Day 3677 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Jeremiah 21:8 NIV

A life lost.

For the gravity of our mortality as defined by His command of morality and our corresponding rejection thereof is we’ve left then with what is a rather upside-down choice to make. And it will indeed feel so confused because we’ve long been a people who pursue enjoyment thinking that such, because it seems to add so much flair to life, is what helps us to best feel alive within a life. But when faced with the choice waged between what it is to enjoy and what less it may well seem to merely escape, the truth is that the latter will always prove the matter far more important as it’s the one always best able to prove that which lasts longest.

Because enjoyment is often known but for a moment or maybe two. Eternal life though, well, that seems worth suffering to.

Alas we’re not really a people who know the gift that is the humility that would allow us to see such suffering as an increasingly more meaningful way of life as lived within this land which is entirely fond of and thus built toward the very enjoyment of everything that is to be eventually proven mere excess. For the fact is that enjoyment was never pinnacular in terms of potential or purpose. And now that’s not to say that we couldn’t or shouldn’t enjoy our lives, for indeed Scripture tells us quite opposite within such places as Ecclesiastes which reads that there is nothing better for man than to enjoy their lot within this life lived within this land.

But, to enjoy this life is not the ultimate purpose for this life. No, as we discussed a bit just yesterday, the purpose of this life is to escape with it, life. And this purpose, this pursuit has become quite a problem even potentially considered offensive in that it asks that we embrace humility as made necessity for us to ever even begin to believe in the hope that is forever, let alone the perfect home that we’ve been told has by now been prepared. Indeed, our struggle seems to be that this version has come to be seen as a perfectly passing version of home.

Yes, all of the enjoyment and our excitement toward it has rendered us either unable or simply unwilling to imagine this world as anything of the passing place He’s promised it to be. But that said promise has been now proven in a rather dramatically dire sense, that being crucifixion preceding a somehow empty tomb, the problem has come in that, with this part being the only part in which we’ve ever played, we know not the way by which to even imagine the rest of the picture as painted by our Father that none here have ever seen.

Rather we know only to debate what it may look like, to dream about what it may feel like, to desire the simple peace as promised within that coming place, or, and most commonly, to simply deny the place is coming at all. And that the latter is a matter far more common amongst the fallen has found for us a personal share of the blanket failure to uphold the Father as done only within the humility that both elates to believe in the better held only in eternity, but that’s also thus willing to welcome and walk through whatever wars or worries may arise within the way before our eyes.

Yes, God calls us to live by such a sightless faith that we come only to denounce/deny the fears felt by our eyes and allowed from there to thrive in our minds whilst we rather learn to weather the lack of whether or not in regard to the unseen as instead we learn, in Him, to place more trust inside the unknown than we do in the mostly assumed. In other words, in Christ and by our faith in Him, we learn to love not what we see but rather the hope of all that we’ve not yet.

Because what is seen is temporary whereas all that isn’t, well, isn’t.

And yet it doesn’t seem that this humbled hope as held in Him is quite able to help us to so overcome our unbelief so as to get us to the point in which we simply have none anymore. Rather unbelief, or doubt or worry or fear or whatever you want to call it, it’s a quite constant companion along this ride that manages to manifest within so many different ways within the different days to which and thus through which we’ve still to either struggle or strive.

Guess then the problem being that our pride has somehow managed to disconnect the two as if to say that when faced with struggle, our striving ahead is simply impossible.

But I dare say that such a saddened assumption is only because our preferences find struggle and stumble and every other semblance of what it is to suffer to be nothing more than illogical as calculated against the comforts that we could find just as easily were we to give up on forging through the foraging of what is a faith we so often both fail and thus struggle to feel. Yes, our pride tells us that were faith to exist, and thus God too as there’s simply no point for faith without the Father in the picture, that it would arrive us at what is a constant influx of everything we consider to be good and absolutely nothing of the more that we can’t so comprehend inside what’s a mind made upon things such as how misery has no meaning.

Make no mistake, it does. And in many ways perhaps even more than the mundanity of, say, complacency.

For indeed, though our preference for the relative ease and simplicity of such things as comfort and stagnancy may profoundly disagree, the truth is that such things are as close to lifeless as we should risk being. Because the fact is that that which asks nothing of us is the same as that which can do nothing for us. If it doesn’t push us then in many ways it could be said that it in fact seems to punish us. And I believe that such could so indeed be said because the current standing of our misunderstandings has us often standing still in what is a life in which still we sin.

And there is nothing at all life-giving about that which earns the wage of death.

Which is why God works in what are ways that seem to us as mysterious. But I would extend to you the plausibility that perhaps His ways are only able to seem so mysterious because our ways, despite being mostly stupid, have long seemed to us as those that make the most sense. And thus anything that runs in any way contrary to our self-conceived understanding of things is to be considered confusing if not confoundingly so. Which is, at least in my estimation, why faith is still found to be foolishness to those who are perishing.

It’s because those who are perishing are the same as they who have done all the things they have within the denial of the fact that we’re all perishing.

But it’s this fact alone that’s founded for me the very foundation of at least a large part of why I believe. It’s that, well, if we’re all gonna die anyway, why not then put at least a few eggs in the basket of belief and see what happens to hatch along the way to what’s going to be the end no matter what? Yes, if my life here will end, well then what do I have to lose by letting, no by insisting it be lived in accord with this audacity to imagine that there might be something more still ahead?

If the grave is the end, then I’ve lost nothing more than I would have if I hadn’t believed. In fact, I consider that a life lived without believing in something better only leaves us living a life lesser. And thus to not believe would even find us to that end with less simply because we never knew true hope. And so I see no loss in having hope because, even if the hope doesn’t show out, at least I lived my life as if more was possible than most can imagine.

And what’s the harm in that?

No, I’m convinced that the greatest harm in life is that done unto us by us alone in what are the many choices we make as if the moment in which they’re made is all that might ever matter. And indeed, we do this very thing so very often that, again, God’s ways as won upon such things as patience and moderation and modesty, they’re seen as confusing and unnecessary. In fact to many His ways seem to be an actual loss of life because, well actually they might finally be on to something.

Because His way does involve a loss of life.

Yes, there will indeed be times into which God leads within which we’ll be asked to embrace changes that may well feel a right loss of life as in fact such they are. For the truth is that we’ve all made a certain way through life within which we’ve allowed a great many horrid habits and societal assumptions to become these pitiable patterns and thus profound problems that form the very verdict from which Christ came to save us. And so we will be led in the Spirit to make a host of changes so complete and so different that our lives themselves will change along the way.

And because changes are themselves losses of life as lived through the choices we make, so to then will we lose and thus leave behind a life, or at least a way of living it. Because the reality is that a change of choices thus begets a new way of life. And so these changes to which and then through which God leads us are to become what is a loss of the lost ways we’ve lived in exchange for the chance at changes that are needed if we’re to ever be the better He made us to be.

Thus those who see faith as something of a loss of life are actually right.

It’s just that they haven’t the heart to believe in resurrection and thus a new life found after the loss of the old. Simply because far too many still rely on sight to see the way. To each their own I guess.

Except, no, not quite. Because the fact as written within His Word as breathed in His will for our benefit of such a gift as that which it is to believe, it just so happens to read that we are not our own but that rather we were bought at a cost that is a life, that of Christ, and that in light of this sacrifice, we too will be expected to give something in return. I mean, it’s a complete logical fallacy to believe that Jesus would die for us only to let us keep living the way of life that He died to save us from.

No, that’s the loss that we’re called to embrace via crosses carried and the strange humility to actually hope in what crosses do. Which is, at least as far as I can figure as this faith grows in me, what we should be most excited about. Because the cross of Christ proves that a loss of life only begets the very beginning of an even better one. At least if done voluntarily. Probably not so much if and when the matter’s forced. Which it will be to the tune every tongue and every knee.

So then, no, it might not actually be a matter of “to each their own.”

Which is actually, looking back, a pretty good way to gloss over what we talked over just yesterday in regard to God calling the Israelites to surrender to the Babylonians that they might live as all who didn’t would surely die. And too how we’re, though not necessarily facing down a Babylonian invasion, that we’re too responsible to surrender to the many seemingly disastrous circumstances into which His calling asks us. And this is where most jump ship because, again, we’re just not big into anything that asks anything from us.

Much less that we learn to enjoy suffering so much that we come to enjoy it like those who left the Sanhedrin rejoicing in the fact that they’d just been beaten because “they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” Yes, how insane must they have seemed to those who, like us, pretty much do all we can to keep ourselves safe and sound? No, that sort of thing is what becomes expendable when at last eternity is no longer seen for the lack of probability that our lost society assumes it to be.

Which is what I find to be the gift of a choice like this lain out before us here in the verse for today. It’s that won within our wondering into what becomes a wandering away from all we’ve known toward the more that we never could have or would have had we never had the courage to imagine in the better that it must be still ahead for Him to have given His life for us to have the chance to be there someday. Indeed, I find that perhaps one of the greatest aspects of faith is that of patience, and oddly enough one that I seem to struggle with most.

Because I think we all do. Again, we’ve come upon this vain idea of life in which we live as if we expect everything to always go our way as won upon such things as comfort and success and pleasure. Yes, we’ve become a people so prideful that we actually all but demand that the entire world cater to us so as to show us that they love us in the ways that we feel we’re owed. But friends, that’s where the freedom of faith is perhaps felt best. For it teaches us that as much as we are not own, nor then are we owed anything whatever.

Rather, having been redeemed at a cost, our lives are now counted unto us as loss for what grows to become the surpassing glory of knowing Christ as our only Lord and Savior. Surpassing because it entirely overwhelms whatever feeble and flimsy accomplishment or accoutrement we could have possibly found whilst still within that old way of life in which we sought our own glory. After all, what can we do with glory? What can our glory do for us? And since the answer to the both is the very same nothing, then why live for them?

Why not rather seek the glory of the Savior within what then becomes an increasingly joyous expectation of our one day being found home wherein we’re told awaits all the peace and rest that we’ve already not had in this life. Yes, if this life is one in which we’ve already faced trial and failure and fear, then what are we still focusing for here? No. That’s foolish, no matter what this fallen world may say of faith! Because if the best we have to look forward to is a life of only temporary enjoyment or fleeting comfort, then I’d say this is all a horribly unfunny joke and we’re but the punching bags.

And I can’t imagine a God that would create us for that.

Which I suppose might say a lot as I can wrap my mind around a God that would call us to lay down our lives in the form of surrender as offered inside such things as embracing struggle and even sacrificing what we’ve come to love. Yes, I can imagine a God that asks us away from such things as jealousy, lust, greed, anger, hatred. Because if He asks us away from those things, well then it only makes sense that He’s also asking us toward their opposites. And He does. He calls us toward humility, purity, generosity, kindness and compassion.

And I just can’t see then anything lost if those are the kinds of things we’re set to gain by our giving away the way of death we’ve known for the hope of a life we haven’t.

Friends, the beauty of belief is that while it relies on us to trust that the impossible may be a bit more plausible than that, that is just about all that it relies on us to do. To trust. To hope. To embrace the courage to count as lost as way of life already that very thing. Yes, He asks us to lay down our lives at the foot of the cross. He asks us to let go of things we’ve come to enjoy. He asks us to reconsider things that we’ve long been all but certain of. He asks us to humble ourselves and sit with the possibility that perhaps we’ve been wrong more than we’ve wanted to be right.

But friends, just look at the outcomes promised! One path leads to life whereas the other only death. But let us remember that God’s ways often seem upside down to us. And thus, that path which leads to death may for now look like the life we’ve known and that we’ve perhaps come to love and thus hate to lose. And too, the path toward life may at times feel like death as we lose and leave behind basically the entirety of all we’ve ever known or ever hoped to be.

But it ends in life. And again, that was always His plan for us. To escape this sinful place with our lives, not necessarily then to enjoy our lives as lived within.

For the children of God can no more enjoy sin than they can the thought of not being home again. And so let us all take stock of both where our hope is and too what that hope is worth. And friends, I dare say that any hope not worth our life isn’t much of a hope at all.

Because if it can be had here and thus not ask us to risk what we have here, then it seems quite shallow considering all that’s here is passing. And yes, that includes us. But that’s the joy of faith. It’s that even though we die, if we live believing in Him then we will live again!

And I can’t think of a greater hope than that. No matter how much less the others may ask.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold