Day 3539 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Colossians 1:17 NIV

The first and the last, beginning and end, Alpha, Omega, was, is, is coming again, Author, Perfector, Creator, Savior, Father, Friend.

He who goes before and protects behind and walks beside and does all out of all He is seeing as all He is is love and mercy and just and justice and jealous and vengeance and kindness and caring and compassion and purpose and promise and permanent and perfect. And somehow inside all of that He finds reason for us to be here, but even more than that, to be His. And further still, to be His despite our having all but become here as where is a world not at all how He created it to remain.

No, for such things as death and demise were not at first His plans for mankind as He began us with the breath of life allowing us to breathe a life that we’ve come to live in love with all that isn’t all He is.

And why? Well, I suppose that the answer to that is perhaps different for each of us and yet too exactly the same. Because this fall away from God in which we’ve fallen in love with all that leads us and leaves us only further fallen is found worthy of our focus, our faith, our fight because it’s famous, fortuitous, fruitful and fulfilling. At least in terms of what we’ve come to accept as the meaning and merit of all the above as defined for us by a world that wishes to find us following them rather than Him.

Because He’s still not liked here. Not popular. Not profitable. Not preferred, not pursued, not prioritized, not by our blind eyes. No, we see alas too many things that shine closer, and this self-perceived nearness is to us of such novelty that is has become a matter of which we’ve become convinced is an evidence of their being of equal measure to His mercy. Indeed, we’re a strange bunch, so able to become so wayward in our wanting for what’s best but always also what’s closest.

And this almost volatile impatience has become for us an unwillingness to want for what’s always been always more. It inspires in us an incessant trading of that which asks patient trust for what we can hold in our hands and thus not need the risk of the wait. For to us, it seems best to have something now that we can then know for sure as opposed to waiting for what we can only slightly imagine, imagining then the what if’s and other weights won in waiting.

A problem proven in that whole bird in the bush equation.

Yes, our doubt is so deep that we deny that He might be worth our wanting for, waiting for, warring toward what His death should have already proven well worth the risk. For He’d have not gone to all that turmoil if the turnout wasn’t a turnstile. Would He? Die only for us to do the same? Give His life so that not much comes from it? Endure such misery as a crucifixion involved, entailed, instilled, still to leave us still uncertain as to this new certainty in the previously uncertain?

It just doesn’t make any sense. Because if our faith stands upon this claim that He is behind and before all things and that thus all things are held together in Him, by Him, well then what then? What must this mean, and too then what can’t it consider? For this is the very nature of all truth as it both defines what is from the rest that never was. That’s why people here so hate the truth as it stands unblemished in record in regard to the reality in which all of life is to be lived.

Truth doesn’t cower, cater, consider even. No, truth is an objectivity in that it has its own identity, its own brutality, its own sovereignty. And we can say this for certain now because Christ has come and in this has proven beyond all doubt, at least for those with eyes to see, that there is no difference between life and truth and the way in which they win life even over death as designed inside the cross He carried on our behalf.

Indeed, He told us this Himself when He said that He is the Way, the Truth, the Life. And yet, this life we live is lived as if we don’t know or can’t show or won’t go where He’s gone as it just goes against all we do know. But what do we know considering all knowledge is due a measure of truth? Yes, what in us is true? What in us false? What in us is faith? What in us is still this place?

What is us? Who are we? Whose image? Whose inscription?

We’ve been talking about that little passage found in the Gospels in which the people are pressing Jesus to try and trip Him up in saying something silly that sounds right to them. They’re asking Him about the paying of taxes, trying, I suppose, to get Him to say that Caesar is most important, or to rather catch Him blatantly saying that he isn’t, and in this all but cementing His position as enemy of the state of both Roman rule and too life itself. Amazing how blinded we can become, even to the point of literally missing the Messiah because of money!

But alas, such is us, is it not?

For again, His Word testifies against us, another reason we hate the truth. Indeed, “what has been will be again,” Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.” Nothing new because those who refuse to learn from history’s lessons are the same bound to repeat them. And tell me we don’t still so love money!

Indeed we do, give our lives to earning it and in this burning it so that our time given to the gaining isn’t realized as having been given to what wasn’t worth what we got in the end. For surely we can see that such a fleeting gift as a finite time is worth more than some wealth of wrongs hung as if wreaths upon hearths made of hearts that we treat as not but thrones of all this world throws us which throws us into tantrums should we miss or otherwise go without.

Yes, let there be no doubt that we do love this world, and in this love not life. For this world is not life, because how can that which is passing away be proven so permanent to be alive forever? No, only our Savior accomplished that feat, finding for us a faith that’s found for us that forever that nothing here can hold. And yet all that’s here is close, close enough to see at least. And this is where we find that forsaken assumption that seeing is believing, us believing only what we’re seeing is worth believing.

Thus us never believing beyond the seeing, sight thus our might and yet still a mite short of seeing beyond the boundaries of a life lived in a world lost.

See the problem?

It’s proven in that we hold tight to what we can hold, but what we hold is only held in a world that couldn’t hold Christ. We place our importance and thus priority and thus focus and thus faith upon things that bring not life but rather ask a portion of our life to so have and thus hold. All because we want it all close, so close we can see it so that we can believe it without the burden of having to believe in or for anything at all. It’s a forfeit of faith, our assumption of belief being so small as to be seen.

For who has to trouble themselves to trust in what they know? Who has to work to believe in what is seen by all? Who has to embrace the struggle of such humility as hope when we walk amongst a many who say hope is best held in what we hold? What a sad story is told of these lives we’ve sold to these things we hold in what is only here and for only now!

Because we’ve another option not so bound by such temporality as all that’s tried for and torn from this tainted and tarnished tapestry of what He created to be His best work. No, we don’t live as if we care toward His best, only what we assume to be our own.

But are we our own? We went over this idea yesterday in a recounting, counting, collecting, collective of what is God’s and what is Caesar’s and where we might fit or fail in between them. Coins, cash, currency, current conflicts and confusions, they’re all Caesar’s. And yet sadly they’re all ours too in that we worry more about such things than we do such better things as belief and betterment and the sheer investment He’s made into each of us, twice now.

Because He at first breathed into us the very breath of the lives we’ve become all but afraid to live for more than what we see, and then again when He came in the Son to set us free from our thinking we could see enough, have enough, be enough to know what’s best for a life.

No, friends, He is our best. And the fact that He’s now proven a greater love than even the greatest love is something of eternal indisputability. For His Word reads that greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friend. He laid down His for His enemies! And thus He has in this bested the best of what love is in truth. For love, well, “love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” Not even our many of them.

Indeed, “love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” Even to and through the tomb!

Yes, “love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.” Because nothing is able to overcome or outlast or otherwise overpower or outshine the Way that is the Life that is the Truth.

Because nothing of temporary tongues, or presently popular prophecies as those preferred by itching ears so that so many here seek to soothe, or what seems knowledge to a world that lives is as if we all know everything and yet all know everything slightly differently from one another, none of it can be proven to have always been nor to always remain. For this world and its way is passing away, and Heaven is promised too a place where the “old order of things has passed away”.

So what are we passing on? And in that, what are we passing on?

For life here is lived as if we’ve all this endless array of things from which to decide our own devotions and the degrees of discipline and determination we divide among the many we determine worth our devotion. Each of us choose for ourselves, this day and every other, who and what we serve. And yet we make such choices so lightly that we believe in them little cost and less consequence. But everything we do sends a message to any who might hear what our lives have to say.

And this is the problem proven in that God has heard and seen all we’ve said and shown.

And this problem is one ever-prepared for us to pass down to those who watch us pass on pursuing Christ due to the cost and consequence. That’s why every life’s a sermon and thus all of us pastors preaching a message that just might mean more than the moments in which we’ve so sadly come to live for. Because Christ proved forever that life is more than a moment, but too that a choice made in a moment could forever alter the course of life.

For every choice, when boiled down to the bottom, it’s a choosing between right and wrong, good and evil, righteousness and wickedness, light and dark, life and death. And I know that this reality has become quite heavy to we who’re anymore unwilling and thus self-perceived as being unable to endure such sound doctrine as the Gospel which has proven that He is before all things, even in being the first into the tomb that is a sinful death (despite His being sinless), and in this the first to begin life lived forever in Heaven.

And in this we can trust, or at least have no reason not to, that He does indeed hold all things together, for death has long seemed where all of life must fall apart. And yet, that empty tomb proves that His plans aren’t so limited by what we think we know of life or death or anything in between or everything before and beyond.

That’s the beauty of faith, it’s that it doesn’t ask us to understand but to simply trust that He does.

Which is why I think it worth the weight of our working through and getting to the bottom of who we are as defined by what we’re doing here. And I’m not talking those existential ponderings such a life’s purpose or our figuring out how to do all of this just right. No, I mean what are we doing as defined by the choices we make, the things we say, the things we do, the things we choose. Yes, what are we choosing, and just how lasting can any of it be?

Because He is the One who exists beyond such limits as time and space and matter, shouldn’t He then be all that does matter? For does not everything else, everyone else still exist bound by such limits as those He never had? Because He is the First and the Last, nothing was before Him and nothing will outlast Him. What then are we building our lives on? Something that only exists in between the first and last? And if so, why settle for something that small?

Indeed, are we choosing things that we have to hold, or a way of life that we struggle to hold together? Why take that on by ourselves, upon ourselves? Can we find a way to overcome death? Can we outlast the everlasting? Can we overcome the never-ending? Can we even find a way to deny the grave its invitation’s satisfaction? Not many have, and of the few who did, they only did because it was God’s will. Are we truly so obtuse as to live opposed to that same will?

Cross says we shouldn’t, because unlike Christ, we ain’t walking out of any tomb. No, when we leave this world, that stone stays. What of our hope, our trust, our joy, our purpose, our meaning, our life is left here when here we leave?

Truth is we don’t have to leave anything here, not if we store our treasures in Heaven. But again, that’s a choice that each of us have to make. Is it one that we should cling to with our hands, trying in vain to make it turn out just right?

Or should we lay it at the feet of Jesus trusting that the One who overcame the grave in order to us forgive is probably the only One we should trust when it comes to our experiencing what’s truly best.

For His best doesn’t end.

Will ours?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold