Day 3445 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 1:21 NIV

It is truly amazing the thoughts we can teach ourselves to think when at first we decide upon this idea that allows us to think we know anything of anything.

For that line we’ve drawn of a life we’ve lived has only led us to where we’ve left us so lost that we look around for all we need and yet only see all we’ve always wanted staring back at us, only now unable to offer us any return upon that investment of a life we’ve lost to thinking we can walk this line and not lose anything along the way toward where we never ended up. And having indeed lost so much of who we were for what we’ve become, seems we’ve only become unable to consider the concessions we chose along the way.

Because the weight of each proves now that we put our priorities into the hands of those who hadn’t a care as to where we might end up nor what we’d have to forget to get here.

And perhaps the most grueling humiliation is given in that those hands have always been our own.

Yes, despite the company we keep and the culture with which we keep it, the reality of our life is that we’re the only ones who’ve lived it. We’re the only ones who’ve chosen the choices we chose within it. We are the only ones who decided upon every decision, despite whatever outside intervention or social intention, we are the only ones who directed this disaster that we’ve tried to deny was indeed our own design. Indeed, we go out of our way to pass the blame for what we’ve done and who we’ve become in our lives.

But the issue is that never have we ever been forced to do what we did. Never have we ever been unable to have taken a bit more time to consider all the options and their outcomes. Never have we ever been in such a hurry that we couldn’t weigh the consequences of all possible choices. But alas, never have we ever seemed all that willing to bear the weight of a life’s responsibility as shown within taking every choice we make as if it were a life and death dilemma.

And our having never ever chosen to embrace that gravity of God’s reality, such has left us now so lost that we even at times shake our fists at God for His not forcing us to do better than we thought was best.

See, we talked about that a bit yesterday, the hardship of hindsight’s holding this humbling honesty that shows us that we honestly made a few mistakes along the way that we either couldn’t or just wouldn’t allow ourselves to see. It’s that we’ve lived life so fast, so free, so frantic and foolishly that we’ve adopted this idea that all that matters is what we want in the moment but that the moment isn’t worth all that much to apparently matter enough to make sure we’re making the most of them.

It’s quite the controversy when you really think about it.

We live this life lost inside the moment, blinded by the immediacy of a choice’s opportunity giving us the chance to either do as we please or to do as we should, for that is the reality of nearly every decision as made by a mankind who delights as much in desire as we do hope. Indeed, we actually tend to care more toward our desires than the patience necessitated by hope’s waiting for what we can only hope is better. We’re too busy for that. Too worried to wait.

Indeed, we have to do as the world’s taught us do, as we’ve decided to, and hurry up toward our fun and fulfillment as fast as we can find them within the choices placed before us.

Yes, we make nearly every choice based almost entirely upon what offers us the most immediate reward in order to best suit our violent impatience and vitriolic selfishness. And when done long enough, well then we find ourselves, eventually, face to face with the sum of all we never did reminding us of who we’ve never been but perhaps should have tried to be so that we could have skipped some of this weight of regret that we’ve sadly learned to deal with in only, ironically, the worst way possible.

We use it as a reason to doubt. People all around the world use faith as this punching bag simply because it speaks to the necessity of a person’s responsibility to perhaps not take life quite so lightly. But we do this because we want to take life lightly. We want this ride to be easy. We enjoy this common misconception that mankind thinks makes them free to do as they please. Indeed, we all have come to live as if our lives are only our time in which to have as much of here as we can hold.

And so when anything asks us to reconsider the roots we’re sowing and where they’re going, we know only now to balk, to rebuke, to refuse such an affront as it’s both humiliating and humbling to suggest that we might not know what we’re doing.

That’s just not a mindset this mankind has come to consider. Pride won’t allow it. Our assumptions can’t understand it. This widespread performance put on by the public which pretends this power to peruse a person’s preferences and then pursue them into priorities only inspires others to prefer the same opinion of a life’s purpose. In other words, we see an entire world living only to please themselves and within their success we assume we should do the same.

And when the objective truth of God’s Word objects to the world’s wickedness as won within that way in which we’ve all come to waste our lives seeking what doesn’t give us life, again we do as the world does and descend again into enmity against He who must be our enemy for insisting upon always making us feel so guilty.

Because the gravity of guilt is that it’s kind of like this knife blade that splits a soul into one of two eternally opposed directions. It either encourages someone to come to their senses and realize that perhaps the reason we must return to our senses is that something has singed them, something has soiled them, spoiled them into this ability to know the right thing to do and yet so often fail to do it. Indeed, guilt either inspires us to reconsider what we’ve done and come to a courage that is dead-set to contend against our being content inside such a contention against God’s intention.

Or it just does the entire opposite.

And it’s this opposite that we witness the world always resort to. For you see, just as easily as guilt can make a person come to embrace humility which then allows for change to take place, so too can it just as easily inspire a person to rebuke the suggestion that we’ve done anything wrong simply because we don’t wish to change, simply because the world shows us every day that living as if God is our enemy is entirely normal.

Indeed, we are a people who seek out such normality, if for nothing else than it allows us a sense of solidity to be so surrounded by so many doing the same. It’s yet again another comfort-by-numbers sort of thing. It’s a life given unto quantity rather than insisting upon a life’s quality. Sadly, our having lived so much like the world that we ourselves have become just like the world, we’ve pretty much known no quality of life whatever.

Because a life can have no lasting quality when it’s lived without worrying toward the will of He who gave us this gift.

And what I fear has come to inspire our fervent dismissal of God’s existence is the substance of the sheer quantity of the mistakes we’ve made inside these lives we’ve lived as if He’s our enemy. It’s like our lives have almost become this minefield of memories mixed with mistakes in which we can’t quite remember where to step not knowing where the memories are planted nor where the mistakes are lying in wait. And we just don’t want to risk realizing another poor choice we’ve made.

It just really erodes the pride and vanity behind which we’ve come to hide all this time.

But you see, that’s the beauty of the Gospel as given in that Word which defines us as sinners, as enemies, as fools living in enmity against He who is our Father, our Creator, our Savior. It’s that His truth tears veils. It obliterates these masquerades. He rolled that stone away so that we could stop hiding from the reality of what we owe for what we’ve done. He overcame it all on our behalf by taking our place and atoning for our mistakes.

And yet it can only be known inside the humility than our vanity cannot comprehend. We’ve just known this other way for far too long to imagine the freedom we’ve actually never known. We think we have been free! I mean, after all, we’ve all spent a fair number of years doing literally only everything we wanted to do. So much so that we’ve come to hate anyone and anything that even hints that such might not be as free as we’ve thought we felt along the way.

No, we see such blatant honesty as hostility as it seems to our blinded eyes to betray this way of life we’ve come to love. We love the relative revelry won within our living our way. We enjoy the prizes we win and the profit we earn and the people we please and those we try to impress with this pretense of pretending our lives are so full that we have to keep looking for more of what we don’t yet have.

It’s this sort of vicious insanity that has come upon humanity in which we shout to the world asking them to look at how awesome our lives are being lived by we who’ve decided how they should go, but yet when the lights go out and the doors lock up for the night, we again fall into living for tomorrow so that we can hopefully then find or feel what we didn’t today as we spent our time pretending we knew what we were doing.

Friends, when will the show stop? When will we retire from stage? Can we walk away from this way of life in which we win the praise and applause of those likewise living as if God doesn’t care what we do, or even worse, that He not even there at all? Is it not that very mindset that’s allowed us to do so many things wrong while still patting ourselves on the back for being so bold as to only do what everyone else does?

Indeed, is that to be the grand outcome of our life? That we lived it just like the rest of the world?

I’ve walked that line long enough to know it’s never enough. That there’s always something more to want, something else to hide, something we have to realize only let us down and left us once more looking for something more to fill these holes we keep digging inside of ourselves to find this lie that the world says is waiting inside. We live our lives as if our hearts are mines in which we find all these delightful desires that we deserve to enjoy.

And we treat as an enemy anyone who has the audacity to say that not only are our desires not all we’ve made them out to be, but indeed the vast majority of them as designed inside hearts that are truly deceitful above all things, the majority of them are deadly as that is simply what sin is and will forever be. Sin is enmity against God as it inspires us to love what He hates and to hate what He said love really is. For love is truth, love is light, love is kind, love is bold, love is restrained, love is free, love is fierce, love is honest, love is humble, love is tough, love is tested, love is tried, love is willing to die so that another might live.

We see this all in Christ, and yet we walk within a world that claims they can’t see Him at all simply so they retain this sort of freedom that frees them from trying to do the better He deserves having died to give us that room to grow and change. And because we’ve agreed to learn far too much about life from a world so lost, so too have we come to live as if He’s at best not there but at most there only to be our adversary.

Indeed, we treat the Lamb as if He’s our last resort to the happiness we want as hoped for inside everything but all that He is and asks us to be.

But friends, we can only live like He’s our enemy for so long before life itself is no longer an option. Because He is the Life! And while this world can and does and will continue to hate Him because so too is He the Truth, that doesn’t mean we can or should do the same. Not anymore.

Because the reality is that we have. We have all lived inside of a sinful mindset in which we do only as we please, even if that brings pain to another. We live as if our getting what we want is worth more than having what we need. We spend our time telling God what He’d better give us if we’re to believe in Him, always a people asking for a sing. But as He said Himself, none will be given except the sign of Jonah.

Three days in death.

Is the One who chose those days of death truly our enemy? Can a love that chose to carry our cross so as to pay our costs so that we can be free to hope again truly our enemy? Would an enemy welcome misery? Would our enemy embrace the need to bleed on our behalf? Would an enemy decide upon the grave in order to save those who wouldn’t do the same? Wouldn’t our enemy rather leave us without mercy to be given the entirety of what we so undeniably deserve?

Friends, we’ve come to see so much in life upside down. Perhaps it’s a symptom of this world in which we live in which darkness is put for light and light accused of being dark, where truth is considered intolerable and thus dishonesty to be preferred, where love is nothing but affirmation and hatred is offered to all who won’t agree that sin is safe. Or maybe it’s just because we don’t care to know anything other than our assumptions.

But the fact is that God isn’t our enemy, we are. He’s not the One who’s made us out to be wrong, we have. He didn’t force us to do all those things that we shouldn’t have done, again, we’re the only one who have lived these lives we’ve so brazenly assumed our own. No, He’s merely the One who gave us life and then gave the life of His Son to save us from what we’ve done to this gift He gave us.

How much longer then can we remain alienated from the most audacious kind of mercy imaginable? How much longer can we reject the greatest grace ever given? How much longer can we assume God our enemy in this world in which the enmity against Him isn’t hidden anymore? Is this world truly where we want to be, who we want to be? For the horror is that this world is who we’ve become, and thus like they, we know nothing of life, of love, of hope, of home.

Is that all we care to accept? Knowing nothing other than the lies of this world so lost as to live as if they know what they’re doing whilst God never could?

No, as this verse reminds us, we’ve indeed all been there and done that. We’ve all lived separated from God and all that He is. We’ve all taken for granted all that He does and all that He gives. All of us have lived a life lost outside the light of love and hope and healing and mercy and meaning. Is this where we want to stay, torn apart from all we need?

Truth is that we can live without fun. We can survive without the fake freedom this world enjoys. We can make it through life without such things as comfort or pleasure or success or even safety. But we cannot live without He who created life. We can’t live without His love. We can’t survive without His salvation. We will not see the hope of Heaven without the Son who came from there to save us from here.

And so maybe it’s time to stop assuming that He’s our enemy.

Maybe it’s time to stop living as if He’s not there or doesn’t really care all that much about all we do. Friends, He couldn’t care more, and so maybe it’s time we care more. Maybe it’s time that we try for more, want for more, fight for more than all this nonsense we’ve all settled for.

Because the way this world lives, the way we’ve all lived, it ends. And when it does, the weight of our every mistake will be felt by someone as no transgression can go unpunished. He offered to take that death we’ve earned so that we could find life again.

And again, that just doesn’t sound like something an enemy would do.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold