Day 3414 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Luke 5:11 NIV

Tis an increasingly beautiful life, this one in which a heart is willing to walk away from a world of wealth because you’ve eyes to see the worth of such a walk as proven within the promise of where it leads.

Yet so much of what we’ve come to so sadly assume of life and this stagnant existence within which we lose it and leave it is nothing but our loving a way in which we win what is near without ever nearing what is not. Because we’ve become but a continuation of those many of millions, bands of billions who’ve always been what we’ve still become. It’s just this endless cycle of concessions conceding that there’s nothing worth seeing alongside any ride that resides outside the status quo of living to have and to hold.

Indeed, we are a people given in matrimony to the pursuit of money and material, doing so only so that we’ve a wealth this world won’t deny was worth the time spent of the life lost that we gave away in order to get what we never would keep no matter how desperately we might try.

For such is the overall outcome of all this. It’s something we discuss in detail many days anymore. It’s that we’re leaving and yet that we’re not willing to live like it. We’re not at all living like we’re losing this time that cannot be retaken, returned, redeemed or received again. None of us, by worrying, can add even an hour to our lives. None of us, by wanting, can purchase the self-assumed promise of a tomorrow in which we can toil again for the day thereafter.

No, none of us, by winning the whole world or a wealth of wealth within can wrangle a lifetime that’s to be deemed worthy of receiving a royal welcome beyond those gates for which we’ve not sought to gain such a hope.

Because we’re fooling ourselves to think that God won’t mind a little time or attention given unto anything, everything that isn’t Him. That He won’t care if we care about everything but considering Him. That He’s okay if we live a life spent walking always only away from His way, contending then that our will is better than His. Yes, surely He won’t mind that. Perhaps we’ll even manage to impress, what with the wealth we win and the world we do it in.

Yes, maybe God is rather to be pleased by what we’ve done in, to, of this place. Yeah, nothing wrong down here, right? Nothing at all!

After all, we’ve all plenty of prizes with pretty prices to point at should He ask what we’re doing. And despite that being a question asked clearly of Elijah in 1 Kings, we live as if it’s not to ever be asked of us. But, allow me to burst yet another bubble. What are you doing here?

Indeed, what are we doing here? Why is that we’re here always the basis for what we’re doing? What are we doing? What are we choosing? What are we chasing? What are we placing? What are we preaching? What are we seeing, saying, showing, sewing, growing? Where are we going? What are we doing? What are we losing? What are we leaving? What are we loving? Where are we loving? Who are we loving? What are we doing?

Well, despite the unrealized unraveling a pride’s predicament, purchasing for us always this sort of meek and weak wandering into a sheepish fear of finally showing ourselves to be who we’ve been, always pretending we’ve not done what we’ve done, the fact is that what we’re doing is living like we’re not losing, not leaving, not choosing or chasing or wanting or wasting a single thing in this life, for this life. We’re all merely waking up every single day as if we’ve always another on the way in which the wealth we want is sure to come.

And when that is our outlook, we’ll look out only for whatever caters to such a catastrophic consideration.

Indeed, we even read through a warning of very similar regard in Jesus’ parable of the rich man’s abundant harvest in Luke chapter 12. It’s the story of this man who’d found himself a good ground into which he’d sewn a crop that reaped a heaping harvest so impressive that he ran out of room in which to store his yield. And so he decided to build bigger barns and have then some place to place all his produce as produced by the good ground he’d grown his wealth within.

And then once surrounded by the substance of such voluminous success, he said to himself that he had plenty to last him for a while, years it would seem. So he chose to sit, to settle, to “take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

Sound familiar? For we see the same thing over in Psalm 39:6, one of my personal favorites. “Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom; in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.” Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom, without knowing.

What are we doing?

This whole idea hit me like a ton of lead last night as I read through Luke recounting the calling of the Disciples. First here the fishermen, Simon, James and John. They’d been out fishing all day, a rather lucrative operation in those days to be sure. For people had to eat, right? And the waters provided God’s provision and gave those with the ability the opportunity to make a decent living doing their working upon the water.

And yet when the three saw what Jesus had caused to happen, a catch so big it was breaking nets, they rowed their life’s livelihood upon the shore and said goodbye to what was an entirely worthwhile and wealth-promising path they’d been walking. They turned off of what they knew and just walked away. Left the boats and never looked back.

Who does that?

Well, Levi did the same thing just a few verses after this one. 5:28. Matthew, as he’s better known to most, a tax collector, also a venture of rather comfortable income. Indeed, in those days tax collectors were afforded a great deal of worldly wealth and comfort for they did the bidding of the ruling class and thus were given the means to live well within the world they were working for. They were given protection from the people that clearly then, as still today, weren’t too big on paying governments to become richer as they struggled to makes end most days.

Indeed, we read in Luke 5:28 that “Levi got up, left everything and followed him.” Left everything and followed Him, the same thing said of those fishermen here in 5:11. Left everything, more than we can imagine, some of us at least. For these men saw something in Jesus that didn’t even give their minds a moment to reconsider what they had that they’d lose were they to leave it all and follow Him. They just knew. For such is the substance of faith, it knows past what’s proven. It believes beyond what’s already been.

It is confidence in what is hoped for, an assurance of things unseen, a certainty thrown in the face of a life lived uncertain. It’s rebellious, redemptive, restorative, ridiculous, rare, real, right, right now, it’s a revival, a renaissance. It’s a new way not walked before, but one won simply because one knows that what it leads to is worth more than the wealth of what’s left behind.

Have we that faith? The kind that considers only the call and not the cost? The sort that settles to surrender our care for worldly comfort in exchange for a share of the confidence that charges into the grave knowing that life is waiting to be found within? The belief that steps out of boats with the same feet that once before left a boat behind simply because they believed in the beauty of the journey into which, unto which they’d been invited, impossible though it seemed?

Well, perhaps some days we do, but then again, how many of those days can there be? Do we not spend still plenty of days worrying about what’s here? Do we not waste away in worry about the wealth we want, the hopes we hold, the dreams we design and demand and devote ourselves to doing, being, showing, seeing? Indeed, are not our lives lived most days as if life is lived only in this place? And if so, well then how can we know what faith is when we’re not yet to the part in which we do the unthinkable?

For that is what faith demands. It’s not just a call to follow, but a call then to leave. It’s not only an asking that we walk behind but too that we walk away. It’s a path paved upon which we’ve the chance to see things that are impossible, but sometimes that means we have to stop leaning upon the certainty of what we know already proven.

That’s why we have stories like this shared here for our benefit, or rather the benefit of our belief as He is more than happy to oblige that request to help our unbelief. We just need to admit that we have it. The unbelief. The fear. The worry. The hesitancy to walk away from what we know to work, to win, to want, to worry about. And that’s the whole problem, it’s that we struggle to admit that we’re afraid to lose what we already have as it’s always worked.

And we don’t know, because our faith is weak, how His way could work when it seems to ask more often than not that we leave behind what we know in exchange for what we couldn’t possibly.

But that’s exactly why the promise is so impressive. We read of it in Matthew 10:29-30. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.” But even then, despite the promise to receive a hundredfold return on our reverence as we join a family of the reverent, there’s even still those three words there that are perfectly problematic.

“Along with persecutions.”

See, we all know what this road means as Christ came to walk it well and left us a wealth of understanding as to what may come should we follow. That along it we would leave things, lose things, love things this world hates, hate what this world loves, and in that, that we’d find ourselves enemies of this state of life so many are lost in love with pretending they’re not losing. Indeed, in Him we see that we might even become so hated that the world just can’t stand having us around anymore.

And that’s bigger than leaving boats or tax booths.

But friends, this journey isn’t about the jaunt but rather the joy of knowing that Jesus is already where we’re going and that He will not lose any who lean upon Him to get them where they’ve no other way of going. We have no other option. We have no competing offer. There is no other Name. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Said by the same man who left his life behind to follow Jesus into a sort of perfect poverty that allowed piety to finally become priority.

What is our priority? Is it that of the rich farmer who had so much here to hope in that he quit trying for more, not caring about anything more than what he’d managed to store? Is it the complacency of a comfortable job that’s always measured up to suit our needs and satisfy our wants? Is it the prizes we’ve won and the people we’ve come to impress with them? Is it the dreams we have of lives lived well, best lives as some assume them here? Is it the common pursuit of popularity or power or profit of some other kind?

What is our life worth, and is it worth so much that we can’t leave it behind for what we can only hope, only trust, only believe is undeniably better?

Yes, this faith asks much of us, but to whom much is given, from the same much is too required. And He gave us so much that He had to lose it all in order for us to have even the opportunity to imagine it worth walking away from a world of wealth, a wealth within this world. That is what is required, and it is much, but He gave so much more.

Or did He?

See, that’s basically the question which defines our faith and the lengths to which we’ll go to know more of Him or deny that we need to. For there are extremities in this faith no matter which side of that line we walk. We have to either walk away from the hope He died to give us so that we can continue working and wanting and wishing for wealth as won within this world. Or we have to walk away from this world and its wealth and its wants and its wishing and wasting and worrying about what is only worth something here.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, and nobody can serve two masters.

So what’s it to be friends? What are we walking away from, knowing that either way, the answer is life? What life are we losing, and what life does that answer say we’re finding?

As I said yesterday, it’s better to live a life knowing where you’re going than to live one assuming you’re already there. For I cannot imagine that all of this means so little as to live a life for only what’s left behind. Because that’s just it, we’re all going to leave all this behind someday anyway. Do we have the faith to lose it now if such means finding the faith that knows there’s still the best up ahead?

Or are we rather content to stay with the boats just in case?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold