Day 3475 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 29:25 NIV

Perhaps my last fear found here is that we’ve failed to figure the fullness of the lack of freedom found within our fear of man and thus have come upon the inability to comprehend just how free we can truly be once found in Him.

Because knowing now that our faith in Christ has come to define our being forever justified to walk however, speak whatever, go wherever the Good Lord may lead leaves us without need of anything in the way of approval or applause from anyone else. And yet those things have long been seen and assumed as the sort of prizes our eyes so filled with blindness have come to believe that we’re supposed to need. In fact, just that that is the only way in which to write this idea proves the silliness of it all.

For there is no supposition within a necessity as something needed doesn’t need anyone to believe in its existence nor to find value within its substance as defined by some characteristic that is otherwise inarguably indispensable.

In other words we don’t need to do much thinking when it comes to whether or not we need something, and thus the more thinking we’re able to do in regard to weighing something’s necessity, such only defines its particular measure of frivolity. Because needs aren’t frivolous. Something being of vital necessity isn’t a worry of fools who weary themselves over wars of words and this human need to be heard and seen and known and thus somehow, again supposedly, justified in our just being alive.

Yes, such is such a common pursuit that entire lifetimes are lost to looking for someone else to validate our very existence. As if the fact that we are here isn’t enough for us to feel as if we should be. And thus we’ve come to so mishandle the sanctity of life itself that we’ve all but outsourced everything from our physicality to our mentality by way of this insatiable need to be around those who afford us this human need of belonging achieved only when our thoughts are found in line with theirs, because that is the only way that most down will ever welcome an outsider in.

And we go along with such violent bowing down before those who are in no way higher or lower than we are all because we’re so afraid of going alone down this long and often dark road called life that we anymore simply refuse to do it by ourselves. We refuse to let loose the fake friends, the bad company, the toxic relationships that we’ve found or forged simply for sake of losing both the time we’ve given to gaining and keeping them but also for the sake of that sudden loss leaving us feeling a little more alone than we were before.

Indeed, we loathe loneliness as if we’ve ever been anything near the word. We know of nothing of loneliness, we only fear it still because this world has once again redefined the idea into something that all of us now worry ourselves over.

Truth is that we have been known and loved since before our lives here even began. Each of us were fearfully and wonderfully made when at first God stitched us together in the womb of our mother, beginning this life we’re living that He wanted us to live. That is the utmost foundational reason for our purpose for being, that God wanted us here. That God wanted us.

I reckon then the problem is that we’re in a world in which so many have so vastly discounted that identity that He gave them in His image that none of us care to care about such simplicity as our not needing anything from anyone else to justify or validate the fact that we are alive. We don’t need a horde of horrible friends who speak nothing but what we want to hear and demand we do the same unto them in return. We don’t need significant others who treat us like strangers simply so they can wear a ring around their finger.

We don’t need bosses to like us, neighbors to be nice to us, strangers to ever even pretend they’re willing to ever perhaps want to try and understand us. We need nothing from mankind as we are, if we are in Christ, no longer of this world but are rather foreigners passing through upon our way following His way home. No, this is not our home and we need then no root here which might hold us in place within a place that cares not toward God’s grace nor seeks to glorify that impossible fact that we’ve all been given it in Christ Jesus.

That is why His very Word warns that bad company corrupts good character. It tarnishes and taints, these ideas and idolatries around which we’ve failed to skirt within this world that’s come entirely too close for us to have become as comfortable here as we’ve sought to be and come to become. Indeed, we are in every way way too comfortable here, and we seem most days most afraid of losing that, more afraid in fact of that loss than the corresponding loss of eternal hope promised unto all who continue to fall into friendship with a world lost and loving their enmity against a God they see as their enemy.

We cannot continue to let a world such as this, one so lost in a mindset such as that be the audience we seek to keep or try to please. Because living to please this world, to appease mankind is a feat only accomplished in our being like mankind and living like this world that the majority here consider their home. And thus we’ll have to do and be, see and agree upon everything this world says, assumes, demands and does if we’re to win our welcome here.

And that is why we need to know that we don’t need it as we are again, if we are in Christ, no longer of this world but rather just here on what amounts to a work-visa that has a firmly established and rapidly approaching expiration.

The problem is that we’ve indeed lived so very long trying to please nearly everyone in order to also feel at home in what does in every way feel a very long life lived within the only place any of us have ever known to even assume as home. And so we’ve come a very long way in this approach to life given unto becoming what has turned out to become nothing but a replica of this world still bent toward rebellion against our Creator. And so that sort of outlook has too become our own understanding.

Thus why we have so little ability to stand.

And yet it seems that that’s all that a life can ever do within this belief that we’re here to please those around us. Just stand still. Because that effort as one done only when we become whatever another might ask us to be, it’s one achieved only in fear which does indeed freeze a soul in solitude seeking only to satisfy or assuage another’s assumptions or presumptions or opinions or whatever other sort of social obligations or agendas we’ve so long felt obliged to allow to become these ties that bind us to this place so gone from true belief beyond whatever someone else may want.

For life was never meant to be such a matter of such violent selfishness as it’s so sadly and yet so clearly become. We were rather created to honor our Creator through praise and appreciation for all that He created and continues to offer. But alas we’ve gone the other way in life, living to please the ways of this world so wicked and wealthy in sin’s wage. And because we’re promised wrath either way, well we’ve come to agree with those who say that to believe is to see, and since we don’t see God well then we fear those we can see.

Indeed, whether it’s a fear borne out of our fighting to find favor or rather the fear of our falling out of the same, fearing man is but an anchor which binds us to the perspectives and preferences of a mankind that isn’t as God at first designed. And so our living to please this man will only bind us to this place which defines this man, and this prevents us from the indeed kind of free for which Christ died to achieve. All because we can see those around us and so we think it’s on us to please them so that they can’t inflict harm upon us assumed more dangerous simply because of their nearness.

And when a world so foolish and faithless has come to become what drives us, it’s going to come out that this place will only drive us away from faith for sake of the fear of letting down those who think faith a matter foolish. No, we don’t want to disappoint those who pretend they’ve either something to give or rather more to take away. For again, we don’t want to be alone along this ride. And thus we do whatever we need to never once lose whatever this world may threaten to take should we be found outside the lines they’ve drawn for us to live within.

But friends, if our walk of faith is one in which we always wait for another to either approve or appreciate, well then we'll be here forever, stuck in place in this place as this place neither understands nor respects either what this faith is, what this faith demands, what this faith deserves or what this faith gives as defined by where this faith leads.

Indeed, if we work out our faith with only the fear of man leaving us trembling should we ever fall out of their welcome or away from their warmth, we'll find ourselves never moving beyond where we've already been. And I for one cannot compute how Christ would have died for so very little as our looking to the world to validate our beliefs or understand our willingness to stand firmly upon them in the face of a world filled with hatred for the truth which forms the foundation of this ground upon which we now do stand.

For He is the only reason we can stand, and I beg you to not take my word for it but to please go and read what God says of the matter in Ephesians 6:13.

You know, I look back upon my old way of life given over to pleasing people and I see now nothing but a wavered weariness that never once accomplished anything worth the wasted opportunities that I could have just as easily given unto the God I back then never knew as He wasn’t much considered within the circles in which I ran myself ragged trying to keep what I never needed in the first place. I was so afraid to lose what I assumed a friend, to not make someone laugh, to not be near whenever they had a want, to not be whatever they wanted me to be.

And I sit here with not much left but a bit of family and a faith finally blossoming in the Father I always needed but always avoided as He wasn’t apparently needed by those I was trying to please or appease or impress.

Yes, my life today is one that we’ve been taught to fear by those people we’re afraid to disappoint. Because it’s one that many if not most could rightly consider lonely and in fact it is one in which daily I find something else suddenly emptied out of my worries, out of my wants, out of my world. Indeed, I feel this distance growing between me and here as I know that here isn’t home, leaving whatever this world insists I do of fading concern as I’ve finally come to learn that I need nothing from a world that can take nothing as my treasure isn’t here.

And that is the indeed sort of free I mentioned above. Because since this world has nothing I need while I’m here, so nor shall my fear be here either. Not anymore.

What I hope everyone comes to realize is that this world has far too many demands when considered against how much this world can either give or take away. People here have these growing lists of things they expect from those around them, checklists of friendship it would seem. The same is said of romantic relationships, even business relationships as nearly everyone continues to devolve into this idea that we’re here to be pleased at whatever expense that may mean to another.

Indeed, people here as worldly as we’ve all become have come to believe only that they’re here to be served in whatever way their selfishness might demand. And while some of those selfish demands might be at first harmless and perhaps even reasonable, should they ever veer toward our joining in or going along with sinfulness or otherwise increasing in worldliness, which are basically anymore one and the same, if that line between here and home, life and death, faith and failure to be faithful unto Christ above all others is ever crossed, it’s not worth it.

If this world or anyone in it invokes or inspires fear in order to compel us to give up on following Jesus, then friends, we’re not then walking in freedom should we agree to follow their suggestions.

And so please keep always in mind that we don’t need help from anyone in regard to our faith as this is meant to be as personal a journey, as close a relationship as we can possibly fathom. For Christ died to live inside until we’re inside that place He said we’ll live forever. Do not, out of fear, trade that hope held there for something found here inside this life that isn’t eternal.

Here we lose, just make sure that those who are okay with denying that fact don’t inspire you to lose what they never wanted to realize they too could have had. Because Christ’s salvation is given unto all, but make no mistake, many here will never accept it. Don’t fear anyone who might have rejected the only hope any of us have.

Because we cannot agree to allow their forfeiture of faith to inspire us to ever consider risking the same.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold