Day 3525 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Samuel 8:8 NIV

Looking around one's sure to see that there's a certain degree of distress hidden either beside or maybe behind a world of what is still, until this day, one of such an invincible incivility.

In fact, it’s something that’s becoming a sort of sorrow to be seen inside a stagnant society still entirely too lost within this shared certainty that everything being done down here is worth doing while here. And it's a matter that’s most likely bound to bring about a measure of heartbreak when we watch those to whom we're called and toward whom we call with the call of Christ, and for whom we're so willing to fight to the very point of smiling should we lose our lives that they might find His hope in theirs, watching them all just not care is just a brutality against which no form of upfront hatred can compare.

Because it’s one thing to sit in silence and solitude with the decisions and devotions upon which our lives have determined their direction, but it’s another mess altogether to realize the commission of the Messiah is to understand that where we stand is truly up atop a hill as if a city meant to shine so bright that even the pagans glorify God on the day Christ visits again.

Indeed, we’re told this plain within the early opening of 1 Peter, chapter 2 verse 12 to be specific. Yes, “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” Because the day He next visits will sadly be the same as the first day they do. And this truth is one seen inside everything done under the sun being nothing worth being done under the Son who so came to set us free from our staying the same.

We’ve been talking about that for several days now, this call to consider who we serve and toward what outcome such devotions might direct us. It’s a divine directive to discernment as defined by not merely the knowing what’s undeniably right from the more that’s so obviously wrong but rather it’s understanding, and even coming so far as to even appreciate the opportunity to grow in the ability to divide between the undeniably right and that which many here say is close enough to count.

No friends, as you may have heard, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and we ain’t here throwing nothing nor playing any games.

Rather we’re here as is messengers, emissaries, ambassadors of the Almighty for whom we now seek to serve as from whom we’ve received the sort of service which sacrificed Himself to set us free from, again, our being the same as those many here who live only doing the same as has always been done before. We’re done with before, pillar of salt, moving on as faith is so meant to move us that He refuses to leave us alone for a day and nor do we dare imagine the asking Him to.

Not anymore.

For there’s a nearness to Christ which grows even overnight in the lives of those who live as if their lives are not their own but that they’ve been, indeed, set free by His paying the cost of the cross that was ours to carry alone, a reflection of ours to carry still. That’s the challenge to His calling. It’s again the discernment which differentiates between doing what’s right and doing what’s almost. For this world loves certain aspects of His access, but the admission being the admission of our missing it seems often the part upon which their hope falls apart.

Because folks here don’t want to hear that humility is such a necessity should we truly hope to be where He’s gone to lead.

But it is, and it’s such a matter non-negotiable that what we’ll find should we walk His line within this life is that loss of worldly hope as we eventually have our eyes opened to see and our ears opened to hear the world shout at us in unison, “We don’t care!” “We won’t try!” “We’ve done nothing wrong, do nothing wrong still!” Yes, “They say to the seers, ‘See no more visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!’”

And so we see that the same sort of scene has been the backdrop of all missionary work since the days of Isaiah, Joshua as we talked about yesterday, Moses even as he talked often about the challenges in trying to lead such a stubborn and obstinate people from slavery to salvation. Can you imagine that? Feeling for forty years the ferocity and faithlessness of a people just freed from slavery and promised a land flowing with milk and honey and everything they hadn’t had to call their own for longer than they couldn’t remember not having it?

No, much like those Israelites wandering that wasteland always whining about what they were leaving and how much better life was with those chains still in place, so still today do we face the same failure to find the pricelessness of a promise immeasurably merciful just because most have so become so convinced that there’s something equally magnificent to be found much quicker within the land where they live. Simply because it’s all they care to see or assume.

Leaving a world all but consumed upon the false hopes of false gods created by man for man. And such is such a perfect pride as prized by those blind that they’ll remain certain they simply can’t see life inside any other direction than their feverish devotion to what we’re simply trying to say will one day prove their destruction.

Just like Israel here asking for a king even though they already had a God.

Alas, we look around and watch a world attempt to call our bluff by all but setting itself on fire in this effort to prove that nothing they do could be so wrong as to hold such cost as the coming consequence of a life forever lost.

And they hate, vehemently, any who say otherwise. No matter the measure of love from which one may simply be trying to help.

Indeed, such is the seen substance of our society having made stubbornness so standard as to all but be expected. Yes, all day long, all month long, all decade long He's held out hands to what remains a stubborn and obstinate people. And in this, as His people, He calls us to uphold His purpose in and for and through our lives by our hands held high in the kind of praise this kind of place cares not to place where it's always belonged.

Because, as we’ve been discussing, such devotion is only directed to every false god that has been worshiped or is being worshiped by those who proclaim loudest that their way of life is the only one to come close to this hope that we might accomplish the best life ever lived. And because this world lives through so many false gods and thus forsaken hopes, it’s undeniable that they’ll deny any and all who try to speak to the fact that their gods can’t speak and thus can’t save. And because such a stance is clearly so evidenced within this world, the odds will only increase against us and our success as always assumed in our sense of seeing the difference we’ve made.

For we may never see the impact we have, other than that measured in the hatred and dismissal of our every effort given unto speaking life to those serving lifeless gods.

I’d been reading through Joshua for a while, started 1 Samuel night before last, and this whole issue of false gods and thus misplaced devotions, it’s all but paramount to the point of both those books, all of the first five in fact.

You go from God creating man in a Garden to their prideful exit from the same into what becomes their enslavement both to sin and in Egypt in Genesis to Moses leading the people through their exodus in Exodus to the laying down of the Law in Deuteronomy and the counting of the growing numbers of the nation as recounted in Numbers, and then Moses dies and so too does the people’s willingness to keep listening to a God they couldn’t see and pretended unable to hear.

No, as the study notes for this verse which I read last night put it, “They wanted God’s power, not His control.”

Tell me such isn’t still what we see when we see the things people are doing and just how resistant they are to the reminding of the fact that God deserves more from us than just these selfish lists of expectations that we’ve come to impress upon everyone all around us. Yes, we’re given daily a new design as to the outline of another’s lifetime that we’re supposed to see fit to not go against. Because I think we’ve perfectly missed the discrepancy designed in all these false gods so many serve.

See, we see these many falsities as found within fabricated deities all formed in hopes of holding the hope of the power of a god whilst always without the control wielded by the God. For we want something that makes us feel as if we have some sort of say in something, but still something that asks nothing of us in return. And so, inside this selfish power grab as proven in pride, what we settle to do is the creation of false gods that afford us an image, an idea, an ideology to which we can do things such as pray, present offerings, perform rituals, build entire religions, all while knowing all the while that they’re not but stone or metal or mortar, all things made or manipulated by humans for humans.

Indeed, such is why we seem so adamant to have our lives every four years all but enveloped by politics. We want a president. We want a leader. We want a Moses who will boldly go up the mountain to converse with God on our behalf so that we, like they, needn’t address the flaws and failures which render us perpetually and persistently unwelcome in His presence. Yes, if we’ve another in the lead then we’ve an intermediary that we can see, that we can hear, that we can rely on to ensure that we either head the right direction or have instead another to blame should we find ourselves led astray.

And so we make gods of politicians and the offices they hold. But it’s not just every four years either. We need more control than that! We want more input than that. And so we fill up the in between with our day-to-day devotions as highlighted in some of what we talked about yesterday. Each of them, be it social media likes or mainstream media headlines, each a false god all its own. And we love them so because they each give us a certain sense of power without demanding they control any of our lives.

That is other than the part or portion we’re already otherwise giving to a thousand other concerns or comforts.

No, we live utterly distracted in every way and by everything, convinced that such things as our follower numbers provide a basis of our impact and influence, certain that our estimation of our understanding as considered within such nonsense as our knowing the “right side of history” will afford for us the outcome to which we insist we’re owed. Indeed, we want everything to go just right, but as with the Israelites, we don’t mind a million middlemen catching the brunt of God’s control, thus leaving us free to feel as if He both has none and thus deserves none.

Oh, but He does!

And friends, no man-made monstrosity will ever change that. And that, my friends, is why we need be so very careful as to just how much praise or importance we place upon anything in or of this world. Even those around us, for the glaring reality through which we walk is that Biblical truth and thus the foundation of a Christian faith, well it’s all considered as foolish has ever.

And in that, as mentioned in that heartbreak found in finding that the world isn’t listening, it’s unfortunately inspiring some to change their approach, even to the degree of dissecting the Gospel in search of what they can say as determined by what we know won’t be heard or liked by those who live to have ears soothed rather than souls saved.

But this is the kind of confusion that God here tries to clarify in helping Samuel understand what He said himself in just the verse before. “It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.”

So often in this calling we feel, or will soon, that our efforts are getting nowhere. We’ll worry that we’re doing this wrong as we don’t seem to see the success we tend to assume. And that’s the problem, that we assume success as measured by worldly weights as unbalanced as they’ve become. See, we measure our impact via fans and followers. We determine the power of our purpose by how many likes some post manages to get. We gauge our faith by the measure of the same growing inside those for whom we fight every day to instill a little more of Him into them.

But it doesn’t work that way. For we’re not the ones who save.

We’re not the ones who ensure success in any of this. We aren’t called to be the ones who accomplish the outcome for anyone as Christ has already done that for everyone. That’s our job, just telling everyone what He’s done for them in the hope and prayer that, by hearing, they too may come around to themselves following this faith that we have in Him. And that’s just it, it’s in Him. It’s for Him. It’s from Him, we’re just the representatives that people scream at on the phone for simply doing their job.

What I think we need to keep in mind is that when our time here is done, the person we voted for or the masses of fans and followers we managed to earn, they won’t be there. It will be us and God, and, if we’re wise, Jesus will be there too as the only true intercessor we ever really had. But the problem is that we tend to leave Him last as we turn our attention to trying and console or cajole or comfort the confusions of those around us as we, naturally, see them as our harvest.

But they’re not. They’re His harvest, and simply put, He already knows the wheat from the tares.

Why let them tear us apart trying to find ways to water down the Word or assuage their assumptions or pre-package their opinions into the options we try to make the Gospel seem to have. We do all this only to not feel as if we’re rejected or somehow failing to undertake this task of being a light in a world that wants to stay dark. We try to prove that we’re doing our best for Him via the standard ways of measuring success that the world has made.

He calls us to use His weights, His measures, His message. Not the one wanted heard by a world that only wants to hear that everything they’re doing here is harmless.

And that’s simply not the message!

And because that isn’t the message of the Gospel, we’ll probably be ignored, denied, rejected by those who ignore, deny, reject the message that is the Gospel. Indeed, friends we'll be ignored by the same world and the same ones who ignore our God. But the point He’s trying to help us understand here is the same as He wanted Samuel to realize. And that is that it doesn't matter. Because this isn’t about us and how successful we try to be at making the Gospel popular. Popularity isn’t the point!

Popularity is nothing more than another false god this world serves!

And so we can’t afford to continue taking things personally as, simply put, we’re not just us anymore. We’re His people, His children, His reflection in this world that doesn’t want to see Him nor hear anything He has to say. That’s why they all put so much importance on their idols, it’s because they allow them to live as if they’re doing something powerful while never giving up control of their lives to the God who simply came to save what He’d created.

Again, in the end, what the world says of us, does to us, it doesn’t matter as they’re not doing it to us but rather to Him who now defines us.

And that’s why we can’t give our time to feeling as if we’ve failed when we watch a world continue to fall apart despite our attempts to point them to the only One who can put us back together. And so let us live not as if it might matter what others do or say or think of our faith nor how desperately we seek to serve the One who continues to lead us into His will for us, for we cannot agree to grant such a delight to those so lost inside such a delusion as their decision to deny life everlasting for the hope of one more comfortable or profitable before still it all proves the otherwise inevitable.

The point is don’t make Him last friends. The world may not understand what He deserves nor why we delight to give it. And too, while He may ask for control of our lives, He only does so in order to lead us from this death we’ve chosen for them within all the sins we’ve chosen in them.

And because this world still lives choosing those same sins, thus we should know that no, we don't belong and that it would behoove us to embrace that severance as soon as spiritually possible. For the stubbornness of man will not relent until forced. But nor shall we back away from this gap to which we're asked to hold this line that is the Life who paved the Way for us to speak the Truth that will set free every captive willing to confess their captivity.

And though they may be few do, it's not the numbers but the forevers that matter most.

It may not seem like we’re doing this well when the world refuses to help us help them find the only hope any of us have. But if all we do is done to honor our Father, then it simply shouldn’t matter what others do or refuse to. That’s between them and God.

We’re just here trying to help others hear that the only thing standing between them and God is, well, them.

The point is don’t let them come between you and God. Seems though that that’s also the challenge.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold