Day 3570 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 3:19 NIV

A close cousin to the commonly-loved 3:16, for God doth indeed so love the world that the verdict is in, signed, sealed, literally delivered unto us as a babe which came to pave the way that still we question somehow.

Perhaps it’s managed to remain a topic of much invasive doubt and public debate because, as if an invading, so is the will of God who saw fit to shine through to however many few might dare do as many, if not most, seem all but entirely, eternally unwilling to. Yes, perhaps this idea fits this best, this consideration of His most confusing concierge who came to call us to care, to come, to convene a culture in which we consider the constructs of our confusions and delusions and the damnations they’re continually continuing to design.

We just don’t know any other way, even though He told us plain that He is the Way.

Still we seem most days rather perfectly lost inside our own minds, victims of our own understandings. This is something that’s started to dawn on me over the past couple of days. It’s this idea that of all the things I’ve long thought I knew, I was wrong about more than I ever dared imagine to. For such is the substance of our sinful selfishness, it’s an outcome of our understanding which seeks always to avoid that kind of heartbreaking realization of just how little we know about life let alone then how much we might get right whilst living it.

Indeed, anymore it seems that our being right is more a matter of sheer happenstance as it’s something which only seems to occasionally happen when we’re otherwise not letting our minds stand in the way with all these insistences that we know more than our pasts contend. And yet, such is something not really considered within our common understandings, the reconsiderations of our past consternations and confusions and illusions of a grandeur we never really had despite having always pretended we did.

That is why we hide them, deny them, pretend them having never happened, isn't it? That we know now that we can't do anything about them? Our pasts? For they're over. They're ended. They're finished and finalized and as fatal then as even the death we see Christ has paid to forgive them.

What then are we still clearly missing that has us still clearly thinking that our lives are best lived in hiding?

And yet, it’s because of that alone, this verdict which we’re discussing here today that in fact I’m in that becoming quite quickly convinced that our realizing we’re wrong is eternally more profitable and productive than our thinking we’re right. Because while it’s nice to think we’re right as it affords us a justification for our preferences toward such things as not changing, not growing, never then going toward the knowing of the more we need as defined by the less we have to keep us distracted, we need more than anything to reach a place in life in which we are able to see the distractions and divisions and disasters caused by our own understandings.

In other words we need more to embrace when we’re wrong than we do to rest when we’re right. Both because we’re wrong far more than we’re right, and too because of that we’ve had enough rest already and we’re starting to rust because of it.

Yes, we’re anymore a people just rusting, wasting, worrying about trusting this lie that keeps saying we’re okay as opposed to enduring the soundest of teaching which says that despite how much we hate being wrong because we think it makes us look foolish, that in Christ it’s only foolish to live in hiding whilst leaving everything only left hidden in plain sight. For that’s the gravity of this Gospel, it’s that there is no hiding as even the grave couldn’t conceal the will of God.

Only held Him for a weekend and then He was right back to working His plans to the perfection of those who are being sanctified by this light that most here knew than and still know now only to hate. But why do we hate the light if not for the pronouncement announced here in Scripture? That we even still today delight in a lack of light in life as the darkness doesn’t seem as dangerous in regard to the disclosing of the dirty deeds we’ve done more often than not. Indeed, we’ve all done so many things we know now we should have never even considered that we seem to be only able to consider now how to hide them all.

See, we've, in our understanding of such things as risk and reward, we've come to assume that we're safer hiding our lives in the dark, living our lives in the dark, for such affords us all these shadows of what we perceive to be something we call plausible deniability. Indeed, we think that we can hide our mistakes, paint over our failures, disguise our being all but eternally disqualified from life due to an almost radicalized indifference toward the God of life and thus His will for how it ought to be lived by we who didn’t give us this gift.

Alas, having become but the very epitome of pride and vanity, we anymore live as if we did. We spend our days still doing as we please within the moment, still never caring to consider what may be found or felt just beyond that moment melting into the rest of what all now define a past that we cannot outrun or outwit fast enough or far enough to finally break those memories loose as we leave off in sail for better assumptions. Yes, all of life as lived in this land of the lost is but a cost of unaccounted assumptions assuming that our doing whatever we wish is what life is all about.

And having done just that for as long as we can only fight to forget, that we can’t has designed inside our mind this idea that says it’s best to hide as opposed to try to find a life that doesn’t ask we do. No, seems we’d rather do as we know not to than to embrace the rebuking for what we’ve done that ignites in us a raging unwillingness to do so ever again. We would rather be but repeats of the past, hiding as much as needed to keep us looking good than to scorn our looks as defined anymore at the judgement of a world gone horribly awry and focus instead on the strengthening of our soul.

Something we’ve all clearly left an afterthought at best, entirely unconsidered at worst, you know, having all but butchered this temporary attempt at such a gift as what we still arrogantly call life.

Yes, we've so fumbled this life that we've found only the realization that were we to continue trying, we'd only continue failing. And as a people who find failure to be somehow equal to being a fool, we've grown unwilling to risk it anymore. We'd literally rather hide in the shadows of this valley of death than to embrace the risk of walking out of our arrogance into the light and finding what we ended up being right about being there waiting.

See, we've talked recently about all these mostly self-perceived lions that we fear as being reasons that we lean on to keep us locked inside ourselves, our understandings, our misunderstandings mainly. And I find that there is an actual validity to this worry. For there is a lion out there, one waiting unhidden in fact as He sits enthroned upon the light of truth and righteous and morality and modesty and honesty. There is a lion, and in fact He's so unhidden that we seek to hide from Him, thinking in vain that we can do a better job of hiding than He can of seeing.

Insanity

And yet we do it anyway because we know this Lion is living out there, just beyond our understanding, lurking in wait to get us, grab us, hold us and have us should we cross that line we’ve drawn and confess the wrongs we done. Yes, in fact we know this Lion is so angry, so filled with wrath over our every wrong turn and worse decision that He even killed His Son just to satiate the righteous anger that we've all had our hand in earning a million-fold. And so we fear this Lion of Judah as we know He came in Jesus, but yet this seems where we tend to lose the plot, miss the point.

For yes, while God is so justifiably angry with all of us for all these sins we've chosen to partake as opposed to preferring His peace, His presence, His promise, His provision, His purpose was rather to come in a kind of love for us that chose to save us from what we've done to us as these victims we've become of our own understanding which has us standing in the shadows of selfishness and sin thinking we're safe here.

And yet, once again, we simply couldn't be more wrong!

For there is nothing at all safe within a life lived lurking only within the shadows of a self. And that is all that we are so long as we stick tight to this lie in life that says we can hide anything we do, anything we say, anything we think. No, this is one of the greatest lies ever told, “you will not surely die.” Just hide, go over there behind that bush and God won’t see you there. “Where are you,” God asked Adam, not because He couldn’t see them but because He knew them and thus both the where and the why already.

Because He’s not called the Almighty for no reason you know!

In fact, you ever read about these angels called Cherubim in Ezekiel 10? Even His servants, the angels, even they have eyes everywhere! I mean, we’re talking everywhere, “their entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings, were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels.” We think He’s going to somehow see less than these angels He’s created that are covered with eyes and thus able to see in every direction at once? We’re nuts!

And that’s the problem.

We’ve become entirely too insane for our ow good, for anyone’s good at that. For down here we’ve come to this frame of mind in which our lives are so communally lived that we’re all really nothing more than just a vessel of suggestions, kind of like those suggestion boxes that restaurants and certain boutique clothing shops have for their clientele. We’re so open outside suggestion that we neither have our own understanding anymore, and nor do we even seem to feel the indigestion from all the nonsense we’re consuming.

Nonsense like this idea we’re discussing here today. All this hiding and lying to ourselves about how good we are at it. We’re so bad that we make black sheep look like they blend in with an all-white herd. But you’d never know it judging by how we live our daily lives. For every day we just wake up and dive or drive or die right back into the burying of our pasts, our present, our every potential should any of them even hint at the chance of problem.

We don’t want to fail anymore because we know that we’ve already earned a million deaths for all the million mistakes we’ve made. And it’s just logical for us to realize that we’ve not ever met anyone who’s managed to make it through even one. But friends, that where this gift shines so brightly that it should inspire us to do things differently. For we’ve now the opportunity to not only meet someone who has survived the grave, but He’s in fact now what’s a really incredible tour guide who walks alongside all those who place their trust in Him alone, leading them from everlasting to everlasting.

His Name is Jesus, and He came to free us from a life lived in darkness trying to hide what He already died to atone for.

Which brings me, yet again, to what is perhaps my favorite question of all time as it just seems to always fit no matter the problem, predicament or circumstance: What are we doing?

The short answer is that we’re hiding, but even getting that quickly to the point somehow still falls short as we’re still doing it horribly. We are the worst at this hiding business, and it’s because we can’t. We want to. Our pasts tell us we need to. Our present failures demand we try to. Our worries inspire inside us all these reasons and comfy little excuses to look for ways or places to attempt to. But we can’t. We know we’re doing something wrong when hiding it is an idea of any significance.

And we should know that this is incredibly stupid because Jesus came not only to save us but also to teach and show us and inspire us to live the kind of life He proved can be lived in which nobody would then have to hide. He didn’t even hide from those who wanted to kill Him but rather, and get this, ”endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

He scorned its shame, this cross meant to kill, which did but somehow still failed.

For those who don’t know, to scorn something is defined as showing or otherwise expressing a contempt for something, a disdain if you will. It’s in a way making a mockery of something as if saying that this something being mocked is worthless or despicable. In other words, He looked at the cross, knowing well what it was going to do, and rather than giving that image which was meant to inspire fear, He looked at the misery and the shame it was to display and He considered it worthless in light of what He knew was waiting just beyond that darkest day in human history.

Because He knew the fullness of His will didn’t end in the darkness, in the grave, in the tomb, in the trials or testing or beating or breaking of a body. He knew that the punishment was nothing compared to the promise it would give to those who had no other way out of the darkness in which they’d hidden for so long that they hated the light. He did all of it for those who hated Him for daring to not only say that their deeds were wrong, but for paying the debt they owed for having lived as if they weren’t.

What are we doing hiding from that kind of mercy that would not only meet us where we are but in fact went to where we belong in order to bring us back to not only our senses but to our salvation?

The way of life we’ve all lived at the inspiration of the wickedness running wild within this world has left us so adamantly convinced that we’ve done nothing wrong that we probably don’t even realize just how much we’re trying to hide, nor then how much more we’re missing by wasting our time trying to do what we never could. We cannot hide our mistakes from God. We can only hide ourselves from His mercy by allowing those mistakes to be things that we either hide or otherwise try to deny.

But if we stop all this foolishness and admit that we’ve made a mess of this, what we’ll find is that in our honesty is the faintest glimmer of humility which is but the opening gambit of a mercy that came not to destroy but rather to deliver. But friends, the problem is that He can’t He forgive what we won’t confess. And so the ball is in our court now.

Are the lights on or are we still playing in the dark?

Look, my point is that there is only shelter in Him. And thus until we run to Him, we're just as helpless and hopeless as our pasts now seem to be, as our present sometimes still looks, and as our often pitiable hopes continue to have to be in order to be things that we know we can hide should the coming days cause us to find that we’ve made only more mistakes that we know make us look bad.

There will always be those in this place, and many of them in fact, who do as they please and just try to hide when it all falls flat and leaves them again feeling so dirty and guilty and ashamed and embarrassed that they can’t stomach the thought that someone else might know about it. But friends, none of us have to live like that. And simply put, none of us should want to as there is absolutely no freedom in it.

No, there is only freedom in Christ, and if takes laying all our sins and stains and shames before Him and raising what are but empty hands as we’ve nothing seemingly good left to offer Him in exchange for His forgiveness, well what do we have to lose? For again, He knows it all already.

And so it seems that all we have to lose is the freedom He bought on our behalf. Why keep buying all these lies that say the shadows we’ve known are somehow better than the peace we haven’t?

It’s scary to think of what the world will see, of what He will see should we step out of our worries and leave our excuses behind. But my friends, what does it matter what anyone sees when His gift is more concerned about who we can be than what we think, which is often only about what we hope nobody has seen?

Again, the verdict is in, and while we can’t change it, we can, in Him, change which side of the outcome we’re on. And thankfully, the choice we make today doesn’t have to be the same as all those we’ve made in the past that we’ve tried to hide or listened to thinking we could.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold