Day 3316 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 2:20 NIV

Seems to shortsightedness that faith demands a rather vicious sort of loss of self, the kind of sacrificial surrender that our pride simply cannot abide.

And yet what if we could just allow ourselves to see beyond the loss of it all? What might we see if we had the audacity to imagine what gain might be worth such a cost? Might we begin to understand what He’s so obviously always understood? That we’ve a worth within us that’s so priceless that it is indeed worth dying for us to find, to feel, to see, to be?

Yes, what if we had the courage to see what He calls us to be, where He calls us to be?

Alas so often we can’t or won’t or don’t for some reason, and we’ve truly a plethora from which to pick. We in fact seek out every day every way in which we can hopefully avoid hassle, hardship, heartbreak and hatred. We’ve become a people so accustomed to the pinball’s path of bouncing through life, living always swerving side-to-side seeking this mythical path of least resistance knowing well the little we’ve to offer whatever might ask anything of us.

Indeed, we are all far more aware of our limitations and weaknesses and fears and failures than our masquerades might convey. Because we’ve lived them, live with them. Every day is laden with reminders or realizations of inadequacies that define an insufficiency that simply humiliates beyond even humility. And I think that’s perhaps the reason for our always managing to make sure we misunderstand what’s asked of us along this path ever narrowing.

Because we’re so afraid of humility as it sounds to us too close to humiliation that we simply seek to avoid the both so as to not accidentally be leveled by either.

No, we seem to still be most adamant that we’ve found something in life, of life that we cannot live without. And despite obvious disquiet and rampant unhappiness and ongoing lack of fulfillment in terms of purpose or promise, we just keep holding tight to this lie that says we can’t let go what we might someday be able to make into something. Yes, we are convinced, thanks to selfishness and its dilutive properties, that life can still become what we want it to be so long as we hold on tight enough to our ideas and our ideals that nothing can ever dare speak to the danger of holding on to what we cannot keep.

Because such reality is among the very earliest fears we find in life. The loss of life. Time running out. A grave calling our name. Tombstones and wishing to wrangle a life worth something to write upon them. We loathe the idea that someday all we are, all we have, all we hope for, believe in will be nothing in this world but some chisel marks on a piece of rock left lying beside other carved reminders scattered throughout some hallowed field somewhere.

How can it be? How can all this effort, all this energy, all this excitement and enthusiasm end us in the same place everyone else? And alongside those fearful thoughts inside our minds we find this resolve to just reject it all. Every mention of mortality. Every hint of humility. Every sound of any suggestion that might seem to remind us of what’s coming for us. We deny it. Run from it. Revolt and rebel and race away at the highest speed our legs can carry us in whatever direction we can think to flee.

But what then becomes of faith?

How are we to ever be able to undertake even a single step down this Damascus when we deny the demand of death? How can we ask Christ to fulfill in us new life when we can’t agree the need of letting go the old? Indeed, why are we still so hesitant to surrender what we know only soiled and scarred and sad and spent always seeking something that always brings only nothing? Why will we not allow ourselves to see the gravity of this gift of letting go such weight as the mistakes we’ve made?

Because it asks death.

Demands death. Deserves death. Was began by death, purchased with a demise, given through eyes closing to this side of life as we’ve only ever known it. But still, why must we share? If Christ is, as many claim, entirely enough, then why must we experience any of His expiration? If what He did accomplished all we need, then why do we now need to share in some of what He went through? Why must we die when He already did?

Yes, why is it that within this faith there’s found a demand to die? Why must we surrender to a life lived outside of selfishness? Why does God ask of us the relinquishment of what we’ve long known as our only identity? Can you see the misunderstanding suddenly simplifying itself? We’re terrified of death, not because of the loss of life, but rather because of the loss of what we assume life to be, to mean, to maybe still offer.

Because we assume life is all about us and what we make of it, want from it, crave in it.

And when we’ve got so many selfish ideas swirling around our minds, the very thought of never knowing any of these perfectly laid plans or the joyous fulfillment we expect them to bring us, it’s intolerable.

But yet, the cross stands and the tomb calls and we choose either to answer or hope for a voicemail that we one day allow ourselves to listen to just before we run out of time. But friends, we’re out of time. Why? Because He already did what He’s already done. And He did what He did because He knows better than we just how dangerous the darkness in which we’ve been lost all this time. And because He knows the danger we’re in, He Himself paid the price with a carried cross to cover our complacency inside these lives so wrapped within sin.

And because He chose that path and walked that road up that hill to suffer in our stead, we should understand the severe simplicity of what is expected of us if we’re to share in what He accomplished.

You see, Christ endured the tomb so as to atone for the weight of our wrongs that we’ve long gone out of our way to ignore or deny. And so He both understands the cost of our mistakes for having paid it on our behalf, but so too does He, having purchased our redemption with His punishment and pain, He now retains all right to ask of us anything He wants as we owe Him our very lives. And because He gave us His life in order to save us from ourselves, what else could He possibly ask if not for the leaving behind of the lives we’ve lived that He had to die to save?

But still, why such severity as a sort of sacrificial surrender that we cannot even understand? Die before death? It makes no sense, right? Why does He call us into such arduous shifting as sanctification? Growing in grace and humility and hope while being refined and remade and rebuked at every turn? Why does this all have to be so hard, so heavy?

No, perhaps the far better question is why we feel so disinterested in such a change. Because we’ve surely felt the sting of things such as regret and sorrow. Surely we’ve faced the weight of our mistakes, even if we did shrug it off and walk away. Surely we remember the sleepless nights spent begging for the sort of hope or healing we couldn’t find on our own.

Personally, those are just about the only memories I seem to remember most anymore. Indeed, I know for a fact that I can’t focus as I need to, want to because I tend to continue to invite all these distractions into my attention. I know that I can’t think on my own when my mind is so muddied by things that only pretend to matter, seem to matter as they clearly matter to many others. Yes, I know that when left to my own devices, I will choose weakness and worry over courage and contentment.

I know too well that tired and torn road I’ve walked wasting away in want and wishing always for something I always found a way to convince myself I could never be. And that’s just it. I’m tired of settling for what my laziness assumes I can never be. I’m sick of allowing my fears to limit my hope as if my concern isn’t the cancer I know it to be, keeping me all but dead in stagnancy as opposed to alive and thriving inside God’s perfect will for me.

Yes, I’m sick to death of seeking ways and weaknesses which I assume afford me the excuse to choose laziness and laxity over focus and faithfulness.

Indeed, I am fed up with inviting mediocrity, accepting mundanity, welcoming weakness and being only faithful to my fearfulness. But inside all that unhappiness, disquiet, discontentment that I’ve found and feel within my way of living life, wasting life, I’ve finally found the reason why He calls us to die.

Because all those things, that’s the old me. It’s the me I was never meant to be. It’s the life He didn’t call me to live. And having now undergone just enough change to see what God can actually do with me when I’m not trying to remain me, I see zero reason to settle for a life lived outside the tomb. I couldn’t be more ecstatic to embrace the death of me and whatever He continues to show me is unworthy of His will for me.

No, because I know that the old me didn’t ever stop to consider that there might be a God, that He might have a use for me, that I may have so utterly let Him down while I wasted all those years trying to please the old me. That’s why the strange focus I seem to share within these posts. It’s why this obviously different direction of devotion. It’s why the continual contempt for the ways of this world and what they’re doing to us, demanding from us, making of us.

It’s killing us. We’re killing us in all this trying to live a life that’s not worth living.

That’s why He calls us to die, because He knows that death isn’t much of life. And yet, sin, which is death, is the only life we’ve known. Thus He calls us to come apart from who we’ve been, where we’ve been. Not because He seeks our misery. No. Simply because He seeks our maturity. In life. In faith. In hope. In healing. In happiness. In Him.

He seeks our growth in His will for us as He knows that His will for us is life and that our living outside of His will for us is only death.

And so He asks us to take up our crosses, crucify our old selves, surrender our plans and profits and preferences and opinions so that His will might finally be able to lead us away from the death we’ve known toward the life we haven’t.

Thus the invitation to follow Him where we don’t want to go. Because it’s only in following Him into that tomb we fear that we can find the life that we never knew to want. For it’s only when we rid ourselves of ourselves that we see beyond ourselves, and our fears, and our failures, and our foolishness and futility. In fact, it’s only when we step into that tomb with crosses in hand that we can finally begin to understand what this world has never known about life.

Because this place lives like life is nothing but a time in which to seek pleasure, satisfaction, success. But what nobody ever seems to admit is that none of those things can matter as none of them can extend beyond that headstone in some quiet field which will mark the place our souls left our bodies behind.

And that’s just it. That’s the message of the Gospel. It’s that for so long we’ve lived seeking to please the body, sooth the mind, follow the waywardness of our wanton hearts. But that all along God knew that one day we’d return to Him from whom we came. And that upon that day, all the dust of this earth, of these bodies, of these many dreams and ideals we seek and serve, they’d all stay behind while our souls moved on to whatever outcome they chose via the way of life they lived and left behind.

That is why we should jump at this chance to die to these wasted lives we’ve lived wasting away wanting only what the world wants, doing only what the world wants, becoming only what the world wants. No I will not, not ever again, be what this world insists I should. I’m headed instead for that something better only possible inside the Son. And so He’s begun inside of me a daily prayer for Him to stoke the fire that consumes whatever shouldn’t be here inside of me.

And so I welcome the hammering, the hardship, the loss and suffering. I choose that hard path, that rare devotion, that foreign kind of faith that finds reason to welcome the refining, to ache for His rebuking. For I know the old me who loves weakness and complacency wouldn’t like where I’m going. And that’s why I refuse to stop. Because I’ll not allow the old me to catch up. And so I’ll rise every day insistent to do something the old me wouldn’t dare imagine for fear of failure or difficulty.

No. I will not settle for easy anymore.

Not now that He’s shown me and keeps showing me the gravity of what He went through to get through to me in order to save me from what He had to go through.

You see, I think that’s the part that we sort of get a little twisted up that keeps us afraid of sharing in the fullness of this faith for what this faith asks of us. Christ died to get us into Heaven, yes, but so too to get Heaven into us. To make us in Him, lived by Him now living in us, focused upon living a life all about His hope, His purpose, His will, His way seeking both His plans as well as His promise, even if such demands a share of His pain. For that is the gravity of life, is it not? That we all hurt at times, suffer in certain seasons, struggle often along the way.

In fact, if we were to be honest, we are indeed dying a little every single day.

But that’s where our fears finally face His faithfulness. Because the fact that we are dying every day already should allow us to see the beauty in this chance He’s given us. Because death does come for each of us, but the question His salvation now allows us to ask is for what.

For what are we dying or willing to perish? From what are we dying or willing to move, be moved should He ask, lead, or drag? To what are we dying or willing to move from so violently that we widely welcome the risk it might mean to make it where we can’t reach on our own? Such as Heaven.

Because such is Heaven. It’s the promise worth the risk. And that’s what He died to help us understand. That inside of Him is found a promise so priceless that pain is more than welcome if it means we’re closer to home. That in Him we might die to whatever has been allowed to keep us from yearning for that home. That thanks to our faith and His showing us daily all the death to which we need to die and leave behind, now we’ve the chance to know we have a home.

With Him. In Him. And that hope is worth dying for. At least He thought so. And well, if I’m willing to trust Him to know that my salvation was worth His suffering, then how dare I not trust Him when He says that my salvation is also worth my suffering through the loss of the life He suffered to save me from?

No. Just doesn’t make any sense for us to trust Him only when nothing is asked of us. Because that’s not faith my friends. That’s just entitlement, and simply put, He deserves far more than that from us. No, if we want the outcome He achieved for us, well then shouldn’t He see our willingness to endure the steps that led to that promise?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold