us to let the world choose for us who we are, what we do, what we want. No, such would show us the fools we’ve long pretended we could never be. But as you’ve heard, never say never! Why? Because God isn’t quite limited to what we think possible. And so while we don’t think ourselves able to make mistakes, pick the wrong paths, choose the wrong choices, owe the deadly consequences, well, Christ walked those consequences and so He knows full well the weight of our mistakes.

Question is whether or not we’ll come to terms with ourselves before we’re left to feel that weight just as we’ve lived, all alone.

Truth is that He doesn’t want that for anyone, entirely the point of the cross. Problem is that we can only accept such an undeserved gift through humble hearts able to admit we don’t deserve it. And that’s all but impossible for us anymore. There’s no pleasure in it. No profit. No hint at prosperity inside a surrender that leads to the grave and demands we do as He deserves, shed this skin and these wasted ways within. But friends, that is the choice of this chance. We either die to self or we go on living to please people as we’ve always done.

And while there is nothing new under the sun as everyone today still does as they did yesterday, living to please people at the obvious expense of ignoring God, there is something new when under the Son. He came to show us how to die to this life that we might live for a different kind of prosperity, one measured not in dollars or desires but rather in fear and fealty. And He will kindly help us learn to make that change in our understandings.

But we have to admit we need it before we can ever agree to it.

The bottom line is that this same choice still sits before us today. Stay where we are, living as we have, doing what’s still going to be popular and publicly profitable for days, weeks, years to come. Or, embrace early the death of our old ways through the destruction of these already wasted lives and in doing so find His gift of resurrection into His new hope of a new life with a new perspective finally aimed where our faith should have always been anyway.

On Him, not on us down here.

No, He knows the way home as He is the Way home. And in Him are life and love and hope and happiness and peace and promise and power and prosperity and every other perfect thing we could ever hope to find. But, and here’s the problem, to find all He gives we have to choose Him in a world that won’t. And while that may not be easy, and definitely won’t get any easier, such is why the reward is so remarkable.

A Promised Land, a permanent peace, a life only just beginning at the inevitable ending of this life we’ve known so far. That’s what the Israelites had to choose between. Either they kept hold of their old ways for sake of the comfort found in the already known or embrace the chance to race into the desert with nothing of certainty to be seen other than the opportunity to lean on God to do the impossible yet again. And one can only imagine the strange difficulty of this choice as they stared into a wasteland without any of the prosperity they’d known in Egypt.

Much like our staring into a life lived without relying on sight but rather upon the faith that He can and will get us where we know we shouldn’t be able to hope in being. But again, He isn’t limited to what we see as being possible. Nor is He hindered by our understandings of life and prosperity, death or destruction for because of the cross He knows Himself that the latter must precede the former for the former to last forever.

Now it’s our turn to learn the same, to die so that we might live, choosing the path that promises life rather than the one we’ve known which leads only to death. A hard choice to be sure, but one far easier to make when you remember we shouldn’t have the chance to make it this second time after having already gotten it so very wrong the first.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold