Day 3531 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 28:13 NIV

And the prosperity of humility is proven within the courage to confess.

For this is not something any would ever otherwise do as it’s the very last thing we ever think to. No, to confess is in a way to renounce as at first the mouth must speak what the heart has likely long held in captivity. Because such is life as it’s come to be lived by those of us, those who are in fact all of us, who don’t really know all that well how to live a life best. We don’t even know how to live life close. For if we did, well then we’d have nothing to confess.

And yet it seems and often feels as if our lists of lusts and lies as found in life continues to grow as further we go into this night of which we were warned so as to be on our guard standing against all that is coming to convince us to fall.

Indeed, within His Word we read that if any think themselves standing, that the same should take care lest they fall. For that is the only two eventual inevitables in life, standing for something and too falling from something else, falling because of something else, falling into something else from that for which we perhaps once stood. Because this world seeks not to encourage such audacity as that seen inside humility. In fact, this world makes humility out to be some sort of embarrassment when in reality it’s perhaps the only way in which hope can ever be known.

Alas, this world finds our faith foolish as it does indeed both demand and deserve that humbled submission upon which it was at first designed and then proven by Christ. For there is no other way that one can gain mercy other than, as seen here, the confession and renouncement of their sins and transgressions. And yet, while we may all well know that we need well that well of mercy and grace that chose that grave so to save us from our having raced into it without a way out, so too do we know well that such a belief won’t go down well while among those who’ve agreed that none need the humiliation that is humility.

For yes, humility is humiliating as it can only exist should we agree to so denounce ourselves. And yet, again, as we read here, that is the only way that any can prosper in regard to His promise and provision as proven in redemption. For He can only redeem what we admit we’ve lost. And thus we have to admit we need it and too that we cannot come about it any other way. And this is a most outlandish outlook as it goes entirely against the arrogance by which all of us have come to live. For here we consider such things as courage as merely the contentment to contend either for something, or mostly against.

But, consider if you will, what if our greatest courage is the courage to confess?

Because you see, that’s what’s needed for our salvation to be seeded, to be unto us deeded, for our to become seceded from the starvation of sin upon our souls. We have to become so arrogant that we too become willing to admit what all we’ve missed or made a mess. We’ve to invite a boldness to incite this insistence that we so betray ourselves as to undermine our selfishness. We have to reach this place where to hide is no longer allowed to feel alive.

For we’ve lived by this stuff all our lives. It’s all we know!

And so for us to confess our confusions and deny their delusions and the delights in which and to which and for which we’ve so violently declined toward what is our forever demise, it asks that we do the opposite of what we always have. For we’ve always hidden our flaws, debated our mistakes, refused to acknowledge our stupidity. Why? Because the world around us has placed this lie inside us that says we don’t have to. We’re told daily that we’re the only source of reality to which we’re obligated or by which we’re instructed.

Yes, we’ve heard this idea of our living our own truth for so very long now that we know only to instinctively debate, deny, decry any and all who defy our reliance upon ourselves alone. Again, that’s all we know. We know only to look to ourselves, maybe those who look like us as found near and around us, to be the ones from whom we learn what matters most in life, what we want most from life, who we’re even to be in life. Indeed, we are the ones who’ve always written our stories in pencil so as to reserve the chance to preserve our outcomes thanks to the erasers that we trust to remove our mistakes before anyone else knows they’re there.

But as we’ve talked here recently, it’s always too late in regard to faith as He’s known our every mistake before we were even alive to begin making them!

And so He knows the confusions and delusions and depraved illusions into which we’ll run in search of some sort of selfish security from what we know remains a coming storm. For as nothing has changed about our God, nor then, we know, will anything change about His wrath as earned by all of us on always our own behalf. For as we talked yesterday, we alone were the ones who made our choices that became the mistakes we still seek to keep hidden.

If only mostly from ourselves so as to not need that audacious seed of such humility as shown and thus sown by the Christ who came to lay down His life to show us that such is the only way salvation can begin.

And so we see, or at least should, that this faith asks that we do all we’ve never known to, all we’ve never wanted to. In fact, it asks that we come boldly before the throne of grace knowing without question that once there, and there alone, can we ever find the mercy that’s able to forgive and the hope that’s able to heal and the grace that can still overcome all these graves we carve of choices we make without making sure we’re making them for the right reasons.

For again, that’s something we’ve always lived as if never needed. We don’t know how to slow down. We’re unsure as to where to go to find the time to risk being left behind by a world that never stops running in the direction it’s always been going. We don’t know how to do this any other way than that in which this world walks and we too have thus walked away.

And from up here upon this ledge of the edge of our utter oblivion to which this world’s way has always led, it seems as if we’ve but one chance left to do what we never have as it means to lose what we’ve always had.

Which is exactly what this world has inspired us to never give. For we all know that we well need that ability to lean upon plausible deniability. We need to continue to trust in this lie that says, “you will not surely die”. We need that hope because it’s the only one we can have when humility isn’t held. Yes, there can be but one hope known when a soul remains prideful and arrogant and boastful and most disobedient. And that lone hope is that maybe He won’t know.

That’s why we here hear so many say that He’s not there. Because our sins know that we cannot afford Him being real. For we know that to Him we’ve never been true. And in that, our every transgression made now transparent thanks to the cross and the Christ who came to carry it so as to ask we take up our own and follow down that narrow, we know that our last hope as found whilst stilling holding onto our hatred of humility is that He isn’t there as that means that He doesn’t know.

And if He doesn’t know, isn’t there, well then there’s no need of our doing anything any differently. And thus we find, and all of us have, this ability to remain unchanged, unmoved, and thus unwilling to ever do either of the above.

Yes, we’re a people perfectly at peace letting our dirty deeds remain undisclosed so as to not feel the shame we know would be known should anyone else know that we’re not as perfect, as spotless, as upright but godless as we’ve so clearly been and too never been close to being. For we’ve always pretended that we’re these pictures of propriety and power, popularity personified thanks to our sharing of every lie that everyone everywhere will always want to hear.

We live to please itching ears, and ours seem always the most desperate to be so assuaged.

Problem is that while lies such as dishonesty, denial, debate and betrayal may indeed to us feel and seem to please, they’re not to be found as anything near pleasing to our Father. For He’s the One who came in the Son to be our Savior from those very things. And thus within that gift we see that He delights in honesty, in modesty, in morality and too that the reality is that we’ve not lived for or in or of any of those things. We’ve all been or become the eternal antithesis of what Christ is.

And in this, as He is the Way, the Truth, the Life, all we found is the wrong way around, the lies that despise the truth, and the death that we all deserve for every sin we’ve sought to win against the will of our Creator. All so that we could create something other, something to us that feels better, something that to us seems freer. For again, that is the only hope to be ever known by those who live by pride and thus hear only the arrogance that survives only on this insistence that we never disclose the substance of who we really are.

So we don’t. Many never will. But that’s become the line in life. And so what’s left for us to decide is where we stand and what falls because of it. Again, that’s life as lived up here on this edge of eternity as to be soon determined for either our good or our deserved. For we do not deserve anything good as we’ve not lived anything near.

Yet there’s been given unto us this one chance to make this one choice to invite this one change that will go on to change everything in every way. And that chance is called Jesus Christ.

But, alas, for us to fall upon His Name as we’re in Scripture so called, we’ve to first embrace the humility that asks we all but humiliate ourselves by confessing and renouncing all we’ve made of ourselves, made for ourselves, done to ourselves, done by ourselves. Yes, for us to be saved from all we’ve done that we know without question we so truly need to be saved from, well, such a difference can only come when we do something different.

And well, what’s more different than doing now what we’ve never done?

And sure, I understand the trepidation toward our humiliation. Again, we’ve all lived a long time pretending and proclaiming that we’ve never done anything wrong. We’re not bad people. We don’t make mistakes. We’ve never said anything we shouldn’t have. Never done anything that amounted only to a regret. We know nothing of shame. And yet, in that perhaps, well, maybe that’s as close to honesty as we’ve ever come.

For no, we do live as if we know nothing of shame for we fear, perhaps more than anything, our being ashamed as to us it’s become a sight unseen. No, we exist, again, amongst those all but sold to this lie that says we’re the image of perfection. And we’ve won so many prizes and platforms from within that pretend that we now know only this pretense that says we can’t dare do anything, say anything, show anything that might prove we’ve never been anything but who we really are.

Guess it all comes down to how long we teeter upon this edge of what will one day be an everlasting destruction. How much longer will we live in denial of what we know we cannot deny? How much longer can we afford to pretend we don’t need forgiven of all we struggle to even forgive ourselves for having done? Yes, how many more days will we risk upon this wage that says we can make it out without paying some price for the way of life we’ve lived as charged against the way of life we should have?

Friends, this world inspires us to hide all we do that we don’t end up being as proud of as we through we would. But honestly, at this point we don’t need much help as this approach has become all we know. We know to hide all we do so as to retain this idea of plausible deniability which we believe will afford us, should we need it, the ability to say we didn’t do any of it.

But we did. And still we do. But how much longer will we try what’s neither plausible nor possible?

Again, I firmly and fully understand that to confess our mistakes and misunderstandings is to admit we’ve gotten something wrong in life despite our having lived as if we never have. But I think the question is what do we gain in all this? What’s the victory to be found in our denial of things we know we cannot debate? What can we ever possibly profit when we pretend we’re perfect? And I know the answer for it’s found here in Proverbs. We do not prosper should we hide our sins. We cannot profit when we deny our wrongs. We will not win when we refuse to admit we’re wrong.

Because we cannot be saved until we admit we are.

And while this is a most blatant betrayal of ourselves and these lives we’ve come to live in love with our selfishness, seeing here that there is no other way to find that hope we need, that forgiveness we can’t live without, that mercy that made a way for us to come back home to live forever, it makes all of this far less humiliating than our pride has often believed it to be.

Indeed, for elsewhere Scripture tells us that with such bold faith is God pleased as whomever comes before Him has to at first believe that He’s there but also then we must trust that He’s both able and too, somehow, also willing to forgive. And who knows but that this faith to enter His presence and ask for His forgiveness, maybe it’s our own version of Abraham’s walk to sacrifice Isaac.

Because in all truth, that’s what we’re doing whenever we embrace humility as that’s exactly humility does. It puts our wants and wishes last. And just like Abraham probably not being too big on this idea of killing this son he and Sarah had been praying for, crying for, begging for, nor too are we at all very keen to kill this way of life we have come to love.

For indeed, to come before God demands we destroy this life we’ve worked for, begged for, saved for, wanted for for as long as we’ve been able to be alive to live it however we have. And that humility to ask for His mercy asks that we be willing to sacrifice the things we like, the things we love, this life we enjoy so very much that to us it seems foolishness to trade it for a share of what we read of the path paved by Christ and then walked by those who walked alongside Him.

Yes, it’s insanity to leave the comforts of our complacency in exchange for the promise of persecution.

But that’s just the point! He risked everything, gave everything, endured everything so that we could turn from our sins and find life everlasting in the Son. And friends, like it or not, He can see that we’re truly trusting in Him only when we do as He’s called us to. And if that means taking up our crosses and spending each day as if a confessional admitting our every fault, failure and flaw, so be it! For this isn’t about protecting ourselves anymore because the fact's always been that we can’t.

We cannot save ourselves. But we don’t need to try it that way anymore either. Because He already has, and thus there remains no other Name as none other has paid the price He has. And so let us share in whatever gets us there to where He’s gone. Even if that price means our all but going against ourselves and their selfishness. Because that cross proves that there is no selfishness in Christ.

And so let us prove that we know we’re His the only way such proof is found which is by not allowing any selfishness to remain in us.

Especially that which tries to hide all He died to forgive.

Because while it might feel like the closest thing to death we’ve ever known to confess our sins and lay out in the open all we’ve tried so hard to hide as it seems to all but annihilate our pride, while that might be the most humiliating thing we’ve ever done, when you sit with the realization that we’re all going to die anyway, only then can you realize that life’s not about what you lose but rather what you find.

And considering here we’re promised that we can find mercy, well, it seems to me that it’s worth losing whatever it takes to find what I know we all need. Because while vanity feels nice, it can’t save. And so why not try reaching for the humility that not can but that in Christ already has?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold