Day 3382 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 4:24 NIV

If we’re to have the hope of being something we’ve never been, well then we’ve to become something we’ve never begun:

Willing.

For willingness is the very outermost aspect which allows for all of life’s intrigue. We must be at first willing to be curious, to be cautious, to be considerate, compassionate, at times perhaps somewhat confused and potentially chaotic even if we’re to ever know what life is. Because life is lived counter to these complacent considerations chased by this cancerous culture alongside whom we’ve died to life thus far in these lives lived toward the here and now always being all that ever mattered.

And thus the new.

Yet also the nuance. Indeed it seems that this faith unfolds in a sort of gradual and graduated manner that allows for both our growth as well as hurried anticipation of more such improvements always waiting just out of reach, inspiring us to perpetually reach toward the impossible. Such as Christ on a cross, life in a tomb, hope after here. All of which are entirely new contemplations considered only once outside what we’ve made of a life lived inside this world and its many ways racing away from the Way.

Which is why the difficulty so easily found along this faith leading us away from all we’ve known into all we’ve never imagined before. We’re talking the complete removal of an existence simultaneously replaced with an entirely new outlook on everything from life to death and whatever we find we need to relearn here between the two. And this kind of shifting away from self to servant is something that all of us are bound to struggle with.

So much so that there be many days on their way in which we might well find ourselves slipping, sliding back into the way of life we’d had figured out. Not because that’s what we want anymore. It’s not because such is our highest expectation on this side of admitting the cross and confessing our deserving of the death displayed thereon. It’s not even because of the inherent weakness which all but defines us at this point in a disheveled existence lightyears away from anything anyone could even accidentally consider happy or hopeful.

It’s simply because there’s an almost subtlety to salvation’s sanctification that at times seems as if we’re never going to make it.

This fear finds us in those many moments in which faith feels so far away no matter how hard we try to pray or study or sturdy ourselves against the storms which blow at our behest. And therein lies the strangeness we come to see in all this. It’s that there’s evidence of growth to be found, but alas, we always seem more than able and for some reason almost entirely willing to imagine struggle into our story. It’s just one of those saddening symptoms of sin.

For sin has taught us, teaches us still in fact, to seek out the path of quicker reward as such has always been proven along the path of lesser resistance. And so we’ve become a people eternally unable to bear any burden, bring any courage, offer up any insistence upon anything of actual substance worth more than what we think we want at any given moment. And yet this is the mindset that our Savior came to combat. To call to account our always going without the courage to take a stand.

Guess the problem is that in this case that stand is one taken against ourselves.

Such is the gravity of our shedding the old whilst hoping in the new we’ve never known before. It’s sort of this sense of starvation, a soul seeing itself stagnant and ashamed of it, but also considering the contentment in godliness we’ve been told about. It almost seems that life out here in hope becomes this sort of wasteland as we learn to waste away all we’ve wanted while we begin to understand the need to wait for all we’ve never known we needed.

Confusion isn’t quite the word for it!

Rather this narrowing road is one defined best by words such as excitement, lament, joy and sorrow sometimes simultaneously screaming from the shadows of a hope we can at best try at times to convince ourselves we really do believe in. Nobody talks about this part though. No, we hear instead that a life following Christ is one of only growing ease, a sort of simplicity that grows in waves as we wave goodbye to everything we’ve ever known, ever wanted, ever been before.

And these messages, while uplifting and encouraging, they do little to assist the struggling and the scared and the souls so scarred that they find themselves only fearing more and more this new that comes only once out in the light of truth, a truth we’ve all hidden from in the past so as to not have our every mistake seen shining so brightly as the blaspheme all of them have always been. No, we’ve known only a life lived in hiding, and so while the hope of not having to is amazing, the road there is arduous at best.

But it’s one that we have to take if we’re to ever be made new, the sort of new we know we need, the sort of new for which we’ve prayed, the kind of help we just can’t find anywhere else nor take another step without.

Friends, that’s why Christ came. To help. To guide we the blind into the light we’ve never known to love before. To buy our ticket to the triumph we couldn’t afford to even pretend we might be able to achieve or accomplish or otherwise deserve. He came to show us the way, and it just so happens that His Way is the utter undoing of all we’ve known to do, all we’ve clearly done to our own undoing. It becomes this confusion that somehow contains such a hope that we find an alien urgency to race into the uncertain absolutely sure of so little that we for once feel alive.

And thus we find the very opening scene of salvation!

It’s felt in that feeling alive for once, a feeling found alongside a hope we’ve always wanted but never held. It’s a glimpse of this grace that took our place and ran into the grave we craved so as to carve us loose from these chains we’ve made to a life we’ve lost in a world so lost that nobody can find anything other than reasons to be always afraid of doing something new, assuming such is safe because of all we’d have to lose for that new to come through as He did on our behalf.

Yes, we’ve come to feel safety as felt best in the shadows of a life so shameful that we dare not show our faces to anything that might offer us everything new. Why? Because we’ve come to manage the mediocrity. We’ve learned to not really mind the mundane. This world and the sin which wins within have left us loving to be lost, lunatics left out of hope for the sake of holding something that says we’re something that doesn’t need that sort of change.

Simply because we’ve come to agree that to change is to lose and thus to chance it is to risk it, and well, we’re sadly a people who’ve blindly lost sight of such an opportunity as to lose a life in order to find a forever.

That’s the promise of the Gospel. That both a life was lost, leaving us a life to lose, but also that once willing to share in that sort of loss of a life we’ve lost already, well only then can the new be found. And that’s actually the only way that salvation can work. Don’t we see that? We have to lose something in order to find something. We’re a people with lives already overflowing, flooded with a foolishness that left us so rich in rebellion that we have to lose everything if we’re to ever find anything better.

Otherwise we’ll forever be a people so blinded by our worthless riches as found in idols and ideologies that we’ll simply never risk losing what we’ve created, thus remaining right where we are and so weighed down by worldliness that we cannot move in any direction but further down.

See, that’s the gravity of going against God. If His way is higher as His thoughts have proven themselves to ours, then if we continue against His will, running away from His Way, we’ll only be able to go downward deeper into the darkness of depravity and the desires for these disasters we’re designing on the dimes we earn from a world cheering us on in comment sections telling us to be true to ourselves.

No, we must lose ourselves.

We must retire from trying to justify ourselves, validate ourselves, affirm and confirm what we’ve done to ourselves at the inspiration and guidance of a world filled with such insanity as assuming we’ve the right to all this sin we’re choosing. We don’t. Never did. Just always really wanted it. Yes, we’ve always craved the chance to see more than we needed to know, to know more than we needed to learn, to learn things that only steal life, to live as if life is worth nothing more than assuming we can somehow steal enough time to live forever without the fall.

But that’s just it, we will all fall. Not all will sleep but all will be changed. Every knee will bow, every tongue shall indeed confess. We will all fall upon bended knee, if we can even muster the arrogance to kneel before the one we’ve never wanted to know before.

No, upon that day we will all fall upon our faces for fear of our failures finding us out for who we’ve been, if we’re found without the new He came to begin.

You see, He has promised to carry onward until completion this good work He’s began in those who call upon His Name and admit they cannot do this without Him. We cannot do this without Him. WE ARE NOTHING WITHOUT HIM! And that is why we are called to relinquish the old, to put off the old, to see the old for what it’s always been, for who we’ve always been. For in that honesty we find finally that everything we’ve done has left us entirely undeserving of even the ability to spell the word hope.

But in Christ, that hope comes alive as we stride into the new found in the tomb!

For such is where the old is left behind. See, that’s the beauty of death that we’ve never known to see before. Yes, it’s a loss of life, an end of our time, a clock that stops ticking and a few loved ones left behind to bear the burden of sadness and sorrow. But only because we see still through eyes insistent that this life is the only chance we have to live, to love, to look around and see something worth seeing. But in Christ and this sort of newness He brings to us, we come to see that the only sorrow is found and felt in our having lived a life with such a shallow outlook as to assume that this world is the only place big enough to house and hold a hope.

And that simply couldn’t be further from the truth.

No, the truth is actually quite the opposite in that hope isn’t held here for hope is what is too big. But that’s a reality found and felt only in the faith that’s found us reasons to leave us behind in search for something more than we’ve ever been able to see. And thus in this new we walk by faith, forget sight as sight assumes only what we see can be seen. But faith, no friends, faith knows beyond our vision. Faith hopes beyond the horizon. Faith trusts well beyond the temporal and temporary.

Faith grasps beyond the grave and demands we be found with Him who we agree did indeed show us the way to shed these sins we’ve been living in.

And while such a new is indeed hard to understand, hard to comprehend, a path we will inevitably struggle along, I for one would rather endure the struggle of trying toward hope than enjoy the fleeting ease of staying lost without the courage to believe that a better hope might exist than this one we’ve been told of by a world that wants only whatever can be held for however long we’re here.

I can’t settle for that anymore, it’s just too hollow for me to hope in. I guess it’s just that once I heard of Heaven, well, I can’t quite come up with a way to make it fit within this world.

And if it takes me leaving everything else behind, myself mostly, well, if it was worth it to Jesus to die in order to give me this new hope of that home He said has a place for me, then let’s get to leaving behind whatever can’t last past this world. And while that may be hard and rather heavy at times, the little I know of hope tells me it’ll be worth it.

Because only in Him is there any hope of anything better than I’ve been. And I just know that I can’t be the one to come up with anything better than I’ve been before. No, I’ll leave that to God as I’ve only gone against Him all this time, and well, I’ve found nothing that I want to keep other than every reason to let Him do something new.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold