Day 3485 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:3 NIV

Because if there’s anything that our weakened flesh can always seem to all but insist upon it is that all of life and whatever makes it so is to be all but surrendered to our failures and fallacies in order that we needn’t admit them.

For the mere presence of a law inevitably defines only the ability for those who know of its existence the imminent fracturing and failing in regard to the obvious necessity of a faithfulness to that righteous outline resulting in that all are thus able to only be proven guilty because of their inability to for every moment resolve to uphold that which is meant only to hold them to the highest of all expectation, a failure felt within any moment in which they waver or wander away from the way that said law was initially intended to guide.

In other words, we cannot be proven righteous by a law which was given to stave or starve our already inherent unrighteousness as defined for us by those like us who live like this world has likewise taught them to settle for assuming is sufficient in regard to everything from reality to righteousness.

Because the defining of such things is as unbecoming those who seek to redefine them as is the audacity to then debate with the divine in an arrogant expectation that somehow He who created is to at some point answer to the created simply because the ego of that which was created has all but absorbed the only respect ever shown in a life as evidenced in how that life is lived. We’ve thus become our own gods as proven in all this foolery we’re continuing as seen inside our efforts to redefine everything from life to love and truth and hope and reason and meaning and purpose and profit and all of it.

Yes, we as our own gods who seek only to serve ourselves have thus in turn become slaves to ourselves as slaves are sought to serve. And thus as we seek to serve ourselves, it is thus that ourselves have become our masters who define daily whatever we’re expected to do in order to find our own versions or definitions or expectations of success and satisfaction by day’s end knowing that we’ll only awake should tomorrow come and do it all over again.

Life has become a cycle in which we’ve crumbled to believing that we are nothing more than the substance of things that we’ve only yet begun to hope for, want for, chase for, waste for.

And we wonder why our lives so often feel so empty.

It’s not because we haven’t had whatever we’ve wanted to hold. It isn’t because we’ve not managed to hold all we’ve wanted to have. Our lives aren’t rendered incomplete because we’ve not chased all we’ve assumed would complete them, nor that we didn’t manage to catch all those catastrophes as chosen always only by us always only for us.

No, it’s because we’ve always done only everything for us and this life was simply never intended to dissolve in that direction.

The only reason that it has is that there is in fact a law which was written and made well-known amongst all of creation that was given by He who created all of creation in order to implore order upon this created creation so that the created would live always in both awe and wonder of the Creator who saw fit to not only create all this but also to give us His law by which to guide us along the way that would prevent us from doing as weakened flesh all but insists upon doing and destroying all that has been created.

Ourselves included.

And yet we’ve instead seemingly only concluded that tired attempt to falsify freedom into nothing more than a foolish belief that we are to be truly free only whenever we live doing only all that we want to do as defined by us for us, assuming thus us the ones who know best what’s best for us having never known much more than a fraction of the full for which God created us to remain. But since such is by no means what we’ve ever known, how might one now remain what they’ve never been?

For you cannot miss what you’ve never had nor feel ashamed of what you don’t realize you’ve lost. And yet it seems that we do miss things in life that we are in fact quite ashamed of having let go, so ashamed in fact that we’ve resorted instead to pretending that we never knew anything better than all this lesser that we’ve come to become instead. And yet how is that? How can we feel guilty about anything done wrong when we’ve always lived as if we’re the ones with the ability to define what’s best for us?

Seems kind of counterintuitive doesn’t it? Because if we really had the ability, the authority to define such things as reality or reason, well then we’d never have reason to allow for feelings of fear or worry or want or even remorse. If we had anything beyond only the arrogant audacity to live as if we’re the only ones who know what’s best for our lives having never even lived all our lives, we’d need never experience regret, shame, sorrow, sadness.

And what’s madness is that there are in fact some who have seemingly managed to dissolve so far from God that they do in truth never feel such hope as the regret of hindsight or the shame of things done in the shadows or the weight of wishing they’d not done something that left only a scar that doesn’t wash away. But that this weakened human flesh has reached the point where we seem only to encourage one another toward that kind of moral ineptitude, such only defines why God did what He did in Christ.

Because as we’ve been talking for a few days now, He really had no need to do all of that for all of us. Just look at us. Even these 2,000+ since that stone was rolled away, the vast majority here still live as if the story is nothing but an ancient fable meant to inspire fear into fools that coax them into forgoing this god-forsaken idea of freedom found and fumbled by all of us at one point or another. Indeed, faith is still assumed foolishness to those who can’t quite bring themselves to admit they’re perishing inside their cozy little lives lived only outside the Light who is the Way and is the Life.

Why? Because of the Truth involved which is something akin to law which renders it obviously limiting unto those who otherwise believe that to be free is to be entirely unencumbered by such external suggestion as truth or law or reason.

No, those things are all ours to define, remember?

Ridiculous!

For since when did those who can clearly not even begin to pretend that they’ve handled themselves in a proper manner, who’ve at times completely lived in utter disregard of any sort of moral authority or responsibility, who’ve all but obliterated so many chances to do the right thing only to choose almost incessantly only the worst of all possible possibilities, since when are we as lawless as we’ve always been supposed to then be able to somehow design a better way back to where we so clearly never wanted to stay?

How can those dead in sin be made alive again when that new life demands the death of the death that we’ve come to live for?

Such is why the law was powerless in regard to us. We’re simply entirely too foolish be fixed! Because a law works only for those who follow the law. The law benefits only those who agree to not break it. Laws are not written for the righteous, for the upright, for the upstanding. Laws are written to try and correct and/or rebuke those who see fit only to push the limits of legality in search of some sort of freedom that better fits within the framework of whatever we’ve come to want for ourselves.

Because we want what we want, but even more important than that, we want to be justified in our chasing after things we know we could live without. Because we know full-well the foolishness in putting ourselves and our desires upon such pedestals that we slowly become slaves serving only those ideals that we’ve come to idolize as designed inside minds so mangled and filled with misunderstanding that we again assume we can stand before God and make Him budge.

Good luck.

For that’s not at all the God I know. No, the God I know parts seas, swallows armies, crumbles walls, overwhelms cities. The God I know splits the ground apart to rid His sight of His enemies. The God I know sends floods that erase all but a handful of humanity. The God I know knows plagues that ruin, pestilence that destroys, famines that wipe out nations. The God I know rains down fire from Heaven upon those living as heathen doing all that He said shouldn’t be done in that law that we still so easily discount still today.

Yes, the God I know is a God of justified wrath as won by all under the sun for all we’ve done against the Son. But therein defines the other side of the God I know.

Because the God I know also came as the Son to set us free by atoning for all we’ve done. The God I know chose to forgive and set free from that false sense of fake freedom spent finding only whatever a lost soul might stumble upon and assume sufficient simply for the sake of something satisfying. The God I know knows that we’re a people of lawlessness as defined by our living always for only the sick sort of satisfaction we find in sin and the enslavement we’ve accepted unto ourselves and our selfishness as demanded to continue being the ones who find such sinful success as our personal satisfaction.

And so the God I know, who wrote the law we’ve all broke, He went a step further, a little beyond the wrath we’ve won and offered us instead a chance at a share of His Son who came to win this war we’ve waged against ourselves so that we might in Him die to these lives we’ve lived so lost and begin them again for something far better that was achieved at a far higher cost. Yes, He sent Christ to give up His life so that we might see that all we’ve done is just the same, a giving up of a life.

But in Him we give up a life not to die but rather to live because this life we have lived is one destined to die because of the sin we’ve wanted within.

Because we are sinners as defined by anything we’ve done outside or against the righteous law of God as given us long ago and thus leaving us plenty of time to have heard about it, learned about it, we’ve only known all about it and still gone without it being allowed to lead the way in our lives that have otherwise been lived for our will as wasted upon our wants rather than being lived in humbled appreciation of God’s constant provision proving us never once needing all this sin that’s left us only losing.

How much more are we willing to wager on our way winning in the end?

We’re told in Scripture that God doesn’t change and too that because of that not a word, not a letter of His Word will be changed either. Do we really think that the God who has destroyed nations and built up new ones in their place, the God who has sent people to their eternal grave and also risen some from their earthly one, the same God who could have wiped us out but instead chose to send the Son to wipe us clean, do we really think that we stand a chance should we continue to stand against Him?

And since we know that He sent the Son, why would we want to now that that kind of love has accomplished that kind of freedom that has gone so far as to allow us finally what we’ve all always wanted? For our pasts have proven that we’ve always sought this sort of freedom as found and felt within this ability to live not under the law. For we have done things we shouldn’t have in order to have what we wanted, haven’t we? Again, if we feel guilt or regret or sorrow or shame then we’re only saying that we’ve done things which we know we shouldn’t have.

And we’ve only done them as we assumed them a furthered feeling of freedom as found always outside the law.

Which is, in a way, exactly what Christ offers us. For those who are in Christ are no longer under the law but rather under grace. Because that’s the power of the grave and His being more powerful still. Because only He can die to sin and rise to new life, and only He can give us that ability, that opportunity to share inside such a miracle as new life blossoming from where only death has always been assumed. And there isn’t just a new life waiting in our surrender. No, there’s freedom waiting there too.

Because only when we humble ourselves and confess our sins and accept that we are entirely, eternally fallen upon His mercy, only then can we even begin to understand just how amazing His grace really is because only then can we finally agree that His grace chose the grave in order to save us from a way of life lived running toward it with absolutely no hope waiting beyond it.

He wants that hope for all of us, it’s why He died to lead the way. It’s why He died to be the Way. Because He wants for none to perish though it’s what all deserve. Rather He wants all to come to repentance as He knows that repentance isn’t the punishment our pride has long assumed but is rather a turning away and thus a turning toward.

Yes, He wants us all to turn away from a life lived within the death of sin, and thus a turning toward life as lived defined both by the law, for the law, of the law, but most of all, because of the love that saved those who’d ignored the law, denied the law, refused the law and thus never lived the life that the law was meant to guide us toward.

Friends, all of us have come up with our own ways to try and reach the same outcome only to have failed time and again. We’ve all wanted only to be free from such things as guilt, regret, shame, embarrassment. But we’ve sought such an accomplishment only by seeking to hide what we do wrong, mistakes made by the reality that we are weakened flesh that is unable to care enough about anything we don’t want for us. He gives us a better way toward what we’ve always known we’ve always needed without all the failure and foolishness found and proven along our way.

He came to set us free from having to find a way to feel free from who we’ve been and what we’ve done. We, so long as we continue to do this our way, we will be slaves to sin and thus forever unable to be the righteousness that God both desires and demands and simply deserves. And so long as we remain unable to be what God created us to be, calls us to be, we will only be unworthy of the hope that He said is stored as treasure in Heaven.

And I don’t want that for anyone.

The amazing news is that we don’t have to live in fear trying to scrape by on little crumbs of hope as had inside things we convince ourselves will make us feel better about getting so much wrong. God came in Christ to wash all that away so that we could finally walk free into the way of life He created us to live before we created all these ways to love sin instead.

The bottom line is that Christ proves that God has the power to condemn, to destroy, but that He chose to love and forgive instead. And He chose that kind of kindness because He knows that there is no freedom found within destruction or condemnation, but there is freedom in love and forgiveness. And no, we don’t deserve it and that will always make it hard to believe in it.

But if He chose the cross and chose the grave and said He did the both so that we wouldn’t have to, it’s worth the trust that He did because I can’t imagine that a God who would die in my place would somehow then refuse to follow through on the purpose of what He didn’t have to do. No, if He came to lead the way that was always meant to set us free from all that our weakened flesh had failed to be, why not believe that that’s exactly what He meant for us to be?

Finally free.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold