Day 3438 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ephesians 5:11 NIV

Having been set ablaze by a brazen belief becomes in those few of faith a fervor fervent upon furthering the freedom found in Christ’s having found us having wandered away from all that a faith affords.

Indeed, we are now in Him eternally indebted unto such a goodness as that which gave for us a grace that turned a grave into gateway through which we’ve now this hastened hope to hurry and harken of our share in that home as held in Heaven, sharing that such good news is given also unto all who’ve the ability to see beyond the disbelief of darkness and the shame of the shadows amongst which and with whom we’ve long hidden our lives through this time. Yes, we are made now aware of just how fleeting this feeling as this life itself lay fading.

And as it burns to ember, this life lived without the light of Christ’s love leading the way toward the better we’ve never proven ourselves able to be all by ourselves, we rejoice now in the joy of knowing that His Word and His will are at work as a consuming fire that finds for all, who’ve the faith to try, a testimony over the trials we’ve failed and those through which He’s now promised to lead us as still they come for us.

For that is the entirety of this life’s gravity. It’s that it’s basically what boils down to a great big battlefield upon which we’ve boasted and blasphemed and believed thus in only the blinded disbelief of those disheveled into despair and disrepair due to the devil’s doing as the devil does. Yes, this world is rife with such raucous rebellion as this revelry in which we rejoice in these rewards we seek so as to say we’ve received what the rest really want for themselves as well.

Yes, the adversary has accomplished this assumption which assumes that life is a competition in which we’re supposed to be competing against one another for what we’re all told we should desire. And because we see so many falling head-over-heels for such harm and hatred as that inspired by seeing our neighbor as our enemy, we seek out those who live their lives seeing and seeking what we want for ourselves so that we feel not alone in this great big world so filled with what a battlefield is.

And yet we deny all of it being done as we can’t bear the brutality of the truth which says that taking part in this dividing of life leaves us too a divided house which thus cannot stand. No, we build our beliefs upon the shifting sands of humanity’s grievances and a sinful society’s assumptions, leaving us always looking to the world around us to lead us into being or believing, wanting or wrecking whatever needed to be left still seated upon these victims thrones from which we pretend ourselves princes as opposed to paupers.

For paupers have here no power, no prestige, no platform from which to perform for the people a pleasing performance that placates the preferences for popularity and politic providing a person a persona behind which they themselves can play pretend as if they too are never the poor or pitiable but always the preferred and profitable.

Indeed, we’ve come so far in this wrong direction that we seek a world’s wealth within the warmth of the wicked’s wants, always wanting to win what the world wishes to have so that we have something by which to awe those lost in that assumption that says we’ve something here we need to have or hold or see or be in order to feel as though we belong. And as those who’ve been created as a communal creation, we fall quickly for whatever semblance of acceptance might be wagered against our walking away from where we had once been in order to be what the world wants to see.

Yes, and along that line leaving a life of love behind, well, we’ve come only to love what doesn’t bring life but what rather disrupts life, divides life, destroys life. For that is what sin does, as sin is death and our having run from that reality reveals that we realize the ridiculousness of such rebellion.

For we’d not try so very hard to hide our every error were we not so well aware that we were making them while always remembering what was at once written upon our hearts which was scribed thereon to remind us against what might kill us.

No, rather our hearts have become stone-like thanks to the hardening of this world’s hatred of God’s call to humility. For it’s not that we couldn’t be, it’s just the asking. That He asks us to take up crosses, to leave old lives then behind and begin to learn again how to live and love and lose all that leaves us unable to grow in that regard, it all just seems to our arrogance and ego an expectation entirely too humiliating.

But why?

Well, simply because that request is what we know as the death we’ve denied and decried all this time so spent inside the darkness of a sinner’s delight in depravity. Indeed, we see with very little effort the evidence of what crosses do, assuming still that such is all they might accomplish despite the round stone in the distance designing a vastly different display which only a few are able to receive. And there are but few simply because of what He asks us to do.

Because He asks us to come to an understanding of where we’re standing and the lack of life as lived thereon. For there is no life in sin just as there is no light in dark nor any dark in Christ. And that we’ve tried so hard to hide our actions, to disguise our words, to convince this world that we are like them so that they’d like us, a feat only accomplished by our doing as they do, such has become in us a violent share of their solemn indifference toward such a demand as what salvation is.

You see, salvation is a gift indeed as God in Christ chose to give what we do not deserve having done all we have that He simply said shouldn’t have been even considered. But that we don’t deserve His mercy is where that gift of salvation brings a new command in that we love, not as the world does as Christ gives not as the world gives. No, He asks rather that we love the Lord our God with all we are and that we too extend that same obligation to those who are anymore obliged to hate us for agreeing to become such a difference.

We’ve talked about this a lot of late, how the world will come to hate us for our leaving the ways in which they’ve always known us. Indeed, we will become the enemies we’ve always joined them in fighting against. It’s our own version of Saul to Paul in that we few who come to find hope in Christ, and thus life as well as that is what He promised unto all who lose this life for that for which He gave His, we find our own Damascus upon which the truth blinds us and then binds us to becoming but the breath through which God breathes His benefit unto all who’ve eyes to see and ears to hear.

Indeed, in Christ we are returned to being but vessels of His benevolence, hands and feet as it were, a people, an army carrying a light into the dark so as to shine the Way home by telling those who knew us once that we’re not who they once knew, but mainly why.

And that is where our transgression are, in Christ, transformed into a testimony of His turning our lives around from the death in which we’d once drown back to the shores of life itself as held inside that hope held just beyond the horizon line of this life we’re all to leave behind.

Yes, that is why we’re still here. It’s because we’ve got a story to tell that someone in this world needs to hear.

For who better to testify to the saving acts of God's grace as seen and shown within the light of Christ's luminous love for all of us than all of us who've walked so deeply in the darkness which still engulfs those who once knew us best therein? Yes, we've indeed been so well-known by a world in which we've lived and loved and looked to be loved in return via the only way such an outcome is promised in this place. For even Scripture says that if we are of the world the world will love us as their own as we would be exactly like they.

And that is in every way who we've been all this time. We've been both in the world, and thus because of our considerations always toward comfort's contentment, we've also lived of the world doing as the world has inspired and thus expected us to do. We've become replicas of the rebellion, reveling in the rejoicing over things done which shouldn't even be considered. In fact, that's what the very next verse discusses.

For indeed, it is truly shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. It is disgusting to speak on what the disbelieving do in darkness where they assume their deeds so well undisclosed and thus undiscoverable. And this is a truth we all know for ourselves, for again, we've been among those who do such things, and thus as part of our trying to please the world so as to feel as though we belong in the world, so too have we gone along with the world doing as the world has done.

Thus we have ourselves walked well within the darkness of wickedness' wanting always worse pleasures as such is demanded as the novelty wanes and leaves a shattered soul seeking something more satiating. And while our shameful deeds as born within the fruit we've sown within our share of this sinful soil have left many mark upon our barely beating hearts, such has become now the most perfect grounds for a testimony of God's transcendence over our transgressions.

Because while we've indeed done a great many disgusting deeds ourselves, such are now merely the scars we've left to show of the times we tried to destroy ourselves only to fail in overcoming God's grace seeking to save us from ourselves.

Then as we begin to be reborn in this repentance brought about and bought on our behalf so that we might now live in Christ, we're because of that gift now called into a share of His rebirth into souls renewed, meaning then that all the old which we sinfully sowed is now just stories to share of how He met us where we once were and refused to lose those who have always been His.

And while that demands our humility as born inside our humiliation of having our dirty deeds displayed for all to see, such might now help another to see that they too are His to the encouragement wherein they themselves embrace the grace that awaits in the grave wherein once in we can all shed our sinful skin and step into the salvation for which He laid down His life as if to lay a bridge for us to cross through a cross that was all our own, a cross that He didn't leave us to carry on our own.

And if there's a message that'll preach to this lost and losing land, it is that transcendence of such a transformation that accomplished for us this adoption into being once more who we were created to be before, children of light who've, now that we've walked low within the valleys of shadows, no fear left of those mistakes we once tried to hide as they've now been allowed to heal as they lay at the foot of the cross and just outside the tomb where we left them behind to become emissaries who emit a share of His surpassing glory through the stories we've now to share of who we once were and how we're no longer there.

It’s only that His light overcame the darkness we’d become. His mercy met our madness and compassionately acted as if a medic applying grace and salvation as if treating an open wound received from fighting this battle on the wrong side of right. And our having been so lovingly healed, and healing still, we slowly come to see this need to share His Word and His will for welcome held within are what have brought us back to life from a death we didn’t know we had been living in the dark.

And that is exactly why this world will come to despise our difference.

Because you see, the Gospel we’ve lived and are thus called to share, it is offensive as it confronts our comforts inside the many mistakes as made within the many misunderstandings this world's made us to believe so as to feel as if we belong. And indeed, when it says what the deeds of darkness are, they do, many of them hit home in a way that hurts and humbles. And when further it says what the kingdom of Heaven is to be like, and further still that none who do those things shall inherit the rest or peace or perfection which await within that Heaven, well, it inspires you do so some changing.

And yet, as God knows well our worldly hesitancy toward change, His Word also allots this hope in telling us that, "that is what some of you once were." But then too, "you were washed." Yes, washed, sanctified, in fact justified in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. And His having so mercifully washed us of our wretchedness as won in what Christ did for us, thus in our share of His suffering our past is lost when we finally agree that Christ came to wash it all away.

But that is just where this story begins as in Him we become unable to refrain from speaking that Name which went to that grave so as to give us His grace that affords us this chance to say that we are not the darkness as that which this world once knew us as we lived so blended in amongst them. No, rather as we discussed a couple days ago, we have now renounced our secret and shameful ways as we’ve come to learn that that which is done in the dark will be revealed by His light. And as such light has seen what we’ve done and still did what He did upon that cross, we realize now we’ve nothing left to lose, nothing left to hide.

No, rather only a story to share of what we once were and how we’re no longer there.

And while this world may not understand it, may not want to hear it, may in fact fight viciously against it, against us, we must remember that it’s only because this world knows not yet the love of God as given in Christ, but that we are here to testify to His goodness so that some might come to believe in Him because of our boldness in being honest and speaking the truth of both our pasts and His ability to overcome them. For that is what this world needs more than anything else.

They just don’t know it yet. But that denial defines this difference for we in Him know the danger of leaving that learning to the end and only then learning the hard way.

Thus we’re here to try and help whomever we might by setting fire to our past efforts to hide what we never could so that this world still trying in vain to hide themselves might realize for themselves that it’s a wasted effort that only keeps them lost outside the love that is the light that they’ve only come to hate because their deeds are dark. Yes, and that is where our testimony comes in. For that which we’ve ourselves renounced becomes that which we cannot help but denounce.

Indeed, as children of the light walking in the light of Christ’s love, we will come to see the death in that which He’s shown us to renounce, helped us to renounce. And as those living to share His love with a lost world, we can’t accept the death of any other either. No matter how misunderstood the effort or honesty may seem by those without eyes to see or ears to hear or hearts willing turn and return to hope itself as held inside Heaven.

We are not here to placate the preferences of those eternally decided upon staying in the dark. For to do so would demand we do as we’ve always done and live to please people by either doing as they do or affirming what they do. But we cannot agree to that anymore as we’ve come to see the death of what’s done down here. And again, we just can’t accept that for anyone, even if they’re happy to settle upon it for themselves.

No, we are here to speak the truth of love, of light, of life. May we not be surprised when, like roaches, many around us scatter from us as we light it up and live to love in that light as He who is the Light and the Life so lovingly loved us back to life. For such will come, the hatred of those held fast in and to the darkness of sin. But that’s okay as Christ Himself embraced the odds as so clearly still stacked against the light of truth as hated in a world lost in the darkness of lies and sin.

We can have nothing else to do with that from which He saved us, nothing more than using those wounds and the scars they left as proof of His redemption as given as reward to any who themselves might come into the light simply because they saw something different in us from the darkness in which they once recognized us.

For we cannot possibly make a difference if we do nothing different. And yet such is the glory of the Gospel in that He makes all things new. Even if doing so means setting fire to who we’ve been so that our pasts finally serve a purpose and bear some fruit through their illuminating the death of that life we once spent in a share of their hating the mercy that asks us out of our madness into His majesty.

And since we’ve now just that opportunity, we cannot help but warn against all that’s at war against those who still refuse to see this life as a battle we’ve all lost, but a life to which He came to bring us back.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold