Day 3415 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Luke 9:24 NIV

It’s a promise perfected along what is an almost perfect peculiarity, this path paved into the impossible gravity of everything unknown and as of now so eternally unknowable.

That is the heaviness of faith as it were. It’s the substance of things hoped for, the assurance of all that is of yet unseen. And there’s in that this realization that who we’ve been, how we’ve lived, this life we’re so accustomed to working in a certain way is now all of the sudden no longer quite so certain. For there must indeed come a change of scene if we’re to see that something unseen in which we’ve found this impossible assurance. Yes, there must come a moment in which we meet ourselves and decide who we’re to be within the gravity of what we give away.

Indeed, there comes a time, a line, a moment of movement toward a singular something in which we find this decision demanded of us, all because to agree that He has indeed descended for us deserves something far more than the negligent indifference in which we’ve thus far dreamed to remain.

Yes, this path of that perfect peculiarity is one in which we come upon this contemplation as to where we either continue to carry on into the known, carrying what we've always known, always had, always hoped to have or had to keep, or rather we surrender all that to the understanding that knowledge, while great, isn't quite the power we've long assumed. We accept that what we've known, this vast grasp of worldly knowledge we've had and hoped within, that it can only help us while within this world.

Thus it can't get us where we've now the chance to go. It can't lead us to a place we can't find. It can’t provide ideas that are worth all that much in this place as in our faith we’re lead to where our understanding only hinders the hope of our not being the ones who lead but rather follow meekly behind the Shepherd who we claim laid down His life for His sheep. We then the sheep in need of such guidance and provision as that promise He brought with the cost He paid to prove it promised.

And yet that's the dilemma.

It’s found in that He found reason to lose a life so that lives may be gained. Therefore there’s an undeniable difference made for any who wish to accept such a blessed renewal as this hope which only grows onward, upward, further into forever. And that there was such a direly distinct difference designed in His decision now demands we decide of our own what our own is worth. What is our share of His substance worth? What is this hope of all things made new worth?

What is salvation worth, and how else can we prove it’s worth anything if we’ll only resolve to the continuation of the nothing that we’ve always settled to offer unto all in life, of life that our tepid and fearful laziness and laxity has always determined sufficient?

Indeed, how might we now dare to do the same nothing we’ve always done when we are among those who claim something was done to design a different idea in our hearts? Have we that difference made inside? Have we opened that door to that distinct distinction? Or rather is He still left knocking? Is He outside our hearts waiting? Is He beating upon the beating of these hopes in which we’ve hoped to have or hold down here? Is He still Christ on the cross atoning for what we can’t quite admit we’ve lost, or rather is He the resurrection into which we now rage in order to shatter a life so lived inside a cage that we care not to lose whatever we’ve done?

Knowing in Him that the cross counted the cost of what we’ve done to the tune of our doing now everything differently.

Yes, indeed, He does deserve such a desire to do all things differently now, but what is different now though? What in our lives have we lost that added to the cost He carried in our cross, which too He carried? What have we given away in order to grow closer, deeper into the One we say gave all He could to help us see that we’ve nothing to lose? What will we lose in order to know that love that laid down a life that we might have ours made new?

Will we live anew, or just do as we’re used to and resolve to here dissolve inside this deadly indifference we’ve always known inside the wasted way of life we’ve always lived?

Sadly, it seems more days than not that we do try to toe that line a little too closely, so close in fact that we often tip back into the past from which we claim He came to save us from continuing. Yes, there is this often continuation of our consolation as considered passing for the sake of its pacificity. For we are creatures with an audacious appreciation of such simplicity. We love the comfort of not caring, the win of not losing, the joy of not knowing, the hope of never going anywhere other than back to where we’ve always been, because there we can manage.

Seems that that’s become the greatest aspiration for some, for many I contend. Just to manage. To survive. To get by and slip by and drift by. To waste and wait and want inside this sty that this sky conceals. Yes, we live as if it’s a wonderful thing to here congeal inside a life we attempt by the day to steal as if these stories are still able to provide us the glories in which we gain something that we otherwise don’t have to fear losing.

For our greatest fear is losing.

Though I reckon such was bound to become our belief. That is the way of the world, always was. We’re a people who think there’s something here we need, a manifestation of magnificence so majestic that our lives are meaningless without it. And we’ve spent so much time seeking that something that we’ve become nothing because of everything we think we now have to lose, that we now have to lose.

Yes, my friends, we now have to lose. Because as I said yesterday, this isn’t only a call to follow, but that in itself is a call to walk away.

For we can’t stay where we’ve been if we say He’s doing something different. We can’t remain who we’ve been if we claim He came to atone for such foolishness. We cannot seek to protect the roots we’ve planted into the rebellions we’ve planned, the rebellions we’ve perfected. We must allow the pruning away of whatever in us bears no fruit, for we’re now here called to produce fruit in keeping with repentance. Ah yes, the dreadful ‘r’ word, repentance. Dreadful as if demands a turning, a turning away, a turning down, a turning around so that we don’t allow ourselves to drown inside who we’ve become.

Because He came!

Indeed, because He came we must now come away from what He came to call us away from. And thus the perfect peculiarity of this path paved toward a promise so profound that He found in us something worth dying for, something we’ve so clearly never looked for, cared for, fought for. And thus the change which must come if we’re to follow Him to that hope we’ve never had, should still not have. Because the fact is that since we do have such a blessed hope as that home with Him in Heaven, we can no more stay here than we at once stayed certain we could.

This faith changes everything. Violently. Viciously. Vehemently. And yet we walk a world in which we see others assume, perhaps even assume ourselves, that such a walk can somehow be done rather vicariously. That we can merely settle meekly for the hope He has, insisting that He be the only One who has it. Indeed, we live as if His believing in us is enough for us to not strive into the boldness of believing in Him. That since He died and thus finished our salvation, that we’ve left nothing to do save for wait for it to show itself within gates opening that we know we’ve never looked for, yearned for, run for.

But friends, when He said that “it is finished”, that is merely where our following began. What He finished was our sinful inconsistency. He finished our selfish propensity. He ended our endless insistence upon such a sense of entitlement that we lived for years expecting everything whilst doing nothing. Yes, He finished our days of doing nothing, for it’s that sort of vile indifference that caused the death in us, and now invites us to share in the death of us, that old us, that complacent and careless us who He came to save.

Did He? And if He did as we claim He did, will we?

For here He makes clear that whomever wishes to save their life, to keep their life, to retain their life and therefore continue to estrange their life from He who came to save their life, they will lose it. And yet whomever loses their life will, according to all four Biblical Gospels, find it, keep it, preserve it, save it. For as it will soon turn out, that line, that moment mentioned above, that decision we discover along this path through this life, it’s the grave. For that is the line He crossed with that cross to call us across.

Will we cross?

From here to there? From now to then? From this nowhere we’ve been, this nothing we’ve found to the place He’s always known and already prepared? Will we leave this life, lose this life, or rather do we still too much love this life to lose it, leave it?

Alas, it seems that the answer to that is rather different depending upon the day. For here there are days in which we don’t mind the idea of staying. We endure comforts that are so pleasing that we’re appeased and at peace with the thought of resting a while. We come across contentments that are in anything but godliness, and yet in this world they’re still a gain good enough that we can consider denying the greater. Indeed, in this life as lost in this place, we mind not placing our preference and priority on the prizes and the prices people are paying to keep playing as if all this is just a game.

Yes, we seem somedays plenty willing to stake our souls on this being so little as to merely change the rules whenever we lose, all so that we don’t have to let go of what we know we can’t keep much longer.

But that’s my question for today: How much longer will we keep going on this way? How much longer will we keep trying this our way? How much longer then will we deny, debate, ignore His way? Yes, how much longer will we love what we’ll lose while not losing what would help us love what we can keep forever?

For that is the weight of redemption. It’s that He’s redeemed His, and that if we are His, then we are too redeemed, a sharing in such salvation as His resurrection over the death we deserve for the death we’ve lived all this time. For sin is death as defined by Him, and thus we have no say. So, will we stay? Will we settle? Will we accept that our understanding is as good as it gets?

Or rather, will we get to moving, to losing, to leaving and learning that to love is to leave a lost life behind? For is that not what He did for us? Lost a life? Scripture says in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” It’s the exchange that’s meant to change everything, even our understanding of life itself and what it’s meant to be lived for, lost for.

Yes, again my friends, we are meant to lose this life as we leave a life behind. Only then a matter of which one and when.

That is the great decision demanded of our faith. What will we lose and just when will we leave it behind? For the truth is that we should love this opportunity as love proved for us that losing a life is not a loss should the lost life be the one lost to the wrong side of right. No, that is in fact why He came. It was to call us to an awareness of just how wrong we’ve been so that we can see only then that this call to lose our lives is the only way to find our lives.

Because if we have indeed lived within the death of sin, then all we lose in losing a life to follow Him is our following that sin into more of the death it is. And so if all we lose by losing our lives as lived in sin is nothing but more sin and thus more death, then friends, only in Him can we find life. And I think that’s pretty much the whole point of everything from everything the Prophets said to everything the Apostles said, to what He Himself had to say.

For since it is finished, thus it all begins.

That is the beauty of God’s blessed benevolence. It just has this way of turning everything on its head so that we might head toward the best up ahead, not stopping anymore, not ever again to worry that the best might have already been. We’re told in Ecclesiastes that it is not wise to carry such an outlook as that looking always behind or always around assuming that that or that this is as good as it gets. Because no, that empty grave proves that His promise still waits for us to shed this skin so that the rest of eternity can begin.

What will begin then, my friends? What will begin? Will we find life after this? Or rather will this sin-filled death only continue? Seems that such is for us to decide, and yes, perhaps every day we have left. But if we can’t see the blessing we have in such an opportunity, well, we might need to rethink what life is meant to be and just what we’re at risk of losing. Because if this seems a hard decision, perhaps we know less than we might imagine.

For if it was worth His death for us to have this opportunity, should it not be worth our losing a lost life too if it means our finding what He died for us to have forever?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold