Day 3757 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:3 NIV

Oh, we do, for such has been made most perfectly clear!

It’s then just that we tend to get rather remarkably lost looking at the toward what as opposed to embracing the what through.

Yes, we all know quite well where this road leads and the things done by which to secure passage for those to whom said promise was, is promised. But there exists alongside our understanding of the gravity of a grace as given in that place that we call a grave, consider then life’s utmost disgrace, an almost violent refusal as to the perusal of the persecution through which said promise was purchased. For we like the sound of Heaven, but alas we cannot admit that hell must then exist too.

Nor then that this world is the closest to either we’ll be depending upon how we determine to live our lives as thus defined by where our treasures are stored.

For if here is held as home, and our treasures housed here as well, then, as the Word reads, we’ll be amongst those who’ve had their reward. Meaning then that this world will have been as close to Heaven as we’ll ever know. Or, if our lives are lived as if as emptied of all that’s worldly, fleshly, sinful and depraved, a live thus lived as if living within a grave in which we seek every single day any possible way to rid ourselves of anything that may dare remain in our way of the Way that is the Life, then here is all the hell we’ll experience.

But as much as all will face both life and death, thus too shall all experience their portion of both prize and punishment.

After all, we cannot fully understand either unless and until we’ve experienced both.

Thus the through what we’ll go.

And make no mistake, as I opened up today, yes, we do know, and quite well in fact, both the lay of this path and where it leads. But again, we, as the comfort-bent that we’ve so clearly become, we seek incessantly any sign, semblance, assumption or presumption of comfort and calm of tranquil waters upon which we can just float through life without a care to the current of the current and how, odds are, it’s only pulling us under.

No, we’re more than fine with our souls sinking, for sinking is easy. It’s the call to swim through suffering that we either don’t like or refuse to understand.

But friends, that’s just it. It’s something I feel summed within something I mentioned day before yesterday in that this salvation is something of a sharing mission. And this is proven, and that quite profoundly, in that since our hope of eternal life was won by the Son laying down His own, well, this seems to prove that we've to share in the same if we're to share in the same.

Problem then that we love the idea of sharing in the outcome. We just don’t want to experience the input.

Because, as those who’ve long thought themselves as quite good at living life, I mean, we do seem rather successful at it what with all this extra time we apparently have on our hands that we can and do so often use upon such things as worrying about being entertained and our share in the pleasing of people (ourselves mostly), we just don’t seem all that able to find any real reason to welcome such a rainy season as that which pours in pain from a side pierced for our chance to be emptied as well.

Yes, we seem to have become so great at living life that we have not only retired from trying to grow and improve, but in fact we’ve come so very far into our retirement from trying that now all we try to do is avoid all that asks we lose anything of the life we’ve lived and learned to love so much that we deny that it we’ll leave.

But we will. Talked about that yesterday. We’re all going to die, each and every single one of us, and that no matter what nor how hard we may try to blind the eye to the fact that everyone else is on that same path toward that same promise. Some of them having already gotten there before us.

Yes, we do know that all will die as, well, we’ve seen our share of it happen to those we’ve known ourselves. What then are we missing that has us still living as if maybe the same thing that’s happened to everyone else might not happen to us?

And while this is a most common of confusion within the collapsing culture of world clearly conscripted to and thus confined within the overall denial of both death and the God who offers us the gift of a life lived beyond it, that this idea is allowed any room within the hearts or minds of those who claim to live by faith in Christ is something altogether unacceptable. Because we claim we know Him, or are at least trying our best to do so.

But as those who know something of the Son and His gift of salvation, how can we then live as if we don’t know what that gift cost as paid by He who took up that cross that has become such an emblematic reflection of the very foundation of this faith we claim to have?

Thus enters Paul’s question of whether we know that those who are baptized into Christ are thus baptized into the fullness of who He is, but too, the fullness of what He did.

Granted, the world ain’t really all that into crucifying people anymore. But friends, this doesn’t mean that we should live with this selfish expectation of all forms of pain or persecution having become things impossible for us to experience. Rather Christ himself told us that in this world we would have trouble, but that with the caveat that He came to overcome it and would help those who are His to overcome their share of it as well.

But still, this seems to say that we should know that we will have our share of the trouble He faced and told us we’d find. And He made this evident, so as to remove from us any doubt or confusion, by taking up that cross and dying upon it in our place.

So, do you not know?

Well, we do now!

Or at least we should! And yet the issue is that the way of life we tend to live is one in which what we do seems often to show only that we don’t. Why is that? Why do we do things, say things, buy, believe, become things that become themselves, us thus ourselves, evidence of His existence at best only partially welcome within us? For let us be honest with us, if we were as filled with Christ as He died for us to be in order for us to have what is, in Him, life in the full and to the same, then we’d be less the same today as we’ve been within every today we’ve ever lived.

Because there exists in Christ such an obvious necessity of our own flesh’s demise that we cannot, or at least should not see still any of the old life within what ought to be new eyes sat, finally, upon things above where He has gone to obtain the fullness of what was His promise to leave us with a Spirit, His own mind you, to guide us up to and including that day when upon which He returns to gather those so clearly His that they’ve been waiting in an humble anticipation as shown within what’s been their share of a death of sorts.

Seeking inside the same that other share He said we could have as held within that place that He’s both gone to make, and from thus He intends to return that we might be where He is.

And friends, He is alive! And yet, so often it seems our lives still but death in waiting.

Which is the question we all must at least begin to wonder if we should consider. That question being for what are we still waiting if we’re not waiting for anything, anyone other than He who is where we hope to be and the self-proclaimed same as the only Name which forms that only Way to get there?

Because it seems most days that we’re waiting for something. Something to get easier. Something to feel better. Something to seem less arduous or precarious. Something to bring us that self-perceived necessity of a path paved painless through a life in which we don’t want to experience anything but the promise. Yes, we just want to wake up in Heaven without ever having to feel anything close to everything we just don’t want to.

And I say that in the most brutally honest way possible because I myself have lived that life seeking to fill my life with only what feels good, looks good, seems safe, asks nothing, risks nothing, gives nothing. Yes, I have myself well known that life in which all of us have lived seeking to save ourselves from those things that seem to us to be a most certain declaration of war against our want for comfort and ease.

But now I’m finding that finally I, within my life as lived now in light of what He’s done for me to have such a hope as what Heaven continues to be in deeper measure every single day, I want only to reach that place inside in which I’m so resolved in regard to my faith that I can spend my however many days waiting in patient eagerness to finally find that face I’ve fought, as best a failure such I ever possibly could, to face without fear of failure, falling short or thus finding only something left unfinished.

No, that He finished the work He came to do, as done so fully that He emptied Himself of the life we’ve known, the life of flesh, for flesh, in flesh, that He died our death defines that He was indeed finished with all He came to accomplish.

Leaving then us to finally begin what has long been left undone within us.

And this is a process we can never here accomplish, finish, figure out, fine tune or fully prove. No, rather we’re called explicitly to continue working out our salvation within the fear and trembling that such an undue gift ought to see us toward. Yes, we should find within His existence a change in our own that is of such magnitude that our very attitude is itself altered so magnificently that we see, again finally, that He is alive as He’s finally allowed to live inside of the hearts we’ve held as if hostage in a life lived as if them homes to only house hopes so hollow and helpless that we’ve become but the same.

I’m tired of feeling that way!

Because I know He didn’t lay down His life for me to continue to find or feel in mine only the same emptiness I’d always known before He came with what is a sword so sharp that its cuts start to feel comforting. How’s that for a curious considering? That His rebuking, refining, the very pruning of our pointing and purposing and preferences and proposals all become of the priority that is seeking His honor rather than more of our inability to proffer our own?

Yes, I want that life to know in which I know so fully that trust in Him that I allow Him only to wound so freely knowing that He freely heals what we allow to be seen as broken as it’s always been. For indeed, such is what it means to die to the flesh. It’s to come unto the seeing of our every deed done and word spoken according to the flesh’s inkling as something of such a sinful provenance that we find in us a permanence in regard to the fighting against who we’ve been as opposed to the love that He is.

And yes, we have fought just that fight for longer than admit we’d probably like. Doesn’t matter though. For that disquiet as discovered in our many such denials of all He is and all He’s done, and all that means, it’s all contented, covered, collapsed within our coming to Him in what is a humility that admits, visibly, that we know we’ve neither any reason to be welcome there, nor yet anywhere else to go.

For to whom else, where else could we?

He has the very words of life! And that even after death!!

So, again I ask, what are we waiting for? Life to get easier? The path to feel safer? The promise to just show up without our ever having to endure anything that asked that we focus on Him so sternly that we forget to even worry about ourselves? What might that feel like? To be focused on Jesus that we didn’t even realize the fire we were standing in or the hungry lion just across the way? Yes, what if rather than continue to measure the height or fright of every giant we’ll face we instead chose to laugh in their face as they mock what we knew could not be moved?

Why does our faith move, if not in search for somewhere easier to step?

Friends, His footprints aren’t changing. Nor then His words, His warnings, His working as won within what remains the grave from which He calls us to come and take up crosses that will inevitably lead us only to our share of His suffering in the flesh. But nor then are His promises changing either!

Such as that which says that whomever suffers in the flesh is finished with sin.

Because it shouldn’t be easy to change as much as we need to. And so, if we’re not suffering, then folks, odds are we’re not changing. And if we’re not changing, then we’re still the very same slaves to sin that we’ve always been.

But He calls us to be that something more He created us to be.

What are we waiting for?

My point is that the path ahead will be however hard He’s determined it to be. But rather than getting lost looking at all we have to go through, what if none of it was allowed to matter as much as where we get to go? And that because of both what and who is waiting.

Friends, we will all experience joy and misery, hardship and happiness. And while we’ve often sought to ensure this life filled with only the majority of the best halves of both, there’s a supreme risk in doing so. Because again, many here will have had their reward. And I’m finally realizing that squandering joy, happiness, hope, meaning, purpose, peace within a place in which nothing is permanent, well, that’s just plain foolish.

And I’m not saying that we should all go out of our way to be miserable. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t go out of His Way trying to avoid it either.

Because He alone knows the path, as He alone walked it perfectly whilst focused completely upon the promise to be gained just beyond the pain. Let us then clothe ourselves with the same mindset:

Treasure in Heaven worth going through whatever we have to in order to get there.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold