Day 3385 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ezekiel 36:32 NIV

I fear we’ve become a people so blinded by self that we assume that all that anyone else does, everything that’s ever done is accomplished only to suit said assumption of the success of such selfishness as defines us.

For indeed there seems a right discrepancy between our desires as designed by delusions dividing our dedications into the death of disbelief and the demand of a pure devotion driving us toward the only Way to overcome our utter disregard for the death we deserve. We see not anything from any perspective other than which caters to and cares only about our illusion of some ivory tainted triumph having achieved for us this engrained ability to assume that everyone is to be so amazed by us that they seek to do all they can to serve us.

Christ Himself even being tossed in alongside this world of wants and wickedness we wish would revolve around us so much as our every understanding does.

It’s no real quandary as to how we got here nor why we’re so inclined to stay as to say that things such as the truth of God’s Word are so utterly offensive that they’re not worth our interest let alone any investment of time or attention that could and will be otherwise given away to all that brings us nothing but more ability to pat ourselves on the back as if no wrongs are known within our way toward our wants reached by our plans and our strength able to force them into existence.

Yes, we live like a people who can make manifest whatever we imagine the best for us. Even if such vanity must eventually go so very far as to usurp that which was already done by reading into any such victory our ability to see ourselves as the lone reason said accomplishment was achieved. Indeed, we see ourselves as being of such vital importance that we seek incessantly to inject ourselves into whatever story or glory we might come to hear about.

Simply because our world has always revolved around us, but the gravity of such insanity is that it’s a mighty lonely place when said world which revolves around us has only a population of us. And thus we seek to fill our emptiness with the stealing of someone else’s successes, simply for the sake of not seeing the starving we’ve served in our having sold ourselves to these sins which have become the only friends we care to have around us anymore.

See, that’s the discrepancy I defined above. It’s this idea that even something so eternally powerful as our salvation could have actually been accomplished for us simply because God might actually agree that we’re so stinking amazing that He couldn’t bear have Heaven without us. I’ve literally heard that exact same statement flow from the mouth of a man standing in a pulpit! That God didn’t want Heaven without us, as if God needs us up there to make Him feel better about Himself and all He’s created Heaven to be unto those who find themselves among the few graciously given that gift.

But no, we see nothing in life as a gift anymore for arrogance and vanity see only everything as an entitlement. We think ourselves owed everything from life to our desired way of living it. We’ve become so self-absorbed that we’ve literally found ways in which to warp the Word so as to make it seem like it means all that we claim we’ve heard Him say from those pages we actually believe were written about us.

Jeremiah 29:11 is the one that’s always thought of in this confusion. So many take that verse and read their ideal outcome into it, spinning it then to mean that everything in life will be just fine. No struggle. No suffering. No loss or misery or worry. Folks even take it so far as to assume it means that we’ll never feel pain, and thus if we do, well then we’re not believing hard enough. Heard dudes in suits say that too. Just need to believe better, believe bigger, name your prize and claim that thing!

All because we’ve come to insist that God is there to make sure we’re okay as if He needs to placate us with the giving of our every desire so as to appease our every demand for every ounce of evidence that our condensed and cooling hearts consider more vital than the very opportunity to allow ourselves to actually walk in His footsteps seeking only to shake this world and all its ways off our feet and out of our hearts so that we’re left nothing but empty vessels finally able to be refined and refilled with that lone reverence we’re called to crave.

For God’s all along made it abundantly clear that we shall have no others gods before Him but that rather we should love the Lord with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all our souls, with all our lives, with absolutely every fragment of every ounce of every consideration of every hope that we can possibly offer of whatever we might have left of whatever we’ve not yet lost to this wicked way of life as lived like He’s there to do our bidding as if we’re the ones to be praised and pleased.

Please!

No, that’s not at all how this works. It’s how we want it to work, because again, we’re a people entirely accustomed to this way of life in which all of life revolves around us. And inside this delusion is designed this idea that everything is about us, everything is done for us, everything is worried about our benefit before any other concern or accomplishment. Indeed, we live this life as if our appeasement is the utmost priority of everything that everyone else around us says or does or gives or imagines.

We think that all of everything is done with us in mind because that is sadly the only way our minds know to work anymore.

And thus we find the line of disbelief over which we’ve never ventured near enough to actually imagine what His sort of surrender must have been like nor why He actually did it.

For indeed we’ve come to believe that He did all that just for us. That He had absolutely no other reason for laying down His life than for us to take something so priceless as salvation as something to be so expected that we’ve become entirely entitled to thinking that He loves us so much that He will happily die all over again just so we don’t have to endure the misery of maybe letting go of this way of life we’ve stolen from the Artist and Author of our existence.

Perhaps the confusion comes in that He did do it because He does love us that much. He did lay down His life that we might find in Him everlasting life. He offered and offers to save everyone who comes to Him. But there’s the part we tend to discount just enough to utterly ignore eventually. He saves those who come to Him. Hebrews 11:6.

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”

We will never come to Christ nor consider the cross unless we at first understand that He didn’t have to do what He did as defined by our agreement that we don’t deserve it. And we cannot agree to that until we see ourselves outside of these selfish assumptions of our being these little angels that our mammas always told us we were. Friends, we’re not. We’re enemies of God. We are His adversaries. We’re His antonym, His antithesis, His arch nemesis. We are everything He is not, and thus He did not do all He’s done just to please this pride we’ve grown inside.

He did all He’s done to prove to us who He is so that through that we could see who we’ve become. For He alone knows that inside that truth is found the kind of humbling faith that will allow us to starve our selfishness in exchange for the chance to know the One who offered Himself in what is the ultimate epitome of humility. God knows that for us to embrace the kind of change we truly need if we’re to ever find any kind of life after this death we’ve loved, it would take something so kind as laying down His life for we who still live as if His enemies.

And that is why we will never be found as being entitled to what we think we deserve, because friends, all we deserve is what Christ endured for He took upon Himself all we’ve done and all we’ve become so that in Him we might see just how wrong we are, and that in that we might see just how good God has always been as to continue offering to lead us away from us so that we don’t destroy ourselves any more than we already have.

Not because we don’t deserve the destruction we’ve become but that He isn’t so quick to deny Himself as our sinfulness has always been. No, He will prove Himself to be everything He’s always claimed to be, even if such is done through showing kindness to His enemies so that said mercy might for some of us enemies become a strange curiosity as to why He would do that for a bunch of scum buckets that aren’t owed anything anywhere near as good as we’ve long thought ourselves to be.

No friends, God alone is good, Christ Himself testified to that very truth in Mark 10:18. And since God alone is good, all that’s done under the sun is to prove His goodness. Even if such evidence is proven in our weaknesses and failures to care about addressing them.

So yes, He did it for me, but He didn’t do it for me. He gave His life for us, but it wasn’t for us. You see, we’re a people so vastly self-centered that we eisegete such a diluted idea as His having done all He did just for our sake. No, it’s to prove Himself who He’s always been through showing mercy to a people who embody madness. It’s to prove Himself loving to a world which knows nothing of love. He paid our cost to set us free from who we’ve been, yes, but such freedom does not now set us as free as we’d like to so selfishly assume ourselves to be.

For we are not our own but rather have been bought at a price, the precious life of Christ! And thus we’re not to do as we please, as we’d so clearly prefer. No, our lives are now lived as slaves of God here only to do His will, allowing His Way to work in us, through us so as to show those around us the change He’s began in us, a change chosen so as to reset us back to His initial intention: a people made in His image to remain His people.

But since we’ve done all we have, all we could have imagined to do against Him and said image, He chose to play a hand we cannot beat. He gave His life, embraced the sort of humility we still try so hard to run from, entered the tomb we avoid and did it all so as to prove that He is the truth. And all of it not for our sake but rather for our salvation from everything we’ve done that has forsaken Him. Thus we have nothing of ourselves over which to rejoice or boast.

No, we rejoice only in His glory as He did all He’s done for us, because it was never for us but rather all for Him.

And friends, that is the line that I believe separates faith from futility. It’s defined by our coming to see that all He’s done, while it may have clearly benefited us, it was done first to prove who He is for His sake alone. That any of us may find ourselves overcome by the humility that allows us to be swept up into His eternal mercy is a miracle unimaginable for nothing we could do could ever erase all we’ve done.

But that’s the beauty of the Gospel! It’s that all that we’ve done couldn’t change who God is, but that who God is saw fit to give us the chance to agree to change who we’ve become. For while we’ve proven ourselves the antithesis of God, so too has He proven Himself the opposite of us.

He’s met our madness with mercy, our pride with provision, our hostility with hope, our hatred with healing, our gluttony with grace, our lustfulness with love, our wickedness with welcome, our foolishness with forgiveness, our selfishness with salvation. He offers His goodness unto all who agree to having again eyes that see and ears that hear and thus hearts that turn and return to Him not because we think He needs us but merely because we’re finally able to see that all we need is Him.

We just can’t see that if we still think that any of His mercy has anything at all to do with us. He did not give His life just so that we could keep ours. No, He gave us His life so that we could see how wrongly we’ve lived ours, because only in that horrid realization is found the willingness to repent from all we’ve done. And He gives us that chance because forgiving is who He is, which just so happens to be who we truly need Him to be!

#LeaveNoSoulUntold