Day 3400 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 12:1 NIV

Seems the solemnity of God’s great mercy is of such depth that it demands we do something that’s indeed nothing short of our share in His sacrifice.

For truly a gift of such eternal gravity as seen upon the cross endured by the Christ is one only met with a proper appreciation when it’s met with an acceptance of the sort of surrender He showed, the loss of a life lived as needed to hope in a life found. Because the particular reality of life is that, aside from secrecy or stupidity, none can live two lives at once. And yet, that is the hope we both need and are, in Him, welcome to have is it not? The ability to let go the life lost to sin and along with it the guilt which therefore rages within, and in so doing, to only then find the promise of a new life as accomplished in Christ laying down His for us to live ours now for a purpose beyond preference or pleasure?

But alas, if we are indeed to ever have such a hope then it ought to be evidenced by a genuine gratitude so very visceral that our very hold on our own lives are in fact loosened to such a selfless extremity that He sees in us an adamancy to share in whatever we might need to lose in order to know we have that hope that’s never asked us to hold anything.

No, our hope as held in Christ asks us merely to be willing to lay down our lives lived lost in sin, as willing as He was to lay down His so that ours as wasted as we’ve watched them become may now be seen only as pasts proving His undoing of all we’ve done and become to the cheers and applause of hearts no longer dead to life as lived in sin but rather alive to life as known only in Him.

This is the clarity that Paul sought to inspire just a few chapters earlier in his letter to the Roman church. Romans 6:3 reminds us of this loss necessitated before the finding of life, a lesson we still to this day seek sternly at times to find ways in which to pretend we don’t know. Yes, we do indeed have such a selfish grip upon our getting what we want in life so that our lives go our way that we’ve gone at times out of our way to ignore, debate or deny that very dire definition of the just due deserved for our chance to find the only way we can escape the debt we’ve made.

“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”

Even better still, how about evidence offered from the mouth of Truth Himself? See, Christ tells us in Matthew 10:38 this promise of a similar weight, albeit one given in what’s an entirely more grave firmness if you will as having come from Christ Himself. Indeed, and it’s one we’ve talked about several times across the years of this journey to and through His Word. “Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”

And sadly, unworthy is what we’ve all been for so very long that we’ve become the best at being still un-worth His worthy, something shown inside our everyday finding us deciding again upon the once more descending again into the depths of darkness and depravity for the simple sake of the selfish ease and personal provision perfected within. Yes, we’ve all but become masters of this life of disaster as demanded and then mercifully overcome on our behalf.

That is the Gospel of Christ. It’s the reality that we are all in fact sinners who’ve lived an entire life in just such a way that’s been always falling away from the Way as made perfectly clear and most eternally simple within the single command to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, something we’ve failed to do every single time we’ve rather chosen to do only what we ourselves so selfishly wanted to. And the mercy is in that such a downfall should have left us all fallen only out of the running for the hope of Heaven.

But no, no, God instead saw and sees still fit to forgive, to favor, to even forsake His own righteous wrath and offer unto us instead a love so profound that our only fear becomes not having time enough to consider enough the contemplation of such a compassion as that which would lay down a life for those living in enmity against. Yes, such has indeed become one of my last few fears of which I’m daily afraid. For I am not scared to die, to hurt, to endure loneliness or loss.

No, anymore it seems I find that I fear only falling once more into a failure to love Him in the greatest fraction I can of the love He’s always had for me.

Which is why I do, and truly contend we all should, find a freshened appreciation for passages such as this, one which offers us one of my favorite verses in the very next point penned after this one which opens Romans 12. Because they’re ongoing and thus timeless reminders of the gravity of grace and the few ways in which we can meet such a mercy face to face and not fear falling into the well-earned oblivion we’ve so justly deserved should we ever dare to show our faces again before the One against whom we’ve lived all this time at war.

That is what sin is. It’s not merely minute mistakes made within minutes of a sheepish apology following behind so as to assuage the guilt we’ve gotten in return for our having gotten our way only to have found it as wrong as we couldn’t admit we already knew it always was. No, sin isn’t defined by certain words considered foul or otherwise obtuse. It’s not the casual stepping on of a toe as if we simply weren’t paying all that much attention to where we were going.

As if we could have ever actually confessed honestly that any wrong turn we’ve taken wasn’t the one we meant to take. No, such is not an honesty we can offer, leaving us then the lone guilty party within this party we’ve pretended life to be.

And that is what must change here on this side of crosses carried, His carrying ours and then asking us to take up a reflection in what is finally an honest show of our understanding. That is why we’re unworthy of Him if we’ll not do as He did. Not that He asks us to physically harm ourselves nor to put Him to some sort of sordid test as we try to see just how far He will go again, this time with our mortal lives on the line. No, He asks us to rid ourselves of what He had to rid Himself of His life to atone for.

Because the wages of sin haven’t changed since Christ took the cross. They each and all still owe a death, just that now we either continue in them as if His sacrifice is so meaningless as to leave us unchanged or we do as He’s called us to and embrace the loss of that wasted way of life so that we might now grow in the faith that knows that we’ve far more to gain in Him than we’ve left to lose of this life already lost.

That’s something that I’ve tried many times to convey in different ways throughout these daily attempts to understand and then encourage others to themselves consider the limitless goodness of our God. It’s that we’ve nothing left to lose having lost our minds to the thinking that sin is so harmless as to be absolved by a simple sorry said within the regret that rolls in within the wake of our getting our way. No friends, sin is not absolved so easily, so lightly as the death it is was instead absorbed into Christ who became our sins and bore their punishment so that we might, in Him, bear now the hope we otherwise have not anymore.

For there is no hope to be found within a sinful life, at least no sort of hope that extends beyond the horizon. The disheveled hope we feel in our sinful ways is just this selfish hoping to have some fun, to feel good for a minute, to enjoy some pleasure for a moment, to forget the weight of the life and our inability to handle it responsibly for a second. That’s all that sin offers us, just a momentary reprieve from our having utterly wrecked our lives onto the shores of hell in search of something to call home within the shadows and sorrows found there.

And now that’s all we have to lose. Just a way of life that’s left us so lost as to think we might somehow belong so far from home as to settle for the sins which crave the fire rather than the surrender which achieves us a step closer to the Father. Such is why Paul here urges those reading his assistance in regard to the hope of Christ, and our feebly finding so often so little effort or concern given unto finding it further, to offer themselves as living sacrifice in light of Christ doing the dying part of the sacrificial idea.

Yes, for such is indeed all we can offer unto God. We’ve been talking about that for a couple of days now, how we’ve none of us left anything of any eternal worth in or of ourselves that would find us welcome within the presence of the One we’ve so wronged as to walk away from the image in which we were made into rather a fellowship with a world living in perpetual enmity against what is only goodness personified. It makes no sense when you stop to think about it for even a second.

What are we doing in fighting so hard to have our way when such a pursuit demands we do only everything against the only One who is everything good?

Are we not then only waging war against the very good for which we claim to seek?

It’s insanity!

Thus the living sacrifice. The ongoing loss of life as He finds for us every single day some new way that we must lose something we’ve done our way. That is the gravity of sanctification’s seeking to grow in the Son. Growing in Him means we grow where He’s gone, and thus into the tomb is where our hope of new life is found. And too, once found via the faith that blinds us to our blindness, it then only inspires us almost incessantly to cease and desist whatever sort of resistance we’ve allowed to become of such substance that we fear actually losing our way of life that was lived earning the wages of death.

Yes, such is the deception of a heart’s deceit, it inspires us only to fear losing the death we have to deny, a fear it contends proven within His asking us to now take up a cross and walk His line.

And for once, we’re actually not far off the mark. For indeed, even a living sacrifice is bound to lose quite a lot as we go along. But there’s where we stumble upon the changes He’s begun within. Because we begin to see them not as losses of life but rather losses of looseness that’ve left us so lost and lazy that we could at a time have looked at the cross and turned away the gift given in His hanging in our place. Yes, we’ve all done just that, and that is what we get now to sacrifice in our share of His.

We get to leave behind all that He took to the cross. And not just the sins for which we feel bad about. No, we get to sacrifice our selfishness as we starve our sinfulness. We can now reject our rebellions and refuse our past rejection of Him to remain of any consideration going forward. For if we indeed know the truth which has done what the truth does, set us free, then we should be among those who do indeed see that we cannot live without Him, and too that He says Himself that we cannot live in Him unless and until we die to us and this world which we’ve allowed to inspire us to conspire against Him.

Yes, yes my friends, everything changes on this side of the cross, whether we agree to it or not. And therein we find the only thing we can offer God that He won’t utterly despise!

We talked yesterday about His not being pleased with sacrifices, scapegoats given to absolve all this guilt we’ve gained in getting our way. There is no money nor amount thereof that we could offer Him as if He’s to be bought off with our worldly belittlements and betrayals. We cannot utter some hidden message or play some secret string and please or appease the Author and Perfecter of faith, of then life itself. No, we have nothing with which to buy His welcome into anything other than His wrath we’ve well-earned already.

All we can offer is, again as David calls it, a broken spirit, a contrite heart that longs only for His healing so deeply that we agree daily to die to whatever isn’t worth living for anymore. For in Him we’ve found all we need as He is life forevermore. And so yes, let us do as urged here and offer our lives as a living sacrifice, for such is indeed our only way to worship the One we’ve long lived in war against.

For He needs not our money, our prizes, our possessions, not even our hopes or happiness. He needs nothing we have, but wants all we have left. And considering simply that Christ died to make a way for the little we have left to be enough to be welcomed back, I can think of nothing in or of this life of which I need to hold onto, not if holding on to anything here is so sure to keep me distracted from the hope and joy that is there, right in that place He’s prepared.

Friends, hold nothing back for doing so only allows you to continue holding yourself hostage. And there’s never anything to be gained in such a hopeless situation as our keeping to ourselves anything we can’t do anything with beyond this life. So let us find the strange willingness to lay down this life, after all, He’s shown us that is indeed the only way to find the new life to which we’re all now called.

Yes, a calling carried in our living as sacrifices, losing daily the lost ways we’ve lived in a world still so filled with so many others who might in our surrender see a glimmer of the hope we have in Him that’s inspired us to let go of what none of us want to keep around. For guilt is far too heavy a thing to live with, and so we should indeed be thankful that we’ve now the chance to sacrifice it every single time we find it or feel it. Because in Him we know that sacrifices aren’t only ended in a death.

Sometimes a sacrificed life brings only a better life.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold