Day 3404 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 4:27 NIV

For as is commonly known, all’s fair in both love and war, and perhaps even more so within this war for love in which our emotions are so easily used against.

Because whether it be seen in anger or arrogance or some other likewise assumptive attitude, we indeed must be aware of the ways in which the evil one works into our wants so as to leave us wasting away within a world and a way we’re all leaving behind before long. That is his way as the lord of lies and father of falsehood. Indeed, the devil’s a hijacker, always looking to heist hearts and hopes in order to turn our attention and intention toward playing into what will sadly be eternally his only accomplishment.

He does come still only to steal and kill and destroy, leaving us to determine and then defend wherever we might decide to stand so that we never again descend back into the dark and dim which define his hand.

And what’s incredible is that indeed, nothing at all has changed in regard to how he plays his hand in this game of life we’ve all so heartbreakingly agreed to assume in indeed nothing more than a game in which the rules are made up as we go along so that we all get along with those who are too going nowhere other than everywhere we’ve already been. Yes, thanks to the devil’s deceptions, it seems we’ve all but determined that life is to be lived cyclical in nature, just a people chasing the tail end of wants and wishing always to catch them before we stop caring and move on to another to chase after.

As to why we’ve settled so sternly, so solemnly, so strictly upon such a sorrow is one of those understandings that seems to be ever-unfolding along this line so narrow that we come to know only that we don’t know today what we can indeed hope to understand by this time tomorrow, so long as we stop trying to make such knowledge conform to all these preconceived concessions that we’ve long considered far above tolerable.

Yes, we live as is the bare-minimum is where our best imaginations are to be believed for, and so we store ourselves inside ourselves assuming safety within such monotony as again today being slaves of yesterday’s unwillingness to listen to reason warning us against not moving beyond our violent disbelief.

I can personally attest that such is the best for which I hoped and hustled over the years. Always afraid that I was falling behind, and in this world that’s such a crime that it’s widely considered better to just fall apart if need be just so we don’t see anything less than everything that everyone else tells us is best. Yes, always looking to a world so clearly lost to help us find what we know none have found. It’s almost as if we actually crave insanity, and perhaps we do for the simple sake of the lack of responsibility we like to assume such an outlook accomplishes on our behalf.

Which leads me to yet another one of my strange realizations as found within my ongoing contemplation of our almost heretical hypocrisy.

For you see, we’re a people so clearly selfish, always looking out for number one as the cliché has become. Indeed, almost all of all that we do is done only to win something we want, to avoid something we don’t, to get our way, and even go out of our way in order to come back around to our best ideas in the end. And as a part of this self-absorption, we’ve become entirely embracive of anything and everyone who offers to do something for us, to achieve something for us, to give something to us.

Yes, if it seems to have been done for us, on our behalf, we’re more than willing to believe in order receive such a benefit as our gaining something without having to get it.

Except salvation.

Because the reality is that the Gospel tells us of the greatest gift given to all of us, and yet despite the obvious freedom (which we’ve not personally found), the eternal forgiveness (which we can’t quite prove we don’t need), the endless provision (which we’re entirely happy to receive everyday), and even the truth which binds them all together into a promise so beautiful the entirety of our human languages cannot convey (a hope brighter and bigger than any other we’ve wanted or imagined all this time), still we seem completely content to deny it all.

Just because of the personal responsibility it asks.

And so that leaves me wondering, as I tend to do more often than most I’d assume, where is this line upon which we walk in which we welcome everything that benefits us in any way but still allows us to refuse to accept what is undeniably the best thing for us, the best thing that’s ever happened to us, the greatest gift which came to save us? I just don’t understand how that’s possible, considering how adamant we are to have our best lives in this time as spent with so little personal involvement or effort that we can otherwise actually spend our time somewhat enjoying life.

That is the power of the Gospel, and yet we go about seeking the same result along so many other failing and foolish avenues just because His narrow road is indeed narrow.

Might lead to Heaven, might ask only that we repent and live responsibly, might convey a hope that the sum of our wildest imagination couldn’t begin to compete with or pretend to stand against. It’s just that darn responsibility thing!

As if, when boiled down to an eight-word concept as defined in this verse, one or two of those eight words even being basically excess as adjectives and articles are in the written language, is so impossible to understand that we just can’t allow ourselves to try even the consideration of such a call.

Not give devil foothold. Cut in half, and still those four words define the simplicity of our part in our salvation, and yet it’s too hard, too cumbersome, too restrictive, too responsible, too whatever.

Friends, are we alive or just getting by? Because the gravity of life itself is that everything done within it demands effort. Feeding ourselves at the very least, at least these days, asks only that we pick up a cell phone and have a stranger run through the drive through for us so we don’t even have to put on clothes and just have our meals ring our doorbells. But even then, the doordash dude doesn’t hang around and put the food in our mouth does he? The grocery delivery person doesn’t put the groceries in the pantry or cook your meals, do they?

Getting dressed, brushing teeth, even watching tv, they all ask us to do something. And we’re happy to do them, because pressing buttons on a remote or a microwave bring us pleasure in the form of junk food and junk entertainment. Is that all we’re worth, junk? The least amount of effort or interest humanly possible? The bare-bones, bare-minimum of expectation? Do we truly think ourselves unable to do more than just survive whilst waiting and pretending we’re not dying?

Or do we just not want to do anything that might actually have a cost?

You see, this simple request as we’re called to undertake in the resisting of granting the devil an entryway back into our hearts now that they’ve been offered both renewal and redemption, it’s just that, simple. But then too it’s also costly, because we all honestly know what it means. And that right there is why I think so many simply refuse to accept the gravity of this faith. It’s not because it’s not worth the trouble, it’s merely that it’s troubling to our present way of life.

Because we don’t mind the devil having a foothold. We don’t mind the filthy jokes, the seedy bars, the foul language in popular music, the graphic violence or innuendo strewn across tv screens. We don’t mind the dirty websites that help us to not feel lonely for a few minutes. We don’t mind the drinks that cool off our memories of mistakes made that we can’t make right. We don’t mind the hours spent on social media becoming more mindless by the scroll. We don’t mind the gluttony of an all-you-can-eat or the greed of an all-you-can-want kind of world that offers us everything the world then says we need.

Don’t mind any of it. Made a life of it actually.

And therein lies the problem that we all have in some way at some time in regard to this faith. Because it basically asks us to kill ourselves, for that is indeed sadly just how attached we’ve each become to the devil making our decisions for us. We’re used to us being who we are, living how we live, liking what we like, hating whatever everyone else inspires us to hate. We’re good with things as they are.

But friends, things as they are are only getting worse.

See, I think that’s something we seem to not understand in life anymore. We’ve bought into this idea that we can stay put, that there’s always going to be some middle ground we can reside on, in, with. But the reality of life is that we’re either getting better or we’re getting worse. We’re either growing wiser or slipping further from wisdom. We are either living for something, standing for something, fighting for something, or we’re just dying. And I know that the only reason we don’t agree with that is because the devil has us convinced that we don’t need to.

We live as if we’ll be here forever and that nothing ever has to change so long as we’re here. But friends that is the coffin that seals our fate every single day that we refuse to rescind the welcome we’ve given to our enemy and to then lose the wealth of deception that he’s ready and waiting to offer in order to get us to reconsider. Because the devil wants us as much as we want to live without responsibility, and so this is a match truly made in hell. And if we’re okay with that, then good enough. Live it up. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Just know that it won’t.

It won’t last simply because Christ came. And as that cross still stands in the middle of our road called life, so stands our living either according to it or still running away from it. There is no other way this goes down. We are either in Christ or we’re against Him, and don’t take my word for it as it’s written plain as day in His. Matthew 12:30.

And that’s why things have to change, because up until our awareness of Christ, we’ve all lived on the wrong side of right. Again, we’re all completely accustomed to this way of life we’ve wasted wanting and wishing for the wickedness of this world to help us remain distracted from the fact that living in sin isn’t living at all. It’s just the only way of living that we’ve come to know in this life lived in this world living in love with all the lies that the devils tries to get us to buy.

Because even he knows that the only way we can afford such a blatant disregard to the simple reality of responsibility is by buying those lies that we can only afford to purchase with the souls we have that we assume are ours to give away.

They’re not.

We are not our own, but we are each left to live these lives within the freewill afforded us that will inevitably define us as we’re each one day weighed and found wither wanting or welcome. And when you put it that way, with Heaven’s peace on the table, I personally cannot anymore pretend that His promise isn’t worth the pain He’s proven it’s worth. For He took my place that I might share in how He got there so that I might end up in His place, a place my past never cared to try for.

How much longer can we continue not caring to try? Because the simple fact is that not one letter of God’s Word is going to fade away, and again, don’t take my word for it, again, it’s found written out in His. Nothing is going to change of all that’s been done, thus Christ did really die for our sins. And that’s a fact that leaves us only to now reconsider just what we welcome into our lives, our hearts, our minds, and then at the same time, what all we now agree to lose and go ahead without.

And believe me, I understand the gravity as I myself lose something I’ve loved or enjoyed or appreciated almost every day. And yeah, sometimes it’s hard to find the reason to wave goodbye to an entire way of life that I’ve lived, at times entirely comfortably and pretty profitably. But I’m understanding finally that it’s not what we lose in this life that matters but rather what we then find the hope of gaining inside forever.

And even then too, no, this world doesn’t make it any easier to keep our hopes focused upon forever. Down here it’s as if life comes speeding by all the time, ever faster it feels. And this faith, it’s like we’re caught standing still upon a narrow rock of everlasting hope while all these thoughts and threats, ideas and intentions and inventions, they just keep flooding our days demanding we allow in again all the excess everyone else is still enjoying.

It’s hard and yet it’s also slowly becoming the only life that makes sense.

Because there’s nothing quite like the feeling of the darkness slipping away and allowing the beauty of His goodness to shine a little more than it ever has before. It’s literally indescribable as it’s something I seem to feel entirely at random and yet somehow consistently within every single day. And I just can’t look upon the hope we’ve been given and look back to a way of life in which the best I hoped for was to get lucky and not get caught worrying about getting what I didn’t need.

For I know I need His forgiveness, His hope, His healing, His patience and provision and the promise they all lead toward. And so if it means my letting go of all I’ve known before and refusing to allow the devil to so easily drag me away from what I know God has offered, so be it. That is a fight worth fighting, no matter how hard it gets or how heavy it feels.

Do not give the devil a foothold. Because while anger or arrogance, complacency and comfort, selfishness and superficiality may all seem nice and feel easy, if it doesn’t lead us closer to Jesus then it only drags us further from life. Because He is the life, and so it all does indeed seem to boil down to a life and death situation. Which are you going to choose?

Just know that the truth is that either way we’ll both win and lose. Only a matter of what and when then. Live now and have fun doing it and lose that when this part ends or rather die to sin now and find in that the hope of living a life of peace later on. Yeah, I’ll take my peace when it’s permanent.

Even if that means war until then. And even if that is waged against myself and all these petty prizes with which the devil still entices.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold