Day 3478 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 8:34 NIV

To heed the call to refuse another yoke of enslavement would at first demand a differed stand as to what we’ve never understood about just how far gone we’ve been as defined by how far He went to bring us back.

And we’ve never sought to understand that as we know it would undeniably define the depth of our downfall as fallen down all around, all within, all of it all just given way all these days we’ve let slip right past our purpose in exchange for our preference for pleasure, an opinion altogether obtuse enough to have formed every bar we couldn’t bend in order to break out of this prison we couldn’t see that we alone have built of every disbelief and inability to fight beyond them for the better for which He built us.

No, we’ve not the stomach for such honesty as we’ve honestly lost so much of the rest of ourselves and our souls that I suppose we shouldn’t expect to have our stomach left around either.

It’s rather all been sold at rock-bottom dollar for that is the wages won by this friend of sin to whom we’ve sold those souls that would have otherwise left Him a foundation from which to frown upon our having chosen to drown ourselves in the deepest of depravity’s darkness. Indeed it’s truly heartbreaking just how wholesale we’ve sold our whole selves. And that so much is now gone to the past we’ve tried to disprove, well, perhaps we’ve not all that much left of anything by way of hope or meaning, purpose or reason.

And yet we’ve somehow managed to retain this audacity to question as to the necessity of both His gift of salvation and it’s rightfully asking us to simply stop doing the many things from which He died to save us and set us free. Free from what? Seems that’s anymore a question so rhetorical that none even ask it for the asking is evidenced in our lives and the many misunderstood mistakes by which we’ve fallen away from Him to live them. Yes, we in fact all know the answers to such vengefully proud ponderings the likes of why the tomb and our asked unto a share.

For we still pretend that we know even what’s going to happen there and it’s an experience that we fear more than we feel the freedom found within is possibly worth. Indeed, we’re a people who’ve done so much wrong that we’re willing to waste away in worry simply so we don’t have to go where He said worry is left behind in exchange for the freedom we know we’ve never known. Rather we follow the breadcrumbs that aren’t personally belittling right up to the rut in which the stone was rolled back and forth.

And that’s right where our willingness so oddly ends. As if the promise of the freedom we know we’ve never known isn’t worth the weight of a risk that He’s proven has no risk whatsoever.

It’s a shame what all we convince ourselves to miss or mistake now that we’re so afraid to be anything other than slaves. And don’t get me wrong, I say this as perhaps the worst of us all.

Because you know, I look back over my life and at times I feel a stranger in my own mind. I’ve these endless memories that come flooding into my every moment, raggedly awake or struggle to sleep, doesn’t matter it seems as it seems they’re always there no matter the time of day. No, I stumble daily through reminders of things I’ve said, stuff I’ve done, all these winnings and grinnings I’ve wanted and won that were in fact nothing but death in masquerade. For that is just what sin is, just death.

And so today I find myself almost an enemy in my own life or at least liable to become one again as I know I’ve been one before.

For who else would choose things that make you lose things that bring life to your life? Who else would ruin opportunities and decline chances, forgo changes that could have led to the joyful dreams that we’re once had and held and hoped within from even those dreams lived through in those few nights you managed to sleep through? Who but an enemy would so willfully undermine the upright and honorable as that of God’s will for our lives and the many open doors it was found behind that we only betrayed as we chose to stay blinded by the things we wanted instead?

Indeed, who would honestly mock the gift that it is to be free simply because it asks a hint of humility, asking obviously our pride to take a day off for once in our life?

Yes, it’s that damnable pride that’s caused all the chains I’ve found and forged and felt and feel too often still. And having these scales of selfishness scraped from eyes so blind as to betray myself the better that He made for me, made me to be, to see, to know and hold and hope within, well, it’s become the very tangibility of the old adage that without pain there be no gain. Indeed, I find in fact that any day anymore in which I don’t feel ashamed or find myself reminded of a regret is one that I feel lost as I feel it only leaves me lost still left apart from the better I know I could have been, pray I might still be someday.

Alas I see now that I’ve lived against myself in that regard as I’ve in fact destroyed or declined opportunities at better things for what I now know are unequivocally lesser things. That’s what we’ve been taught to do within the moments in which life is either lived or left to die. We take each moment in life at such monotony that we simply exist within this assumption that should we ruin many at least we’ll always have many more still to right all the wrong.

But what if we’re wrong? What if all those wrongs made in the moments we’ve always taken for granted were metal being forged around our hearts, our eyes, our minds, our lives that have come to become the very chains that we’ve so sadly come to find more comforting than the compassion of Christ simply for this complacency outside of where He asks us to meet Him?

Because again I look back and find that I feel this verse come to life within every day of my life as lived so lost thus far. And that I might not get those chances back and thus may not ever know where or to what some of them may have led, that guts me in ways that I’ve not the words to define or describe. And so I’ll resort to agree with that portion of me that hates me as I hope that it makes me not be so quick to settle again for all that’s lesser than why God put me here and gave me the hope to have, to hold, to see, to be.

For within that hatred of who I’ve been I suppose I’ve made some peace with my past, as much as feel I deserve to have anyway.

And I feel this way because I know without question that it was in fact lived that lost as outside of the many reminders of mistakes made along the way I find that I wonder most anymore about the choices not chosen in those many moments in which I chose what I wanted to matter rather than what mattered most. What life didn’t I live that was found behind all those open doors He whispered from within as I raced onward after what I heard the world yelling?

Come have fun! You deserve this! Enjoy yourself! It’ll feel good! Promise it’ll make you happy! Do what makes you happy! Pleasure and treasure and prize and surprise, and surprise, it was all just a call to die as a slave to sin who never imagined a freedom not found or felt within the frame of mind so mangled as to mistake this life as being all mine and thus a matter to make my own.

And it’s indeed been all my own all along. All my fault. All my failure. All my folly. All my fall. And sure, maybe this world and its way had some sort of sordid hand in helping me down. Perhaps those around me were more than willing to cheer me on as I crumbled apart. Yeah, maybe that’s something all of us can say, except it’s not the excuse we might have hoped it could be, would be. No, because the reality is that every choice in life is one entirely personal regardless of the outside input or expectation.

We alone are the ones who’ve settled upon every choice we’ve made and thus every mistake they’ve ended up being.

And it’s the sum of those mistakes that have made our minds unable to imagine the freedom found in Jesus as it’s truly unlike everything we’ve ever believed for before. It’s a freedom so free that it laughs even at death’s daring to keep pretending that it might actually end what He Himself died to begin.

The freedom we’ve never known before. But that’s the beauty of the Bible’s honesty. It’s been breathed a living Word that is so incredibly alive and active that it acts as a double-edged sword slicing through all the stupidity and settling, all the complacency and complaining, all the fear and all our failure to fight beyond it to the better which has always been beyond it. For that is where freedom must be if it’s to be anything other than whatever this is that we’ve all already known.

For this life as lived in sin isn’t a life at all, it’s but a cage wrapped around those wearied and worn by the battles they’ve built to never have to believe beyond this barricade of self that we’ve sold ourselves to stay safely behind. We’ve indeed always believed right up to the bars only to wrap our hands around our captivity and convince ourselves to pretend it still not possible. All because we don’t it to be what it so clearly is.

But friends, wishful thinking will keep us slaves of such wishing, wanting always for what we know is possible, but always wanting to refuse the risk of leaving behind what’s already proven.

That’s just it though, what’s already proven is that we are in fact sinners. And as sinners, slaves. And as slaves, as seen in the opening of the next verse, not family. And as not family, not welcome. And as not welcome, not wanted. And as not wanted, not worth it. And as not worth it, not willing. And as not willing, not changing. And as not changing, not chasing. And as not chasing, not catching. And as not catching, as in the drift He died to provide, we’re simply nothing.

Tell me that isn’t why we’re all so afraid to change, so unwilling to try.

Because until we come to terms with who we are as written by what we’ve done, we can be nothing else as we’ll forever be entirely too unwilling to even imagine that we might be worth more than the little we sold ourselves for. For as sinners we carry a shame that convinces us, and rightfully so, that we’ve no business imagining something so beautiful as hope, as freedom, as forgiveness, as mercy and grace and a God who would take our place in that grave that we might, in Him, take again His image upon ourselves and live like we’re far more than the nothing we’ve convinced ourselves to stay.

Again I say this with a truly personal honesty because it’s something that He’s got me realizing every single day it seems. Everything I’ve settled for wanting, chosen to keep doing, become afraid of losing or changing, it’s all a link in this chain of my enslavement to sin, to self, to society, to assumptions, to the sum of something I can see, never then being able to believe beyond the seen and known into that unknown where the impossibles I need are actually possibly possible.

Like mercy and forgiveness and freedom.

We all need them, but unfortunately they’re only found by those who admit their chains and accept that we cannot move from them without Him coming to melt them off our hearts through the fire that refines us so ferociously that all we’ve been becomes nothing but all we wish to lose so that we might not lose whatever He might have left to lead us to before we leave this life.

I can’t bear the wonder as to what all I’ve missed as I was busy welding more wrongs in place that only ended up keeping me believing that my place was in this place and that thus I should be a person like the people who’ve run this place right into the ground. And if I can’t bear the weight of that better life that I’ve not lived, I cannot then settle for living for lesser than better going forward. Because if I know, and I do, that I’ve been a sinner, then I see here that I’ve been a slave.

And if I’ve been as slave, as I know I have, then I know I’ve never known anything of freedom. And if I’ve never known anything of freedom, well then I have nothing to lose expect shame, regret, guilt, remorse, misery, misunderstanding. And if that’s all that I have to lose, then I can finally imagine what all I might stand to gain should I do what I’ve never done and admit this death I’ve lived if such might truly mean the beginning of the life I’ve never known.

Friends, this world has a way of breaking us down and convincing us that somehow that’s what’s best for us. Stop believing so little about yourself. Stop living as if you’re supposed to do this by yourself or for yourself. Just stop it. Stop negotiating who you are! For we were not created to be slaves to ourselves nor to this world nor to whatever this world has inspired us to become. We were created to be free, and Christ even died to both accomplish that freedom and to sign the adoption papers so that we might have a family again.

Only this time one forever rather than those foreigners and spies that have conspired with us against us to keep us so bound and broken that we’ve known only to betray ourselves the better that we could have and thus should have always been.

Do not settle for who you’ve been, what you’ve been, what you’ve done, where you are. We are not home, we don’t have roots, we’re not robots, and thus we can learn and change and grow and move and maybe find a way to let the Way in before we fall away again.

Sure, it might be scary to lay it all out there knowing that you’ve pretty much only shame to show for the life you’ve lived so far. So be it. Because the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Thankfully Jesus here helps us with that part. And what’s even better is that He’s already helped with the solving part too.

We just have to allow ourselves to realize just how free we’ve never been as that reality will finally inspire us, hopefully, to ask Him to help us leave beyond the known in exchange for that we’ve long assumed impossible.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold