Day 3378 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Deuteronomy 30:15 NIV

Almost as if a gift designed inside a daily dilemma demanding a decision as to the direction we’ve decided, both oddly enough promising prosperity, just in vastly different ways.

For you see, to be prosperous is merely to be successful. It’s an outcome defined by the thriving of something, the fulfillment of something, the provision of something that brings something that we didn’t have in such manner or measure before an effort was given unto gaining whatever it is that we seek to prosper. Indeed, we can succeed at a great many things, and in fact already have a list long and ever growing at that.

Problem is that we can succeed in things that bring not what we want but rather allow to thrive things which do not promote life, things which may indeed destroy life.

Perhaps this confusion is one found alongside our world’s having misunderstood everything monetarily, momentarily. We’ve come to see through these gold-tinted glasses in which everything we want, and thus everything we do done toward the gaining of such goals, well, it’s all seen as gold, as gain, as the glory of our avoiding the pain of not getting whatever it is for which we live in want and wish. And that is all that we seem interested in living for anymore. Just a list of entitlements we expect to bring us the sort of glimmering profit we think of when we think of prosperity.

But what if I told you that we can prosper in things improper? What if I told you that we could find success in things that are in no way best as they can never make us better? Indeed, what if I told you that this daily decision we’re given is one that we get wrong without fail? For doing something with failure is truly what it is to be successful, to be prosperous, is it not?

You see, that is indeed the very danger of this sin we’ve welcomed to remain within, lives still stuck within the sin we’ve made a friend since time began. We’re really good at it. We’re amazing at sin, masters of such disasters as our deciding to the diving and driving for desires that demand we devote our time and attention to anything we want to be given, giving then nothing away for to lose is to fail and to fail is to fall out of success.

No, there is no prosperity in losing, or so we seem to keep assuming.

But here’s my challenge for you today, and it’s one that I pray you’ll actually take: Think. Yes, think, remember, recall something from the past that you did that you thought right only to have gone wrong. You see, we all have them, these things we’ve done that we now call mistakes. We all find ourselves presented with a decision and we decide. We choose our side of whatever divide and ride out the aftermath into the outcome.

Problem is that we tend to allow the wrong motives to inspire our movements. We invite the wrong voices into these personal choices. We allow in so much influence in fact that we’re likely always ready to struggle to recall something we did all on our own. Can you think of anything? Any choice you made without anyone else playing a part, having a say? Can you remember anything you’ve said, done, been that was solely your call alone?

Or are not many of, most of our actions and understandings the result of a rather communal outlook on life and thus the many choices which define how we live it?

Such is both the blessing of community, but also the danger as well. For while it is a blessing to be standing among a people who may in fact know more than we do having experienced more than we have, so too are we among those who’ve never cared to experience anything and thus know less than anything. And while that may sound mean to say, such is the truth, it isn’t something that concerns itself with feelings. No, truth marches on aiding those who learn from it while condemning the many who refuse.

On which side of that line do we stand?

I know that this idea, much like the heaviness of the demanded death that we’ve been discussing of late, is entirely something we don’t really enjoying considering. We’ve come to hate responsibility so very violently that we cannot endure sound teaching. Sound familiar? Yes, indeed we are on the brink of such a break, a tearing away of our hearts from their hope. Why? Company. Community. The interest of external influence offering unto all who’ll listen the opportunity to have our choices made for us, with the clear assumption of having their consequences covered for us as well.

But therein lies the issue at hand in a decision like this. While we can, and sadly do more often than we should, allow others to instruct and influence our decisions, to the very point of making our choices if not living our very lives for us in fact, we will be the only one left to answer for what we’ve done, for who we’ve been, for who we become. We will be the only one found kneeling before God as He sits in judgement of our lives and all we’ve done in them, done with them, done to them.

What are we doing in them, with them, to them? And again, just how much of it is actually our call made with the understanding that we will answer for every word we speak and action we take?

You see, what scares me is that we’ve so distanced ourselves from things like responsibility, and thus reason too as we’ve rightly no reason to do something we know so wrong, that we’ve become all but unable to care enough to make our own choices anymore. We’re so used to outsourcing our choosing to whomever claims to know what best to do that we just sort of bask in the backseat of our own life, as if we needn’t burden ourselves with living for ourselves.

But the danger in this idea, a common one no doubt, is that God didn’t quite create us to become so communal that we all just sort of live through one another. He didn’t design us to design such a communized goal of everyone living everyone else’s ideas. In fact, as we see in Babel, He’s not really big on our attempting such foolishness as a fostering of fellowship seen and shown in something like our playing god. But is such not what we’re doing or allowing done when we act as if we have no one to answer to for the choices we make, the lives we live as a result of them?

And is that not exactly what we’re doing when we take so lightly the choices we’re given that we simply allow others to make them for us?

See, such a ripe unwillingness to take responsibility may have served us well until now. We may have found a right success in our living at the instruction and influence of everyone else thus far. We might have indeed become rather prosperous in letting others live for us. But none of what we have, none of what we think, none of what we’ve done can change the fact that God is going to weigh the lives we’ve lived, nor that we will be the ones answering for them.

Thus begs the question, when will we start living them?

When will we bear the responsibility for them? When will we shoulder the severity of them? When will our lives become so appreciated that we’re actually able to appreciate the opportunities we’re given in them? Opportunities like the choices we have to make.

It’s an entirely, and perhaps eternally, sad state of existence we’ve successfully stumbled upon. For we’ve become a people so blinded by our hatred of responsibility, merely for fear of the consequences it costs, that we likely don’t even see choices as opportunities. No, anymore we probably see them as burdens. They’re more uncertainty we have to face, more assistance we have to ask for, more consequences that we have to acknowledge.

They’re more things that could go wrong. And well, having gotten the vast majority of them wrong so far, it makes sense that we’re a little afraid to make them on our own going forward.

But such is the gravity of reality!

We are a creation created in the image of God, and I can think of none who either have or have shown a greater understanding and appreciation for responsibility than God. Can you even fathom a fraction of His daily efforts? I mean it’s literally impossible to imagine all of what He does. Mostly because we take almost all of it for granted, but He is the very epitome of responsible, dependable, moral and compassionate. And if we were made in His image, well then what makes us think He’s going to let it slide if we shirk any chance to bear a bit of our own responsibility?

No, simply put that isn’t who God is and thus nor can it be allowed to be who we remain. We have had our fun as found within the freedom of feeling we have the right to do as little as possible. But the cross changed that. And since He made His choice in carrying that cross and thus paying our cost as charged in a way of life lived wasting away as if life isn’t worth the burden of living, we’ve a choice now to make of our own. His choice begets our choice.

And nothing we assume can change that.

Because it’s the same choice we see here laid out before the people as they near the land God had promised them. Life and prosperity or death and destruction? Peace and hope or mayhem and disaster? They’re things that seem so different that even the blind could see the line separating them, but that’s where we’re wrong. For, as we’ve been told, narrow is the path that leads to life and few find it while wide is the road which leads to destruction and it is well traveled.

Friends, my point is that we’re each given this very decision every single day. And the problem which defines the death we’ve been discussing as being demanded for us to find God’s gift of new life in Christ is that we don’t understand this anymore. We don’t understand the severity of our choices. We don’t take seriously enough the eternal repercussions of our decisions. We just float through life as if life’s so light that we can let others live it for us.

We can’t.

Not because we can’t welcome in all the input we desire or ask for all the help we could want so as to offload at least a little of the weight of our mistakes should they be made. But we can let others live our lives for us because we’re going to answer for them. We will be the ones who find either life and prosperity in the promise God’s given us, or we will find death and destruction as we’re led away from His promise of the goodness of Heaven.

And in this world, we are far more likely to find someone to lead us astray than we are someone who will lead us in truth.

But that’s the beauty of God’s gift as given every day, in every step we take along this journey called life. He goes before and behind, and thus He can and will lead us along the right path, and have our back so that no surprise mistake sneaks up behind us. He will show us the right way to take. He will council us, correct us, rebuke us and refuse us the levity and laxity we’ve always loved. Why? Because He loves us. He loves us so much that He was willing to die for us to have the chance to try again this choice we’ve gotten so wrong so many times.

And in His leading the way into the tomb, we see too that He loves us enough to lead us to the promise that’s proven just past it.

This world won’t do that. To be honest, we don’t even do that, not even for ourselves. We’re a people so at home atop the path of least resistance that we resist even responsibility, reverence, repentance. Because they are hard, hard choices to make, hard paths to follow. And in fact each of them are made even more impossible when we look around at a world ignoring all the above. Such is why we cannot allow this world to take the lead in our lives.

No, we have to do that so that He can do that. Because if we let this world decide for us which path we take, what kind of life we live, well, it’s pretty obvious that Christ won’t be anywhere to be seen. No, this world’s made it clear their choice and they’ve not chosen to honor Him, follow Him, trust in Him, let alone die with Him. Is that we choice we want to be left answering for? Ignoring Christ? Debating His Word? Denying our Father?

That is what this world has decided to do, and thus the death and destruction God has promised unto all who continue along that way. What way are we going? What outcome do we want waiting? Life and prosperity or death and destruction? Each of us will be given one or the other, and unlike this world believes, they last not merely the 70-80 we’re on this planet.

No, these outcomes are eternally permanent. So what’s it to be? Everlasting life filled with the prosperity of peace and joy and hope and rest, or unending death and all that so clearly contains?

Seems quite simple on the surface, maybe even a choice easy enough to actually make for ourselves.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold