Day 3344 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Timothy 2:15 NIV

It appears as though we’ve once again flipped the script into another failure flopping around on the ground unable to stand for anything that means anything that can in any way accomplish anything for anyone.

Because although somewhat antiquated and potentially fading ever rapidly still, to do one’s best is still the best we can give to whatever or whomever we feel the need to honor or assist. And yet as such is a mindset almost archaic in the opinion of this world on fire, it seems anymore that our best is being given only to what we feel is best for us. We live our everyday wasting away every hour taking each and every second for granted assuming that such selfish focus is going to accomplish for us the safety, sovereignty, success and satisfaction that we’ve come to assume make life’s meaning.

But my wondering is what can life mean if all it means is what I think is best for me?

What profit is there to be found inside what’s best for me as determined by me, for me? What does my perspective of what’s best for my life offer unto any other? How can anyone be made better if I’m always worried about what’s best for me? What does God get in my focusing upon what’s best for me? What do I get in my focusing upon what’s best for me, considering that what’s best for me today seems somewhat different than my understanding of such best from yesterday?

How can anyone or anything ever possibly progress when my focus on the best is seen in terms not of my giving my best to what I believe matters most but rather my deciding what matters most based upon what I think is best?

And there’s the flipping I mentioned at the open today. We’ve taken and flipped this here call to do our best and selfishly shoved it violently into seeking our best. Offering our best to craving the best. External made internal, surrender exchanged for desire, sacrifice replaced by craving. And in that we yet again find one more way in which we’ve become just like this world we’re in but are called to be no longer of for the simple sake of our eternal salvation.

Because again, this world is not only headed for eternal flame but it seems most herein cannot wait to feel the heat, leaving them this daily resolve to set themselves on fire as if burning inside disbelief as designed by the darkness of depravity and debasement are truly able to secure for someone what they can only blindly assume is best for, again, themselves alone.

No, very rarely anymore does anyone give their best because we’ve become a people who only seek our best. We want, we crave, we desire and yearn, but we never give. For that is what gluttony and greed become in us, an unwillingness to lose, to suffer, to surrender, to sacrifice. And when such things are allowed to become inconsiderable, as they have to us apparently, so too then does a relationship with Christ become impossible. Because if we’ll not share in what He did, then how can we claim we care about who He is?

And when such spiritual failure is allowed to become for us our generally expected and widely accepted outlook upon life itself, well friends, we’ve nowhere to go but downhill at a speed so unsafe that salvation eventually become impossible.

Why? Because when settled upon focusing on ourselves just long enough, we’ll eventually lose sight of His offer to save us from such selfish inclinations, and we’ll forget any and every reason we might have once known or considered to reach out for that hand that’s been always reaching out for us.

Just won’t do it. Not because there’s no sense in it as so many assume. Not because we don’t see or feel the danger in our downfall as so many try to convince us isn’t there, isn’t real. Not because we genuinely believe that our understanding of what’s best is truly best for not only us but for everyone and everything we care about. No, we won’t reach out for Christ because we’ll have become so self-diluted that we can see no reason to live beyond our way of life given unto always putting ourselves first so as to ensure the outcomes and successes and satisfactions that we can and will always find a reason to desire.

And what’s sadly ironic is that to that end, we do give our best. This entire world gives its best to living this idealized idol of a ‘best life’ as always defined by a single person for themselves alone. And yet somehow we seem to legitimately not see such irony in that. For how arrogant must a person be to assume, despite their many faults and flaws and failures, that they can suddenly plan this path of perfection and then plot the play to make it happen?

How can we go so very far in the entirely wrong direction as to finally agreeing to give our very best, but only to everything that keeps us convinced that we’re God and thus that we don’t need the real God getting in our way with all this stuff about honoring Him, glorifying Him, serving Him, praising Him, pleasing Him. Indeed, why should we worry about pleasing Him when we’ve made a mighty fine life out of pleasing ourselves, pleasing others?

Why embrace the cost of a carried cross when we can leave that suffering on the ground and instead build kingdoms made of personal preferences and public applause and professional profit and political popularity? Seems insanity! A most unsanitary existence compared to the pomp and panache of a life given unto giving our best only unto ourselves.

But again I ask, to what gain at what end?

You see, yesterday we talked about the gravity of the unknowns in regard to our faith and our not having been given the luxury of knowing the day nor the hour upon which the switch will flip and life as we’ve known it will be flung upside down as we’re wrung inside out as Christ judges the hearts and souls we’ve lived thus far pretty much only tainting and tarnishing in our efforts to please our pride at the expense of honoring our God.

And whether we’ve the courage to consider it or not, that day is undeniably approaching rapidly. What will it bring?

A scary quandary to be sure, but oddly enough a question answered in part by who we’ve been.

So who have we been? What is the fruit of our labor? What harvest are we planting, reaping, seeking, sowing? What priorities are in place, and just what place are they each in in our lives? What matters to us and what are we doing to testify that such does indeed mean so much to us? Are we doing anything in any way that seems to show that any of it matters at all?

Combine them all, and what are we doing to show God that He’s of such a stern priority that we’re planting daily, hourly, a crop of hope in Him that is of such vast importance to us that we’ll happily insist it grow onward into eternity even if that means we must water said hope with tears from sorrow or even the very blood from our veins as poured in persecution if need be?

Does our faith mean that much that we’ll suffer for it? Because the truth is that to give one’s best is to agree to suffer for something that is worth that misery in order to make it so very real that it cannot help but be realized.

And I’m not talking in the same line as those ‘name it and claim it’ clowns who assume Christ’s mercy means only the means to the mammon and material of this life only as they are truly of all people most to be pitied. No, I’m talking in terms of believing so unashamedly in something that matters so much to us that our very best is finally all we care to give, because that’s just it, to give. Not to receive, not to crave, not to want or wish or win. No, to give.

For greater love has no one than to lay down one’s life for their friends. Are we living as if Christ is our friend, our Savior, our helper, our healer, our hope? Because if He is and we truly believe that with all our heart, will all our mind, with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our focus, will all our courage, with all our weakness, with all our inability, with all our insufficiency, with all of our everything, then how could we hold back anything?

How can we hold back anything so as to seek still in any way, to any measure, anything that we want for ourselves?

Because that’s the way of life as lived in this world in which we’re still found for the moment. And as we’re still in this world, so too are we still at risk of living of this world. It’s nothing for us to accept one of the millions of invitations we’re given every moment of the day to turn our worry, our wanting, our focus and our effort to something of this world rather than staying adamant that all of us is focused on Christ alone. It’s something that happens constantly as this world just bombards us with all this noise screaming all these lies about what’s best, about what’s worst, about what’s good for us to worry about and what’s right for us to want.

And though the spirit is willing indeed, the flesh is weak in truth. We are all a billion miles away from giving our best, but that sort of humbled realization demands we look at what all is being given a share of our best that should belong to God alone without all of this incessant distraction becoming for us an ongoing division dividing us away from the sort of dire devotion that God alone is due.

This is something that’s been so heavy on me lately that I almost can’t breathe anymore without thinking of something I feel the need to say, to share. I guess that’s because after 36 years being spread across a million misplaced priorities and worries and wants, it seems that I’m finally getting around to letting myself not be the one who sees so as to seek what I think is best. No, I think now that God is finally helping me to understand what’s always been best, and doing is so in such a way that just crushes everything else out of the way.

Because all of the sudden all of the things I’ve worried about, all the stuff I’ve wanted, all the wishes I wasted my life wishing for, all the junk I’ve amassed around me as if trophies of my having given my best to something that won for me only something I could hold, it all seems fading so fast into a stark understanding that where I’m standing isn’t as great as that best I’d always assumed it would be. In fact, it seems that I can’t outrun the realization that I’ve never given God my best.

For I know too well such things as shame, failure, disquiet, unrest, unease, arrogance, vanity, ego, know it all far too well for me to say with any gravity that I’ve given Him what He should have always had. I’ve not given Him my best, no, because it seems that all of the sudden all that I can confess about my best is that it’s always been given only to what I thought was best for me.

And wouldn’t you know it, but it turns out that picking up a cross and losing my misunderstanding of my life’s meaning upon it has never been found on that list of what I thought best.

But yet in that there comes the beauty of God’s most patient benevolence. For He is not slow in keeping His promises, we’re just slow in caring about them. He’s not slow as we assume to understand, we’re just slow to understand. Slow to understand what matters. Slow to understand who we’re supposed to be serving. Slow to understand what we’re here to be doing. Slow to come to terms with the fact that our lives have nothing to do with what we think is best but that the best life we can live is the one that seeks to give our best to the One who gave us life.

That’s my only goal. And that’s saying something because, like everyone else, at one time I had a whole passel of goals. But somewhere along the way they were all either accomplished or they just dissolved at some point because all I seem to have the ability to care about anymore is doing this the very best I can while learning more with every letter I type to want nothing from this for me. I want nothing for me, and in that I’m finally learning that such is the only outlook that allows me to insist upon giving Him the best from me.

Because I can’t, you can’t, nobody can give Christ our best, their best if we’re at all, in any way worried in any way at all about us. And the proof of our stupidity is that we should have seen that very realization in the life He lived on this earth and what He did with it. He laid down His life, embracing the pain and misery of being hated and beaten, all because it honored God.

And such is still the only path which leads to Heaven. Through Christ. And it just stands to reason, at least to me, that if hope is found only in Him, well then all this has to be for Him. And maybe I’m just tired or confused or something like that, but that seems the only thing that makes much sense anymore.

But it makes sense because upon that day when those clouds part and our souls are judged and our eternities sealed, I want to be able to present myself unto Him as one approved to enter His presence rather than one among the many unwelcomed into that hope. And so I will embrace the shame of a life lived in surrender, the loneliness of a life lived without friendship with the world, the gravity of this shouldering of sharing His truth and doing my absolute best to not make a mess of it.

And do so for His glory alone for however long He keeps me here.

Because the truth is that worldly shame means nothing, but finding myself ashamed to enter His presence, well that can only happen if I don’t take this life as my chance to get to know Him as much as He’s invited us to. And so I don’t want to know anything but Christ and His purpose for my life, whatever that may be, whatever that may bring. I will give Him my very best, because honestly, I’ve already given it to almost everything else, and here in the aftermath, all I can say is that that didn’t accomplish much at all!

No, safe to say that my best needs to be given to the One who died to help us all understand without question what is indeed best. Because contrary to our version, His best doesn’t have to fit in this world nor this way of life we’ve come to waste within it.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold