Day 3718 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Revelations 3:21 NIV

So wake up sleeper.

For if we’re to ever arise we must first revive into what is the life we’ve scarcely proven able to live from within what is a bed made of a doubt and disbelief so desperately deep that alas most days we sleep inside the substance of things seen being those only for which we believe. And thus we need to awake if we’re to arise into that life that He at first laid down but only to then take up to what is the outcome of a victory the likes of which not even death can stand against.

And this is something we’ve been told plain of the plane which is His promise as proven first within the problems that we’re to have if we’re to hold He who is the hope that we all need to overcome them.

It’s just then that He’s often too the one hope we cannot see.

Because within this life the problem and strife are always far closer, or so it feels. Yes, nearly every day brings a nearly novel change that we’re asked to at the least consider as blown in by the whether we want more to stay who we are or to find rather that weather as blown by that final breath of a dying Man who bowed His head having just said that “it was finished”. And it’s because of this that we’re now tasked with the taking up of personal crosses constructed of the many losses of a lost life we’ve lived underneath these cozy covers of confusion.

Such is why He left no room for interpretation. No, rather we’ve either eyes to see and ears that hear or we’re instead like all the others here who have neither and simply don’t mind the life of those blind and deaf to the death of He who is the Life as spoken in the Truth that is the Way by which we all now must be saved. And this is quite the dilemma indeed in that for our to be so freed at first demands we sign the decree to now flee all that for which we’ve either fought to find or become afraid to lose.

Yes, He’s roused us once more unto the shore of a life spent pouring ourselves into only the many seas of selfishness and vanity. And as we stand here upon the edge of eternity, His call still applies to all who are to be found either sitting in the hall afraid of the fall or rather fighting to resolve such fears through the tears of a life torn in two just as that veil was said to. For such is the entirety of His purpose, the purchase of every soul so completely that death, having now lost its sting, even it is now something that we needn’t fear as it no longer stands between us.

Unless we let it.

Which is the question, isn’t it? Whether or not we’ll continue to let it? And it is a quite taxing considering in that it asks that we look at life upside down now. An oddity proven simply and simply because for those lost to be there found demands at first that those who’ve long thought themselves to have found what life should be to instead become away from those many and admit, finally, that we’ve not found a thing other than apparently every reason to not start this fall apart far sooner than now.

And this is something that I find has become woven into a great many worries and wars within my own walk in that I wonder often as to how much further my faith could have grown, and thus just how much more of Him I might by now have known had I had the bold audacity to set out into the imagining of every reason I’ve always had to confess at living a life I’m really bad. How better might I serve? How bolder might I speak? How taller might I walk?

How to falter might I not?

Alas I do. For such to be man is what it means to. We fall. We fail. We fear the both and yet so much more as well. And well, this has left us all but entirely unwilling to try much of anything, let alone that everything that asks that we both try what seems all but illogical if not blatantly impossible and too that we both do it alone but yet not at all. And it’s this oddity that ignites the fumble and fall of what is a faith that doesn’t fit this place, but also then the realization that we’re in a place that doesn’t fit our faith.

And so what then does this mean of us? Well, I think it’s a question best asked in that form found, as usual, within a Scriptural perusal. Galatians 1:10 to be specific. “Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

Are we living our lives looking to people, even if only ourselves, for the source of the substance of the semblance of our successes, or rather are we seeking to see past what we can into all that we can’t as done only with the express expectation of the elation of knowing He whom far too few seem to at be all that willing to?

The issue being that which is found in that latter half of the last line of that verse above. “I would not be a servant of Christ.” For if we are not found as servants of Christ, thus not living to serve the same will as that which won the victory over both our sinfulness and thus our mortality as demanded of our immorality, well then it would seem that we’re only serving the wants of immorality which demands mortality over which we cannot, alone, gain the victory.

Thus proving that we’re either living to serve Christ and growing in the promised victory thereof, or we’re still serving people, even ourselves, and thus growing only cold as we fall there only further away from any semblance of faith in the Father who sent the Son to achieve such a lasting victory won.

But I think our continued confusion comes within the asking of what. Or rather over what. What is this victory that He speaks of several times within just the book of Revelation?

To the one who is victorious over what?

Well, only our own inability to see or even there understand that perhaps we finally can, and thus, in that, finally comprehend what victory really is.

Because He’s showed us that we, in our worldly understandings of such, have actually no idea what it is to overcome. Because the reality is that to overcome is to be best won within what is the letting go in order to then go what society assumes to be insane and to once there finally allow God to get us where we’ve never been at the defeat then of who we always have.

Yes, such is the victory into which He calls us, even the overcoming of us. And this is offered unto all of us as such an unfading crown because it is indeed perhaps the very hardest thing that we’ll ever have to do. But make no mistake, we all will have to at one point or another. It’s only then that He did what He did the way He did so as to help us see that He came to point the way to both this kind of victory as won only within His kind of suffering so as to then also inspire us unto the endurance of the same as sung within every sounding of sound doctrine despite such proving us so lost that to win is something that we shouldn’t even have the ability to begin the imagining thereof.

And yet that we can only seems to sing that new song of that new hope that is that new love that did a new think so new that even still it meets us in strange ways every single day.

Indeed, some days is seems a rather grating grinding as that given within our giving away of all but all of the plans we’ve made. Within others it comes in what becomes the betrayal of this common belief that we’re somehow as important as our pride has long preferred pretend. Upon still others it brings in tow the trials we know only to hate, but only so that through them we can learn to see Him who took the greatest of them all on our behalf so that we might, in Him, not fear this fight along this plight spent back to life as lived in love of He who’s done both what we needed and yet sometimes hate simply because it was too what we couldn’t but would have so pridefully loved to.

Which is why the victory, I believe, is to be that won over ourselves. For He’s said plain that whomever takes not up their cross are to be then, perhaps forever, those same as deemed unworthy of Him. And thus too the victory He won for them. And if there is a greater defeat in life, that then found within the promised losing your life to the pride that’s already given it away, well, that seems to say all we need to know.

For if we don’t know now the necessity of His shown victory over the sinful flesh becoming the one that we should aim for in every way within our own lives, and thus our striving only for a sharing inside the same, well then we’ll be only left to be found still lost among the many who then miss the plane aimed for home and are then forever left cold and alone in a place where the fire never stops, and the fear doesn’t either.

And such is why I cannot imagine a day spent not doing this. Because as much as I trust that He doesn’t want that miserable defeat for any, and as much as I don’t want it for me either, well nor then can I imagine not trying one more time to tell one more person about this only chance we have to win the victory that is the overcoming of ourselves to the victory of eternity as already won by He who simply asks that we believe He did as shown then in our doing of the same all things new that He himself said He came to do.

Yes, let us this day do a new thing, for I stand convinced that such is the only way to ever hope as to the overcoming of such a common selfishness that such has become all of us, and thus, the kind of victory that He came to help us find.

Why? Because we can’t do it alone. Why? Because we know only to try it that way. We know only to buy that lie that says we might be those who find that life that all of everyone wants, and that for all of forever, only to sit and watch everyone everywhere struggle and stumble and eventually succumb to the promise of all humanity. And that is that this isn’t eternity but rather the part in which we dabble in the mundanity of a mankind trying every vile form of vanity seeking to find something that makes them feel alive.

As if we aren’t already!

And I think that’s the proverbial testimony that we’ve unknowingly given only always against ourselves. It seems something akin to that problem the Pharisees had back then. For they all claimed they could see despite being so spiritually blind that they sought, in pride, to destroy the Messiah by stealing His life and killing this message that was making people wake up to the reality of faith being a much greater necessity than works or renown.

And arrogance simply can’t have that truth getting out.

Much the same as that truth which says today that we’re doing all of this seeking for something to make us feel alive because, oddly enough, we must then know we’re basically not. Yes, we spend every day seeking in every way to fill our lives with everything that we can find close enough, easy enough, cheap enough to fill us up. And we’d not do that if we were already full, would we? And so our constant greed and gluttony are but a testimony that is none but we ourselves saying that we know our lives are all but empty, and yet that we think filling them with vanity or immorality will help somehow.

But friends, how can winning more of the same victories of the emptiness of such things as vanity help us to become victorious over the same emptiness we’ve already found within those very things?

No, that’s why things need to change! Because we’ve already spent a lifetime sifting through the rubble and rebellions of a fallen world seeking to find something that won’t fall apart. And having failed to find that foundation as much as we have, we’ve just stopped looking in what is finally an admitting that we know that better isn’t here. And yet we know better is there somewhere. So why just give up looking? Just because we’ve not found it where He said it isn’t?

Seems kind of dumb, doesn’t it?

Indeed it does because indeed He did ask us to store our every treasure such as hope and peace and purpose within the promise of Heaven holding for us a place He died to leave in order to make ready. And so what are we waiting for? We think He’s not done yet? We working on a few backup plans? Just gonna give a couple more days or maybe a few more years to the sowing of tears as torn within the trying to find what reality has told us simply isn’t here to see?

Are we truly going to merely stay asleep at the wheel of what is a life constantly moving regardless of whether or not we’re walking along with it toward the promised forever finding of it?

Friends, we’ve long known to give up whenever the going got going, not really ever wanting to dare venture into it getting tough. But that’s the triumph, is it not? We don’t win victories over things that are easy. Everyone can do those things. No, the victories that matter most are those that aren’t easy. And the victory that matters most is that which is so difficult, so seemingly impossible, so completely insane and utterly illogical that it asks that we lay down a life with absolutely nothing but the hope of faith there to help us believe in the promise that, like Jesus, we too can take it up again just beyond the death of us.

We can, but only because He did. But friends, if we don’t live moving toward Him, as done in the kind of death He won, well then who’s to say that He will say that He knew us? If we’ll not move toward Him, why think He would come for us? Not to say that He didn’t, because He did. But simply put, if we’ll not share in His suffering then we’ve no reason to ever expect that we might share in His victory over it.

And that’s a truly sad outcome to settle for in life. Not only because we’ll die anyway, but simply because we’ll have only ever lived that one way of life in which we stayed lukewarm and worried rather than growing in hope and finally feeling freedom.

The point is that He came that we might all have life, and that life so very filled that we need forever to live it all. And thus His victory is life as won over the death we’ve come to deserve having done so little with our own, and that because we’ve long seen it as such. And that’s why we need to do this new thing which requires us to do something so as to show Him that we’re willing to risk everything upon the promise that He’s done everything we needed but simply couldn’t do alone.

For that is the victory, that we finally understand that we’re not doing this alone but rather with the love of the Father who came in the Son to lift us up by helping us reach the ability to see the rock bottom we’ve been living in so as to finally then inspire us to try for the everything better that only He can help us be. And He will help us because that is part of the promise of His victory.

But friends, He can’t help anyone who can’t admit they need it. And simply put, none will ever know the help they need until they finally agree to get out of bed and try for the living of life again.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold