Day 3459 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:3 NIV

And that we’ve such a joyous hope held in Heaven ahead defines the delight designed within the why we’re here but as foreigners and aliens within this land on loan that we’re overjoyed to leave before long.

For to be given this gift of a renewed everything is something of such substance that it entirely, intrinsically, eternally and enthusiastically alters all of what we at once thought we knew of reality and reason. Because now that we’ve caught air of that home up there as told by He who came from there to here to help us to hear beyond our fear of leaving here, well that has left us now no reason to refuse this news that makes all things new.

Because as it turns out, living a life dead in decay as designed inside an indifference that affords no reverence of He who gave us this life to be lived in His image and thus given unto living it His way in accord with His will, doing the same things which we’ve come to somehow see as mistakes made makes no sense anymore. It makes no sense anymore.

Perhaps it never did.

That’s the sort of realization that is found as reward granted unto all who humble themselves and pray and seek His face and turn from their wicked ways back unto the way of wisdom which says that since we cannot last here that we’ve then no reason or excuse to refuse or lose the gift we’ve been given of something greater than what we’re all already losing. Why hold tight a life we can’t keep when it’s already been proven one of increasing death both in the reality of mortality and too the gravity of our wealth in sin’s wage?

I mean sure, it’s always going to be easier to stay wherever you already are doing whatever you’ve always done to become and thus easily remain what you already know. But is what we are, where we are, doing what we are really all we’re meant to be, to want, to see? Is the entirety of a life’s gravity to be felt before the grave? Is our time here truly the only triumph and treasure in which we’re to find and feel pleasure and purpose?

Can a time so spent in triumph mixed with trial truly be all we want in life, of life? Is life meant to be never more than treasure tarnished by tragedy, joy overwhelmed by judgement, hope lambasted by hatred, love left hurting by the lack thereof given in return? That is all ways in which this world so wonderfully works its wicked wants and wishes into those weak enough to want nothing more than everything this world claims the authority to either offer or take away.

And indeed, such a guaranteed loss should we live outside the ways and wishes of those who pose as those who have this pretend power to punish or promote, persecute or placate, such a dire difference as designed inside those who live and who die in accord with the ways of a world so wicked and warm, wayward and worn, it inspires us to the pleasing of people so we’ve not welcomed that risk of being refused the simplicity of a life’s ease that we all seek.

But we’ve done just that for just about as long as we can remember. And that then begs the question, what have we to show? I asked at the close of yesterday’s post what it is that our lives show in regard to reverence as commanded due to the fact that God in Christ has descended in order to help us begin this most undeserved ascent back to life. What does this life now look like on this side of a cross confessed?

Is there any share of His loss to find? Do we show Him any share of His Son as seen inside our willingness to also die if need be to whatever, whenever if such means we’re closer to He who we can now see holds the keys to eternity? Indeed, do our lives appear as if we’re at all even interested, intrigued or otherwise even perplexed by the promise of eternity?

Or rather are we as always still showing Him basically nothing that can even be accidentally confused or misconstrued as a life lived at all?

This is sadly the most likely situation in that we’re again a people of a certain degree of persistence and perseverance, but unfortunately always given into the wrong direction. We’re the very antithesis of Scripture’s warning us to remember Lot’s wife. For rather than heeded such call to stop looking back to see the glaring destruction billowing behind us, we just keep returning to the very crimes we ourselves have committed, sifting through the ashes of a life lived in ruin looking for something we wouldn’t mind to keep on doing.

And thus, as I did yesterday, I ask again, what are we doing?

Because if there is in fact any figment of faith to be found in us, any awareness of His Word, any appreciation of His truth, any inclination to the investigation as to where this tale of the tomb might turn out to lead, any life left inside of us at all, well such should show somewhere at some point. And so again, what do our lives show and where does that show say we hope to go?

Back to the past? Running toward the rearview? Elated at the repeating of the already? Overjoyed at doing yesterday all over again?

Friends, where is the life in that? And I’m not even talking from a perspective of faith in His promises. Where is there life to be found or felt within our always doing only what we already have? Even before delving deeper into what He so glaringly deserves, what do our lives say about what we think we deserve? More of the past? A rehashing of old mistakes? A continuation of current confusions? A delight in more deceitful delusions?

Is that all we care to be, to have, to hold, to know? Just all that already was?

And mixing the gravity of God’s good grace as given us in that cross carried by He who came to take our place in that grave that is our past as lived in sin, adding that in, what can we possibly pretend is able to offer Him praise? How is He to be glorified by our going back as if dogs to vomit, pigs to wallow, those set free escaping back in to their past lives of slavery? Is Christ’s life truly able to accomplish so little that we can look at what He did to break us out of who and where we’ve been and just turn back again?

Hebrews 6:4-6 tells us that such is what amounts to two impossibilities as it seems. “It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.”

Indeed, it is impossible to claim we know at least of Christ and the cross and live as if that claim is true only to return to what we did and who we were before we made that good confession to then be brought back to it after we’d lived it and left it. But so too is it pretty much an impossibility to say we know of Christ and the work He accomplished on the cross and turn away anyway before even the talk of being brought back.

We can’t actually know Christ and walk away. And thus if we have walked away from faith, from hope, from love back to a life lived in sin, thus death, well then we never knew Him at all. Because one does not simply forsake such things as life, love, hope, healing, joy, meaning, forgiveness, freedom. And thus nor can one truly disavow their faith unless they never had it to begin with.

And as Hebrews says in that passage above, any who do pretend that it’s possible to turn around and leave a life of faith, there is then no going back again. Because it’d be like our crying wolf. It’s our crying out for help whenever we finally, embarrassingly, humiliatingly agree that, yeah, we really do kind of need a hand here only to slap away the very hand we turned to for help. How many times do we really think that God is going to play our fool? No, friends, He shall not be fooled as He knows every heart and thus knows those who are His from the many who never will be.

Will we be? Are we to be found in His book of life? “Well done, good and faithful servant”? Or, as only fair within a life lived walking away from any semblance or figment of faith we may have once proclaimed, will we indeed only get what we already deserve in that “I never knew you”?

Because He should see in us a clear urgency to know Him, and then to know more of Him. How could we not? How could we truly say we understand His gift of overcoming our death and not want to know more of that sort of power and purpose and promise within however many days or hours we have left here? How can we ever agree to some sort of finish line in which we’ve had enough and just walk away back to a world that breaks itself to make life here easy knowing that He came to make life so much better than it can’t even quite begin here?

Yes, how can we ever agree to any sort of finality to faith when He’s standing on the horizon calling us toward a forever in Heaven?

Are we there yet?

Well, looking around and listening in, nah, I think not. And thus since we’ve still got a ways to go, again, how are we going about it along the way home? Or rather is that again the problem, that we think ourselves already home? For that is what this world seeks to inspire in us, that feeling of belonging among the fulsome and foolish. Is that where we want to feel as if we belong? Is our trying to pretend we still do or should or could belong among the dead what God deserves to see?

Should He look down upon His redeemed only to see them still mingling with those pulling them in the other direction? Did Jesus die for us to continue ahead in the death of sin just so we feel as if we share this life with the world and how it’s chosen to live it, lose it, leave it? Or should He see those given the gift of life for all eternity eagerly walking away, running away from everything that even slightly smells of death? We should, if we are in Christ, be utterly nauseated at the thought of living as this world does so welcoming of sin and thus the death it wins.

When then will we stop and do as we’re called to by He who calls us into that grave because He knows that that is where His gift of everlasting life truly begins as it’s therein that we begin to leave this life as lived like this world behind for good. And by for good I mean both forever and too for better. Like so much better! A forever of better!

And that we have this promise of that better forever defines why we’re to live out our remaining days in reverent fear as if foreigners and aliens in a world that is supposed to feel less and less like home as we do less and less of the things this world does. For that is the sort of praise that God deserves for having sent Christ to take our place that we might share in where He went from there. Indeed, in Him we will grow to desire to do less of what this world does.

In fact we will grow to hate what this world does, what this world loves. We will even begin to lose our affinity for all this world asks of us, expects of us. We will in turn begin to lose of our fear of man and thus our willingness to live trying to please them. Because in this faith which brings us every morning a new step into the continuation of sanctification, which is again a restoring of something or someone to proper function as designed by its Creator, we will begin to physically feel that understanding given us in Scripture which says that if we were still trying to please people, to praise people, then we’d not then be servants of Christ.

Yes, we will, in time, in Him, come to find that the only thing we come to fear is our Father for His impartiality as proven, as we discussed yesterday, in what is promised to be a righteous judgement for He is the only One who can either save or destroy. And once we learn that, well, just don’t matter what anyone else may say, think or do as we’re not here to make them like us but rather to be like Him.

And in a world that will never agree to even try to understand that, we can’t settle for trying to round off our sharpening corners or smooth the edges that His consuming fire have left or will make a little rougher than this world so filled with weakness and sensitivity might appreciate.

And we should realize the gift that even that is in that Him making us to be less like the world as proven through pain and persecution, such only now comes as evidence of our sharing more and more in Him who we’re, by faith, yearning to grow more and more like. And for that opportunity we should thank Him, praise Him, honor Him by living in an utterly reverent fear of God that He has given us such a gift as this salvation that is making everything so very different that we even come to find excitement in our worldly death as we come to understand that it’s demanded before we feel the fullness of forever as found by His coming down to lead us to the death of what was never life as it’s been lived in sin by all.

Because that’s the whole point of the Gospel, to point us to life as found in Christ as He alone came to atone for our living in the death that is sin. And that He did all that He did to give us that gift of what is an undeniably better direction, such simply deserves the sort of devotion that we should have been giving unto Him all along. And that’s where the change in how we live our lives comes in to prove that He has made us new.

We should look new, sound new, do new. We cannot settle for who we’ve been as again, in Him, we should understand that who we’ve been is just dead. And in case you didn’t know, living in death ain’t much of a life!

If it was He wouldn’t have had to pay such a price to resurrect our hope and redeem our soul.

Friends, the fact is that God will always deserve more than we can give because He’s already done more than we can at present understand. He gave us life twice, three times in fact. Who does that? Especially considering what we did to the first two! He created us in His image and we traded it for a life given to living in sin. The second life He gave was that of His Son who came to save us from what we’d done to the first. Thus we’ve utterly ruined two lives, ours and then His as we ourselves cheered on His suffering as inflicted by us, unknowingly for us.

The third? Well, that’s what’s left to be seen. So again, what does He see? Have we learned our lesson, gotten the message? Are there changes in us that evidence our leaving behind our lives given unto death in sin and the death of His Son?

Because the reality is that He has given us this new birth into a living hope because we’ve not had that within our lives spent lost in all this wickedness we’ve known so far. And that He died to overcome all this death we’ve craved, well that just deserves the kind of praise that seeks to prove that He has indeed made us new. And we can only do that by indeed living a new way of life spent following behind the One who came to lead the way to what and who we’ve never been nor cared to be. Don’t let that hope die just because you’re more used to death.

Because while He would do it again, it just ain’t right asking Him to.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold