Day 3315 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:37 NIV

All these things.

What things? All things. Social condemnation. Public humiliation. Personal consternation. Worldly distraction by all this desecration and decimation we see being designed by and demanded of this widespread and spreading declaration of the contemplation of execration and detestation of all who decline the invitation to life their lives so vastly lost as most inside the shared consideration of the proclamation that God isn’t there, doesn’t care, will not judge nor condemn any and all who deny Him.

Yes, we live in a world convinced God is dead or simply never existed, and the ramifications of such blatant idiocy are igniting inside the vast majority an utter hatred of all who they feel feeble enough to actually abide by hearts that have the audacity to believe in such betterment as this victory into which we were born. For it’s such victory that all have since forgotten, hence the sin that sells with such value to a person that we’ve all sold away even our souls in exchange for the chance to have just a little more of nothing we need.

But alas, to be in need is to be human it would seem.

Indeed, humanity exists as if we’re always without, always in want, always left to wander and work and wonder why neither seem to help satisfy or fulfill or find for us a life finally without emptiness or void. And yet we cannot seem to see anymore that wanting more is the very mechanism which digs deeper daily these holes we feel and try to fill inside hearts that know nothing of life anymore. Because all they know is fear.

Yes, all we know is fear of failure, of forgetting, of foraging and finding what feels at the moment plenty only to be left inevitably back on the hunt as life remains cast within the wax and wane of a world which gives and takes away. That such is evident is undeniable, but what seems quite the confusion is why. Not why this world gives and then steals back all that we’ve come to assume we need more than even life itself if we’re to be honest.

No, why do we continue to settle for it? Why do we remain distracted by it? Why do we accept such defeat as assuming inside each day only this race to hope we can heap and keep enough to keep us going into doing the same all over again should tomorrow prove the for granted for which it’s taken? Why do we take each day for granted, doing so little to grow or learn within each simply for the assumed safety of another chance to do nothing more tomorrow?

Is it not because we’ve accepted a life of defeat despite His dying to remind us of the actuality of the other possibility? That we were born to be victorious over all these things in which we find now only fear? That the image in which we were created was not, is not an image that so violently accepts the mediocrity of worldly immodesty, immaturity, immobilized complacency?

That our settling for staying locked inside such assumptions of our needing safety from those who can only at worst kill the body but yet can never come close to touching the soul is simply our saying that we’ve forgotten the whole of who we are?

In all these things.

I wonder sometimes if these weird thoughts are a figment of my own desire to become as different from who I’ve been as I possibly can or if they’re legitimately God’s working through me, in me, on me to make me something that I couldn’t be as it’s something I so clearly, so obviously, so blatantly and foolishly lost sight of so long ago. Because there are so many things that I ponder that I know are not of my own consideration’s capability.

And yet they never leave, and I pray they never do.

Because I find in these thoughts no fear of all that I’ve worried myself to death over before. All the times spent worrying about being whatever others might have wanted of me, from me. All the days lost to fretting and freaking over the littlest of inconveniences and largest of disasters. All the moments in which mankind seemed to somehow turn another shade darker as they turned another degree away from hope and joy and peace and the purpose purchased by all the above.

No, these thoughts that I often fear that I can’t type fast enough to capture or convey leave me only a renewed hope that life hasn’t truly become what this world insists we believe it to be.

Because I can’t buy that we’re here to worry about what others do or say or think. I can’t quite understand why we give mere humans such authority over us to determine our words, dictate our actions, decide our decisions and demand our indecision. I don’t really know why we look still to this world to justify us, to pacify us, to placate us as if this place is able to provide the profit of palaces and platforms for all of us. I can’t comprehend why we spend so much time wearing ourselves wicked in this want for a world to like us, love us, leave us alone at least.

Not when we’ve been handed an eternal victory over such temporary worry as if a promise that if we’d just stop worrying about what we see, how we feel, what we face, then we might finally understand that faith is the truest victory one might experience.

And yet it’s the one least experienced by most and most experienced by those considered the least.

Which is perhaps the confusion of many toward faith and the richness of the promise it gives us. Because surely the lack of belief among the majority isn’t due to the impossible promises which are provided by faith nor the ultimate victory such belief guarantees unto all who bow the knee.

No, perhaps that’s the problem, the bowing. The bending. The belittlement of our breaking bringing the torment of this tournament to see who comes in last believing that the last shall indeed be first and that whomever is servant of all is the greatest of the group, the most confusing advent of our salvation demanding of us a complete surrender. Not partial, not a portion, not some percentage of some half-hearted and thus wholly disinterested devotion fairly still all but devoid of direction.

Yes, perhaps the lone hindrance to humanity’s finding the humility which would find for them the hope of a home in Heaven is the necessity of submission.

For no human heart as prideful as we’ve become wishes to welcome such misery as the agreement of our lives having been so widely and wildly lost when victory was never even ours to fight for. Because we want to fight for it. We want to fight others for it. We want to claim the glory of this story we’ve written in our minds that speaks to our own personal ability to always achieve victory without ever needing another. Yes, we want to be the heroes who are so strong and resolute that we never need to admit we face struggle or strife as such are simply below a people such as us up here upon the pedestals from which we pretend we’ve not already fallen.

That’s the thing that scarcely leaves me anymore. The fall and further falling I see, I feel, we hear basically every day anymore. Because so much seems so hopeless these days. And yet Scripture teaches this idea that victory over sin and self and society and the scum we’ve all become was never even on us to earn. We never had to be the ones to find the way to overcome, to understand, to even figure out where we could stand and still somehow remain standing when all the dust has settled and this storm of life had blown by.

It’s never been on us to find peace nor force it found.

Yet we still seem to only know otherwise. That life is a time in which we’re to work for what we want as defined by all this world says we need, says we should want, says they’ll take away if our needs don’t agree to their list of wants and the whims which drive them. That’s all life is anymore, all we’ve ever really known of it at all. Just a wasting away inside a worry over wants and the world which insists upon them.

And this seemingly inescapable sadness we feel so often is the result of our agreeing to live needing always more of the little this world wants to have, wants to be.

But the confusion to me is that there came a Savior who sought to open eyes to seeing that life isn’t bound so bashfully to living as if this world is our home and thus we’d better do our best to make a life here as comfortable, as profitable, as powerful as possible. No, such is indeed how we’ve come to see, but such isn’t the sight nor the sound of which He first designed this idea we call life.

No, He made us for so much more than allowing this world to shape and steal our identity as defined by Him, in Him. And because we lost that, forgot that, destroyed that image, He came to pay the price to buy back what was never ours to lose, to let go, to otherwise decide not to love anymore.

Indeed, through Christ we've been invited to be resurrected back into the victory we once had back when, existing within His image, we didn't need to win a thing. Yes, at one time our lives were so simple as to be free of assumption, never needing to feel we needed to assume we knew what we were doing or what we needed to keep doing it. At one time our every understanding was simply too amazed at the fact that we were given the chance to live that we didn’t have time to worry about anything else. In fact, at one time we were running around stark naked in a Garden not even knowing to be ashamed.

No, at that time our every desire was to simply remain within the presence of our Creator, as within His presence we had no needs and thus no need to fight as if we were lacking or our lives a time of loss meant to be spent seeking gain and growth.

We had no need for growth, nothing left to gain back when He was our everything. But my how far we've fallen from having no needs as it seems to me that all we know anymore is to need, to want, to crave and cry as we remain convinced we're living without. And perhaps such is so easily convinced as we are in fact living without. We are in lack. We are in need. But not of what we think as defined by what we see.

No, what we need is to turn and return, repent and allow Him to reinvent us for what we've made of life has left us lost in so many lies that we know only to accept defeat.

And yet we are more than conquerors. Lions living in cages. Sons and daughters assuming themselves only performers putting on some show for the world from which we were just handed the script and told to jump, to sing, to sit, to do whatever they want whenever their wants change. Yes, we were born free but found sin with that freedom. Made in God’s image but allowed the world to teach us how to paint over it. We were created to be victorious, redeemed from the defeat we found instead, and yet still all but dead worrying about what the world wants of us and what we’ll face if we don’t satisfy the crowd.

Friends, we’ve had our wings clipped, leaving now the only flying we know to be done under the radar so as to not offend or displease or otherwise invite the winds of worldly wrath to blow.

What have we become? Conquerors? No. Victorious? Hardly. Champions? Not really. Overcomers? Only in our dreams. No, truth is we’re more fearful than faithful. We’re more worrier than warrior. Vicious rather than victorious. Choose more often to live in confusion than as champion. Why? Broken. Defeated. Convinced we can be nothing but insufficient.

All because we’ve come to see as only the world sees. And the world just doesn’t seem to see Jesus.

And yet by some of the most amazing grace and impossible mercy, His offer still stands for all who have the courage to lose for it. Yes, to lose for it. To lose our worries. To lose our cares about what the world thinks of us. To lose our living for things as if trinkets and toys are worth the time we waste to get them. To lose our fear of whatever we may face in life, knowing that in Him we face nothing alone. To lose out on keeping up with the ways of the world, refusing to take ever again the way of this world.

No, we’ve a lot to rid, and while such seems only as loss, no. For if what we lose is what’s kept us losing then we win for the loss. How could we not? What is there to lose when we lose worries that keep us hopeless? What do we lose when we forget to be afraid of this world which can’t really do anything to us? What do we lose when we give ourselves fully to One who gave Himself fully unto achieving our salvation? What do we lose in finding the promise of eternal refuge from all that this life is, all that this world holds, all that others threaten against us?

More than conquerors through all manner of misery and mundanity and immorality and hostility and hatred and harm and hassle and hardship and whatever else may come in this life for our choosing to lose what we can’t keep in exchange for the hope we shouldn’t have.

Because this world can’t take that away. They can take our comfort. They can take our safety. They can take our health, our wealth, our possessions and prides. This world can bring upon us the heaviness of things such as hatred and rejection, persecution all but promised. But they cannot have our hope. They cannot steal our salvation. They can’t ruin our relationship with the One they can’t see, won’t believe.

They cannot take our eternity.

Unless we agree to keep all the above assumed within a world that pretends the power to offer them.

Friends, this world cannot give us what we need nor define what we should want. Because what we need is salvation and thus all we should want is the fullest faith possible in the One who achieved that gift for us. Christ died that we might have life and live it to the full in every way possible. This world cannot offer such fulfillment, as even should we be given all the kingdoms on earth, we’d be rulers for only the expanse of our time here.

Let us instead live for what doesn’t fade or falter or fail. Faith is the ultimate victory as if keeps us focused even when life gets blurry. Please do not settle for anything else, anything less, nor let anything else that is less shift your focus from the fullness of this faith.

Because in Him we are more than conquerors, but without Him, we are all but conquered.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold