Day 3544 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:7 NIV

Proving thus that faith perish not?

It does seem that such is exactly the point and purpose of this path purposed for us to follow both personally and thus too on purpose. Why? It’s worth it. Worth more than everything in fact, even gold, as we see here. For, as we see here, even gold is destined to perish as if it’s found here then it stays here. But faith, no, while faith begins here it’s end is in Heaven, and thus it is indeed worth more than everything worldly that we’ve sadly come to want so much more simply for the ease in which it comes.

For it seems that more times than not in life as we’ve come to so sadly assume it best lived, we waste not our attention nor intention upon such things as words and wisdom as they require work and effort, a true humility as formed in the heat of our agreeing that we don’t really know everything and thus have plenty of room to grow and improve. That, and well, we’ve a whole plethora of other problems more perfectly perceived by eyes so blind to anything which begins behind belief.

Indeed, it seems that we care not toward the purposes and propositions as proposed with the express purpose of our profit.

And no, not the gold kind as clarified here.

Rather this profit is one proven in the loss of illusion, the forfeiture of faithlessness, the falling into the hands of a loving Savior as we fall out of the interest of both worldly things and too that of worldly scenes. That’s one of the most amazing things to see along this journey back to life, from madness to mercy, grave to grace, everlasting to never-ending. It’s that mind-shift as summed up rather perfectly in what’s become one of my life’s verses that just hits me every time I read it.

Yeah, Paul put it perfect in Galatians 6:14. “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

As the Jefferson’s would know, no, I’m movin’ on up! And it’s a trip more incredible by the moment.

Because it brings about this freedom that our infatuation with independence cannot comprehend. For to be independent is to be of the ability to stand on your own and thus need none. And this is a worthy outcome in this world, all things and options considered. But, alas I’ve realized that standing alone, something I’ve come to indeed embrace in my own life, while it’s able to afford us a great many privileges, avoiding fear or failure or persecution or pain are not among the mines we miss.

No, those calamities are still certain in life for we walk it within a world without such things as compassion, kindness, even caring, at least on the large scale. Indeed, this world is very much the veritable furnace, sort of a visual and physical and thus personal example of torture and torment in a wide scope of the two. It’s anymore a daily dishevelment as demanded of so much vile indifference and violent dissidence.

And it’s this brutality through which all of us walk, but yet still it feels the flames a bit hotter the odder you’re considered. And this is a perfectly placed problem for all who choose to abide by this path both split apart and thus spent apart from the wide and well-worn. Yes, for any who walk by a faith the herd feels foolish, well, you’ll be invited to feel the heat of a world of hate, simply because you neither fit nor feel anymore the need to. And this simply rescinds this world’s ability to lord over us anything or in any way.

No, as followers of Christ, we already know this ain’t gon’ be nice! He told us this himself.

Still though, doesn’t mean we’re actually able to in any way fully prepare for the pruning. And nor do we have any real way by which to measure up front the degree of dross spread across such things and places as our hearts and minds and eyes and faces. No, as sinners we’ve no idea the depth to which sin has spun its lies into our lives. And yet such is where we find perhaps the first hint of the fullness of His goodness as the grave says He went all the way to bring us back.

And knowing this ought to make all of this far more straightforward than it seems to have been allowed to become. But, I supposed that the main, and indeed perhaps only reason that faith is often felt more precarious than it really is is that the straight forwardness of it is aimed right into the heart of the flame.

Yes, this faith finds for us a forging that we simply cannot forego as it’s something gradually seen as entirely necessary if we’re to be found fit for that home in eternity. Because, while sinners cannot see their stains, once we begin to, we cannot even then even begin to understand what it’s going to take to wash them away. For the actions and words may be rather quickly altered, but alas the patterns and preferences they’ve left are things we only grow to learn are as bad as the habits we’ve had.

This is all what needs burned away here between the fire and flame. Far be it from us to understand it though, no, not having become so accustomed to custom couches and safe-spaces.

Indeed, we’ve grown quite weak within all our modernity. So much so that we’re all but unable to want for what actually makes us better. In fact, seems that often times that which makes us better only begins by making us bitter at the mere suggestion that we’ve such room for improvement. No, our vanity knows not at all what to do with that sort of brutal honesty. Seems the proverbial furnace in fact, scorching us so severely that we seriously doubt most days whether or not even Heaven is worth the war.

Yes, we’ve become so cozy here that we’re willing to consider conceding upon His promise of eternity in exchange for the chance to have our reward here in the form of avoiding the fight and failure and fear as found within a faith that’s not welcome around here. No, this world cannot compute how to balance such charges of guilt as levied upon all of us by He who came to lead us back to the better we’ve never cared to be. Just an alien curiosity at best, and in this not one worth working for.

Let alone suffering toward.

Because it’s considered too personal, too painful, too close to home in this place we think our home. But that’s just it, this isn’t our home as much as this faith is supposed to be personal. And the problem is that we’ve sort of gotten the two backwards in that faith is seen as a culture, a communal undertaking, a steady attendance at a local church service and perhaps passing out some food every other Thursday evening. It’s corporate worship and celebrity pastors speaking messages that profit their present popularity.

And this kind of constant comfort as born inside such incessant coddling has only catered to this idea that we’re at home already as it sure feels all warm and fuzzy. And it’s all sadly become just comfortable enough that we can afford to take everything personally, as if even our salvation is a matter of potential measure as misconstrued by our mainstream misunderstanding of just how pitiable or present standing. Leaving us to actually question whether or not the refinement of sanctification is absolutely necessary.

After all, Christ already died to atone for our sins, right? Must we then suffer through the fighting against them ourselves?

See, it’s one thing to think these thoughts in the corners and recesses of minds and hearts living as if life and faith are a recess in which we can play games and pretend it all light and easy. But it’s another matter altogether when you put it into words as it makes you wonder as to how we got here!

Because, contrary to our commonly accepted penchant for taking everything entirely too personal, the challenges we face in life, in faith are not there to see how much we can take. They’re there to help us see how much we have to give, both to this faith and thus up in order to fight the fight this faith will prove. For to whom much is given, much is thus required!

And yet even this is something of an as of yet unrealized two-fold opportunity in that life’s trials are there to help us see both how much we have to give in terms of pushing us to our breaking point so that we can begin building it out a little further so that we’re then more able to endure a little more and a little more and a little more in light of every fight we face and manage to survive.

But they’re also there to help us come to realize how much we have to give up. Because perhaps even more important than helping refine us in terms of strength, courage, determination, discipline, what we maybe need more than even those things is to reach a point wherein we begin to discern what matters from what doesn’t. And oh, the amount of things that we’ve lived thinking mattered that never did at all!

Because the often underutilized reality to life is that we’re surrounded by a whole lot of things that simply don’t matter. But yet, what makes this worse, and indeed personal for that matter, is that a bunch of these things that don’t matter have become things that matter a lot to us as individuals. They in fact matter so much that they’ve become part of our lives, invading our minds, blinding our eyes and binding our times to wasting our time worrying about things that mean not only nothing in eternity’s opinion, but actually, actively keep us from focusing on what does echo in eternity.

For let’s face the facts, who some celebrity is dating doesn’t have anything at all to do with where we spend eternity. Unless, that is, that such frivolity becomes of such vast importance that it prevents us from giving our time to such things as prayer or Bible study as we give it instead to gossip pages on Reddit and scrolling through social media comment sections seeking a little clarification on this new beau of our favorite idol.

Because that’s the danger!

It’s proven in that we’ve only so much focus, effort, attention to offer, and so any of it given to anything that doesn’t help us toward Heaven only keeps us among heathen. And that’s not at all what we’re called to do nor who we’re called to be.

Issue is that it’s sadly become what we do more often than not, so much so that it is all but who we’ve come to be. And that’s what needs to change, because the fact is that Jesus didn’t just come to save us from such things as witchcraft and devil worship. He came to save us from those, certainly, but also from the dangers so deceptive that we’ve come to see them as delights. Like wasting our time. Worrying about worldly matters. Fighting over political allegiances. Listening to songs that in no way edify the Spirit. Watching shows that lean on foul humor. Judging others over petty matters.

Not judging ourselves over what matters most.

Road rage. Food addiction. Idolizing everything from singers to neon signs. We all have a ton of things in our lists of priorities that simply don’t belong there, because they’re stealing our time from focusing on fighting this good fight and doing so as if we’re dying so that we can both live like it and in that show a joy this world can’t understand so that they can feel this alien curiosity to see what we’re on.

Indeed, we should be high on Christ, not living as low lives with no lives leaning on headlines of party lines to keep us partly blind believing all that matters is the current time and some conga line in which we find that we’ve become just a part of the herd who can’t believe what we heard nor wait to tell others all about it.

Friends, thus the fire, the necessity of refinement however He might see fit to bring it! Because if it doesn’t help us grow in our faith, then it doesn’t matter. If Jesus ain’t in it, it just doesn’t matter. And thus the refiner's fire. Thus the furnace of affliction we talked about yesterday. Thus the failures we face and the feelings we feel and the flaws we find when we finally find ourselves not quite so blind or bound by again what doesn’t matter.

See, God tests us to help us see for ourselves, feel in ourselves, find for ourselves that we’ve allowed in far too many things that leave too much room for distraction from the pure devotion He both demands and deserves. And so He sends us into storms that blow away our ability to worry about anything other than focusing on Him get us through what we know we can’t do, and what no celebrity can help us with either.

He sends the fire to light up our laziness and help us learn to address the laxity that allows it. He makes us feel dirty, guilty, ashamed and angry about the things we catch ourselves doing, saying, watching, singing along with so as to help us understand that the line between good and evil had become a bit too blurred in our lives. In fact, He sends us trials and tests to help us start to learn that discernment isn’t a matter of knowing right from wrong but of understanding the difference between right and almost.

Because that’s what matters.

And yet sadly, it’s never been allowed to matter all that much to us. No, again, we’ve become so comfortable inside our status quo that we fight against anything and everyone that says we have some things that we need to let go. We fight against anything that tries to take them away. Indeed, we utterly hate anything, anyone, everyone that dares to harshen our complacency.

But thankfully He isn’t as willing to settle as we are.

So He does what’s needed to help us realize what all we have to give, both to this fight and up in order to better undertake this fight with the faith and fervor it deserves. Because as He knows better than any having endured the cross, He knows better than any that this journey has never been about what we go through but rather what it all goes to, goes toward, leads us toward. And so if it takes a life lived as if a battlefield, bring it! Not because it's easy, not because it's our preference, not because it brings us comfort.

But simply because it brings us closer to Jesus! 1 Peter 4:12.

My point is that we simply can’t afford to hate the trials He sends our way. My friends, they’re only there to make us better by helping us see just how much room we have to improve in that direction. And even if such is done by helping us realize this by beating the tar out of us, if that’s what it takes to rip the tar out of us, so be it. Be thankful for it! Because the bottom line is that yes, He most definitely gives us more than we can handle.

But that’s to both help us find the strength and courage and discipline He placed inside us, things we’ve largely forgotten about as they’ve rarely been used thus far, but also, and most importantly, to learn to lean on Him when our best is broken and bleeding and we’ve just got nothing left but to look to Him and finally ask Him to be our Lord as we finally accept that we suck at trying to be.

Friends, let us do as asked in James chapter 1 verses 2-4 and, “consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Because while we have roundly accepted this suggestion that there are all these finish lines in life, in faith for that matter, there simply aren’t.

We do not get to decide when we’re done or have done enough. We didn’t create us, we didn’t save us, and so nor do we have the right to determine when we’re done. He does, because He did.

Let us not forget that again, even if it takes going through the fire to be reminded that we’re worth more than we’ve settled for inside such lives given more to fear than faith.

Indeed, He created us in His image, meaning then that we’re worth more than everything that wasn’t given that truly distinct honor. Let us not then grow cold or cautious when this road home gets hard or heavy. He knows what we need to make it, and if He has to break us to help us learn it, find it, fix it or forget it, then so be it.

After all, if Heaven is the finish line, does it really matter what we have to go through to get there?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold