Day 3487 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 1:22 NIV

For our to have been made something we once were but had since lost demanded the doing of something none had ever known, had any reason to imagine, nor as it turns out even the ability to imagine.

Because who would imagine such a freedom as forgiveness? Who would imagine such a blessing as a new beginning? Who would imagine such a kindness as Christ’s compassion? Who would imagine such a love as one that would delight to lay down a life for the good of anyone much less for the best for everyone? Yes, who could imagine that through such a death as that in which He decided to endure, delighted to endure, that through such a suffering might one day come an eternal salvation complete with everlasting life won on the other side of our present death as defined by our living in the dark afraid of the light?

It’s in every way mind-bending and life-changing as that is in fact the point and purpose perfectly perfected in Christ Jesus.

To free us.

To change us so that we can finally be a free us. To move us toward that freedom for which He died for us. To show us that His love for us chose to not leave us where we had wound up in this place asking to just be left alone to live and die however we please. To help us see that to live only to do and die as we please is in proof not much of a life as it runs only outside and forever away from the Way that is the Truth that is the Life that is designed to both manifest and then carry onward to the best the life for which He created us to live and has thus far refused to allow us to lose.

For that is the message of the entirety of existence. It is that we are all and too all around us all of God’s creation created to remain His created. It’s that despite our trying so feverishly to prove otherwise, that we’ve never actually been endowed with this arrogant insistence to so change the substance of our having been created into our now creating a way of life, a million ways of life, a billion ways in which we’ve lived and lost our lives to the clearly defined wrong side of right. No, that was never our purpose, to so pursue everything He kindly and lovingly asked us not to.

No. He created us to be both alive and to live, the latter undertaken thankfully for the former in what is the only way such gratitude can be proved.

And that is to set our lives upon only the worry to honor Him, to glorify Him, to praise Him, to please Him. Problem then being obviously that we’ve never done anything of the sort. For we’ve so sadly forgotten that we’ve sort fallen all out of sorts seeking the sort of selfish sights that sing the sounds and show the signs of our satisfaction and only the sustenance of its continuance.

Indeed, that is in fact why we’ve never been freed. For we can know nothing of a life lived free when at first we decide to decline the simplicity of staying His people. And as we’ve so clearly never stayed His, a fact evidenced within our ongoing eagerness to chase after only what pleases us, well then we’ve thus never known what it was like to be who we were created to be as defined by the One we’ve never tried to acknowledge let alone adore.

And there’s such a vast difference between even acknowledgement and adoration that it’s become only what is a furthered distance between who we are and who we were created to be and thus could have remained and thus should still be. Alas we seem all but entangled within an insanity that says such is something we neither know how to be, want to be, can allow ourselves to see, to believe, to even perceive might be a possibility. No, we’re otherwise stranded a million miles from home and even further from Him.

All because of the little of the little that we do allow ourselves to realize in regard to our rebellion and our rejoicing only in its continuing.

Because that little of that little makes us well aware of where we are having become where we are only because we allowed ourselves to lead the way so as to usurp the praise that God was due instead. Sadly this world has been sending us this vile message telling us that our lives are only for us, about us. And this lie has taken such root inside so many people and so many places that we all in unison sing the same song showing Him that nothing will be allowed to ever be new under this sun we assume the only light in life.

And if there is to be nothing allowed new or even renewed, well then we know real well that we are only to be what we’ve already become and that is but a people again a million miles from home and without a hope in this world in which we’ve solemnly, stoically, stupidly come to assume all our hope is to be housed in what we’ve come to consider our only home to ever be known.

Which is undoubtedly and undeniably the most heartbreaking of concessions that I can personally consider anymore.

Why? Because of messages like this one in the opening chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae. See, he wrote to the Colossians, as he did to all the other churches of whose letters form the majority of the New Testament, telling them all about all that had happened for them in order to perhaps implore them, impel them to carry on this hope that they’d, that we’d been given in Him who is the Savior. Still. The Savior. That’s the message in its most basic and fundamental and elementary understanding, undertaking.

It’s that God in Christ saw fit to come to us to save us from both who we’d become and too what all we’d done because of who we’d become. Because that is the same thing that has basically been the foundational purpose of His ever since we proposed that our preferences, our opinions, our personal priorities and popular proclivities were of somehow greater importance and better reward and more amazing benefit than living as a man in a garden with no needs, no worries, no fears, no failures, just faith.

Yes, that has been our message that we’ve been throwing in God’s face for as long as we’ve been here. It’s nothing but this ongoing broken record rejoicing in our rebellion and asking Him to just leave us alone to ignore Him, deny Him, debate Him, even destroy Him all so that we could do only what we please because that’s all we believe. Indeed, it seems that all we can believe is that our pleasure, our success, our satisfaction is all that matters.

And we would have all stood in that crowd at the foot of the cross jeering and sneering at this self-proclaimed Son of God saying He’d come to save us while He hung there apparently unable to even save Himself.

For that is the message that our lives so lived and lost in sin have sent to Him who created us to be not slaves to sin or self but rather sons and daughters of the only true Father that could have created us, did in fact create us, should have since destroyed us, but instead chose to keep trying a few more days that same attempt that has been His will for as long as mankind has been alive.

To save us.

You see, God’s been sending the very same message to all of creation since our creation. Just so happens that we've only found reasons to refuse that call and pretend we've not even voicemail by which to get the message, by which to get the picture. And that message, that picture is that we are either His and living like it or we are not and thus not living at all. And when broken down to that sort of radical simplicity, it’s pretty easy to see why being the sinners we know ourselves to be would have problems with the gravity.

Because we know we don’t stand a chance despite all our chants sounded and resounding still against the only One who has never moved. For the sheer fact that God has never changed proves if nothing else that His stance is solidified whereas our having always changed our minds, changed our plans, changed our priorities and their pursuits, well that sort of ever-shifting insanity has left us basically unable to stand still if we’re even able to stand at all.

Which is pretty much what He’s been trying to point out about the sands of sin that have been the foundation of our every idea and ideal and idol and ideology ever since we stamped out of that Garden in search of something somehow better than everything He had simply offered for us to forever enjoy. Yeah, beliefs bigger than brains it seems! Because we still haven’t found what we’re looking for, and yet He still hasn’t changed the fact that we’re looking in only the wrong directions.

That’s in fact why Christ came to all but seal the insanity and finally draw the line that we’ll either cross thanks to the cross or continue to refuse simply because of the loss of a life we know it means. Again, God has kept all of this impossibly simple and perfectly straightforward for an undeniably obvious reason. And that reason is so that we could either come to embrace the humility of a childlike faith or be left without excuse for having continued to refuse.

What I seem unable to comprehend anymore is why we won’t take Him up on this chance. I get that we hate change even though we change our minds and change our clothes and changes our hairstyles and changes our tv stations so as to always stave off the boredom. I understand that we’re afraid of being proven wrong having always lived thinking we were always right and well within our right to assume as such. I realize that we really don’t like the whole idea of death having always agreed that it’s nothing but the end of life itself.

But when will we understand that the empty tomb is a fact? When will realize that redemption is a hope we can have because of that fact? When will we accept that salvation is a promise because of that hope of redemption as proven by the fact that that tomb is still empty? When will we get it through our heads that that tomb is still empty because He both left and that He then called us to join Him in it so that we could join in His leaving it?

Because that was the whole point of His dying our death. It was to lead the way. It was to show us that there is nothing He can’t do, nothing He won’t do to get through to those who are His to help them see that we are all His whether we agree to it or not. Again, that is a very basic version of what God’s message has always been. We are either His and living lives that look like it, sound like it, love like it, love Him for it, or we’re living as if we’re not His and thus not really living for anything worth living for.

And that’s the danger in our continuing to refuse this opportunity to realize that all He’s asking is for us to humble ourselves, to turn back toward Him, to seek His face, to share His praise, to offer up our lives as living testimonies to both His existence and His goodness as both proven in the fact that we are not who we’ve been but that we’ve been moved because of Him and His wanting, for some reason, us to still be His. Forever.

See, that’s the thing that is so amazing to me about our Father. For throughout time God has time and again shown Himself to always be the first to make a move. He was the first to move in regard to creation. The first to move to inspire this creation to carry itself within a manner worthy of His gift of life having been created. The first to move to call this creation to task for having fallen away from His way of living this life in the way He himself defined as right. The first to warn of condemnation. The first to contemplate the gift of reconciliation for our having fallen away into condemnation.

And even then yet too the first to extend an offer of peace, a priceless offer that cost His own Son His own blood in order to make a way, to make the way, to be the Way for us to be again what He made us to be which is simply His creation as He intended it to simply remain.

A creation free from blemish, free from embarrassment, free from enslavement, free from punishment. He, as we read in Colossians 1:19-20, was pleased to have the fullness of Himself to dwell in Christ Jesus so that His fullness might fully free us from having so fully earned the fullness of His fully justified wrath. Yes, He was pleased to come in Christ to make peace with all things, with all people through the gift of redemption and reconciliation as rewarded by His refusing to leave us so broken as we still so often seem too willing to remain.

Friends, this was His move, His choice, our chance. To what? Move. Because now that He has made the way, become the Way for us to move beyond our shames and regrets and the weight of all their due punishments, we are now, in Him, free to move in Him, toward Him, for Him. Finally and fully and forever free to simply be His. For that is what He created us to be and refuses to allow us to forget.

How much longer will we pretend that we have? Because there is no way to deny God, to debate His authority, to decline His sovereignty, to question His majesty, to remain confused as to His mercy. He made all of the above clearly evident in Christ Jesus who came to free a people who have known only enslavement for so long now that we, like those Israelites wandering and wavering in that wasteland, sometimes we just want to go back to what we’ve always known.

But His message is that what we’ve always known isn’t life but merely death disguising itself as such unto eyes now too blind to see the difference.

My point is that our sins have convinced us of things that have only led us away from life. We’ve become entangled in excitement, ensnared in entertainment, enraptured by the procurement of all these prizes and prices that we deny we’ve paid to hold what we’ve had that has never been the hope we know we need. He is that hope that we know we need, just then a matter of how much longer we refuse to admit that we’ve never thus far been free enough to wonder enough as to what it might really be like to be something better than everything we’ve become.

He made that move to move all the guilt and punishment and pain out of the way. And sure, it might hurt our pride to admit we’ve gotten so little right, but isn’t it worth the growing pains of feeling our chains fall off in order to see what more He might have in store considering all He’s done to remind us that He won’t fail to lead us to something so amazing that He himself chose to lay down His life for us to have even the chance to believe for it?

I know we’ve all done a lot of things that have become a lot of chains that have held us in fear of Him finding out that we’ve not been living like we’re His. Newsflash folks, He already knows. That’s why He made the first move, so that we could move too.

So what are we waiting for considering that things like freedom and hope and peace and life are waiting for us to stop waiting to move toward He who came to set us free and lead us home?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold