Day 3524 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Joshua 24:15 NIV

What is perhaps one of the most often quoted lines of Old Testament theology has alas become too one of the most often under-agreed upon opportunities chosen amongst humanity as evidenced in the opposition to such a stance as shown in ours.

For to declare that both one and their house would then, or as of today, will now serve the Lord against any of the alternatives or competitives or additives or objections or oppositions or whatever otherwise differing perspectives, such a different declaration is one as limited in popularity as Joshua’s proclamation would prove to the people who at first agreed only to live in blatant disregard within days. And this dishevelment in regard to an upright devotion is one still displayed in these days in which we waste our focuses upon fellowship with such an antiquated foolishness.

Simply for the sake of some sick and subhuman sense of acceptance found both from and offered too unto those for whom we’ve come to so divvy up our dedications that were we to sit and realize how many idols and idolatries we have in our lives, we might be more than just a bit surprised.

I know I’ve been. And it’s something so recently realized that I find I cannot help but lax one of my long-standing insistences upon the substance of these posts.

I’ve rarely felt inclined to add any personal anecdotes to these daily attempts to somehow capture and too convey the goodness and glory of God to the glory of God as is something I know I’ve lived in what’s been an almost upmost inability to so achieve. And yet, perhaps sometimes a personal lesson learned might somehow make the gravity of the grace so given unto us more apparently personal than such an undeserved mercy so seems to remain more days than not.

And so here’s to that hope that something I’ve seen might help someone else see beyond the blinders of life as we’ve come to assume it lived.

Last Wednesday as I was finishing up my workout, I decided to get a little rambunctious and add in a little added abdominal work. Problem is that just last month I’d undertaken a challenge to walk 100 miles in the month of September, a challenge I most certainly met, if not ended up besting by a bit. It’s just that over the last few of those 100+ I managed to tweak my lower back, and that added round of Russian Twists left me in a spot I've known entirely too often in the past.

I threw my back out to the tune of not being able to sit all that much for what’s been an entire week now. Lots of ice packs, heating pads, stretching, praying, regretting and getting better far more slowly than I’d so obviously prefer. Kind of the entirely opposite outcome of that for which I’ve become accustomed across these past few years of seeking to get healthier, stronger, just better overall. No, you don’t work out to hurt more, to mess things up, to render yourself all but entirely unable to bend over or sit down or stand from having sat down only to wonder if your lower back might actually explode.

Seems that such is the unforeseen sometimes, such as the same as found in regard to what we serve. Often unseen indeed. And as for me, well, having thrown my back out and thus been relegated to basically rolling around on the ground in some pretty impressive pain for going on a week now, life has changed, momentarily at least. For in that the time that I typically spend every day exercising is now wide open as, again, I can’t move without fear of my spine exiting my body. I know it won’t, but it does seem rather intent upon proving me wrong from time to time.

But it’s within this extra time I have of not being able to help my family run errands or exercise as usual or even really stay upright for all that long that I’ve found myself entirely ashamed of something my otherwise busy normality never let me notice. And that is the presence of a false god in my life. In fact this falsity is one so prominent anymore that I find that I’ve suddenly found that I feel this fear for everyone now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen in light of my life being somewhat paused and thus open to novel ways in which to stave the boredom.

Technology. Yes, I’ve spent the better part of this past week with some sort of screen shoved in my face just asking the hours of agony to pass by quickly. And it’s made me realize just how glued to our gods we’ve truly become.

See, I didn’t grow up with laptops. My family didn’t own a computer until I was in high school, or thereabouts. Didn’t get my first cell phone until I got my first job around 16. It was flip phone, only game worth playing, in my opinion, being Tetris. Our family computer had dial-up, something kids today know nothing of. I even remember my first personal TV set was a relic bought from a friend passed down apparently from their family from what was likely the 60’s or somewhere in there. Buttons, no remote, about 8 channels, only 3 worked.

Worked well for my first video game though, which I mistakenly got as a gift from my family for my high school graduation. And I say mistakenly as they initially bought me an incredible camera, and I, being the buffoon I didn’t realize I was at the time, I encouraged them to return it so that I could finally have an Xbox, of which I spent so many hours in my room cast apart from said family playing games as if life were such. Upon yet again a screen.

And as an aside, I even now cannot define how much I regret that mistake and the arrogance it now defines in my mind. I will never forgive myself for so discounting my family’s time as spent deciding upon my gift only to insist they take it back and give me what I wanted instead.

For that seems to be the god behind the screen, one of which we were so kindly warned against only to come around to serving unwittingly anyhow. Yes, seems there’s a god in this stomach of mine that still I serve through still a screen, something I fear we all might find if we weren’t otherwise so busy being or becoming so distracted from life by the gods we’re serving instead.

Yes, over the past months, years I suppose, I’ve apparently been choosing a god alongside the only One in true existence in this attachment to technology. This past week of agony has found me watching more youtube than ever before, playing games on my cell phone, scrolling through social media seeking updates to soothe the monotony of a life of chosen mundanity. Yes, and what I fear is that such is what we all seem to choose. Or at least most of us do.

But why?

You see, that same time we spend on cell phones or computer screens could be used reading, drawing, exercising, learning something new, leaving something old, growing something that might last longer than the latest headline and the outrage it offers. But this, this is the life we’ve chosen, and all we’ve filled with it, filled it with as counted within the things we choose, the priorities we have, the plans we make, the addictions we deny, the problems we hide, the pride we don’t, they’re all the gods we serve.

And yet we never seem willing or able or interested in asking as to whether God is truly even one of them.

For within this pantheon of personal preferences and popular opinions and professional appeasements and societal agreements, we’ve amassed so many gods that God is likely left mostly an afterthought thought about only after we’ve caught up on all the stories and shared all the hashtags and run ourselves smack out of lives left to lose within some game we’ve been playing on some screen somewhere.

Indeed, so many directions and delights and devotions, and thus so many gods in our lives, is God truly even one of them? And if not, as we’ve been discussing, can we not see the death we’re choosing in our choosing to not serve He who is the Life?

See, often in life we get sort of stuck between these two opposing forces that seem to always be pulling us apart. It’s the created and all we’ve tried creating against the One who created us. It’s a battle waged between the ways of this world and the will of our Father. It’s the choice between doing as is done by those we see or seeing beyond that sight and all those sounds to see if we can be among the few who walk by faith and thus not by sight. And within this daily dilemma as such a decision has been so clearly allowed to become, we just sit there as if unsure and thus afraid to choose.

But that makes we wonder why we're holding onto death so tight.

Because, as we talked about yesterday, though the faces have changed and the names don't sound the same, the sad truth is that we often live as if we still belong beyond the Euphrates and entirely too much like Egypt. We still do as the Romans do and serve as many false gods as the Greeks did. Because the world doesn't change. Our habits aren’t allowed to change. Our surroundings are always going to be, at least here, what they’ve always been only to perhaps a deeper measure in that darkened direction.

And still we ignore it all as if it can’t possibly be a problem simply because it hasn’t proven one as of yet. That is despite our growing indifference in regard to God and our call to revere Him alone as God. Despite our growing fascination with facechats and instatubes, we still live as if we’re ultimately and utterly devoted unto a single direction. A lie we believe simple because we don’t want to realize we have a problem and that it’s become such a false god that from within our staunch service shown unto what society has become, our thus living life according to what so many insist it remain, we just don’t move anymore.

We sit inside assumptions assuming that everything we’re doing is so entirely harmless that it couldn’t possibly prove to carry consequence. We glue our attention to the intentions and interventions of a world that still denies God and we do so while convinced that our doing as the world does would never lead us to see Him the way the world always has. No, surely we won’t become so worldly that He returns to find us unready.

But friends, how can we be when all we seem to serve is so worldly that we don’t do what faith is meant to? For faith is meant to move us toward freedom.

And friends, the freedom for which Christ freed us grants us the opportunity to no longer do as our ancestors did nor as the world around us does now within this land upon which we’re currently living. Because again, nothing has changed in regard to the fact that we’ll not, any of us, be living in this land forever. No with that promise of Heaven waited upon the horizon, we are, in Him, free to choose Him and to make Him our only choice every day we’ve left before we leave.

No matter how abnormal or unpopular such a stance will here remain. Because to here remain is not in any way anything for which I’ve any intention.

And so perhaps we choose for ourselves this day to let ourselves let faith do what He meant it to by choosing to throw away our foreign falsities and public preferences and personal pridefulness as wanted and won by so many in this world that this world has become only such subhuman superficialities in regard to reverence and religion and the necessity therein of our own personal devotion unto a single direction chosen so sternly that we welcome Him daily to helping us see whatever we’ve allowed to steal His time, His praise, His presence in our lives.

Yes, choose for yourselves, this day, whom you shall serve.

For yourselves, knowing that such a decision, as declared at the end of this verse for today, such a choice might have either blessings or curses for those nearest and dearest. Yes, what we do impacts those around us, something seen inside our either being the lead leading our loved ones toward the Lord, or rather our being led by a world not at all interested in His will nor living His way nor upholding His Name. And yet sadly the second is so clearly the most common in that we live lives anymore that allow the lost to lead us rather than our choosing for ourselves to do this differently.

Because the apparently all too commonly overlooked reality is that we are all already choosing this day who or what we serve, or rather anymore we’re only riding the coattails and confusions of those around us insisting they make our choices for us. And because this has become so common, so popular, the dire reality anymore is that we’re making this choice every day, perhaps multiple times a day thanks to such an ongoing and thus ever-incoming influx of the substance of things others are choosing to serve as we choose only to follow.

Indeed, within this world as it lives and lies and loses its life every single day inside of such lifeless pursuits as politics and pride, we’re otherwise endlessly bombarded with a buffet of blaspheme from which we watch all of humanity select their idolatries as if pastries unable to engorge or enlarge an already gluttonous stomach which has, for too long now, been considered the homes of house gods who exist again inside such things as headlines and hatred.

For such are such obvious examples of the things that some serve, and yet that list is almost as endless as eternity. But knowing the cost of salvation as now considered in the cross carried by Christ, can we not comprehend the necessity of the kind of humility that refuses to let anything else, anyone else take His place or our time as given unto praising Him for giving us a place in His presence?

Yes, friends, what are we serving? How many are we serving? Is what we’re serving today the same as we chose to serve yesterday? For in all reality, again because of a world do divided and distracted and disappointed from having served the wrong things for entirely too long, we all watch the world race right after yet another idol that they simply can’t see will too let them down and leave them lost.

What about us?

Is there any continuity to the choices we’ve chosen or are currently choosing in regard to the things we’re serving? And even if God isn’t the lone priority in our lives, as He simply doesn’t seem to be at all all that popular still, is there any agreement today with what we thought most important yesterday? Or are we rather living as the world does as if each day is a life all its own in which whatever we do won’t matter long after the sun has set and tomorrow has shown up as already always assumed?

Indeed, this past week has opened my eyes to seeing something that I’ve so clearly failed to notice before. And now I fear we so discount the risk of such directions and directives given us from a world serving a billion bulls and baals that we don’t really realize that we’re in such risk of not making the same choices today as we did yesterday. We might not choose the same way we did yesterday, or for the same reasons as those reasons we relied upon being reasonable yesterday.

Because the world keeps running on ahead of itself seeking something to serve that won’t fail or fall apart in the end. But all here will for again, as we discussed a day or two ago, this world and its way and its will and all its wants and wishes, they will all fall and fade away. Is what we’re serving or who we’re following or what we’re doing going to leave us falling short when that end shows up as unannounced as He promised it would be?

For nothing’s changed in that none knows the day nor the hour, and so too has thus nothing changed in regard to His asking us to remain focused and vigilant as if watchmen wearied upon the night watch not wanting anything bad to happen, and thus refusing our complacencies their comforts. And thus not doing as the world does in allowing choices to be made so carelessly that we even invite the world around us to make them for us.

No, choose for yourselves, this day and every single day we’ve left thereafter, who you will serve. And once you’ve made that decision, allow then no swerve, no second thought, not a single moment of maybe. No, if we choose to serve God, and such is the only choice we can make if we want to make it home alive, to make it home at all, we cannot then allow anything of this world to remain of any passing importance.

For salvation is not measured in portions or percentages as Christ went all the way up that hill with all the weight of all our sins and all our shame upon His shoulders, endured all those hours of an agony no thrown-out back begin to can imagine, and indeed died all that death on our behalf so that we’d be left lacking nothing until He returns to lead us into the life for which He freed us from all the chains and choices we’ve chosen and served in all those years for which that cross was the cost.

Let us be careful then in regard to every choice we make as each and every one of them tells God something more about what we find to be most important. And not only should He be on that list, friends, He is the list.

But, again, as Joshua asked, choose for yourselves. As for me any mine, well I’ve got work to do for them and myself that’ll show God a better scene than the ones I’ve seen or shown staring at a screen.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold