Day 3773 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 John 2:28 NIV

Lead me indeed

And that unto the Rock which remaineth so higher than I. Why? For I’ve a house to build as bought in hope and bridged in the holiness that is both where my hope is held and too in He who is the Way toward that home which is what every house should seek to be. Yes, none builds a house with the express intent of it remaining a tent in which is stored only worldly goods and wayward dreams. No, every house imagines itself a home as is filled with love and joy and peace and purpose as posed upon the protection of all the above.

But such homes are only known when built upon the Rock that makes them stand as the shifting of sand only brings to hand the inability to hold together much of anything.

And there is found an even deeper depth to this dire desire to dream far bigger and love far better in that promise that our “work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.” 1 Corinthians 3:13. Thus leaving this life as if a hand held out unto the plow of a purpose either pursued or purchased. For indeed, many seek within this life only to buy what all they believe they’ll need.

Only problem is that “wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.” Proverbs 11:4. And thus we see that all we can buy, build, believe, become, if it comes from a store as sold with a price involved, chances are that our hopes are entirely too reliant upon someone else that we may or may not be able to trust to have cared even half as much as to the effort they’ve given unto this hope we’re getting closer to finding either forever fulfilled or fatally failed.

And yes, upon that day we will all receive either a passing grade and thus passage into the Promise, or we’ll have failed to build a life able to stand before He who came first to help and comes next only to see who accepted their need thereof.

And we’ve all need thereof!

Problem is that we don’t all live as if we need His help, or really any other for that matter. Rather we seem to better enjoy this idea that help is a hope as best held inside ourselves as such is too where our every treasure is stored in what is the safety of assumption as preempted upon the preference of pride seeking only to abide beside itself so as to never share the glory with anyone else.

But friends, that will remain the most glaring asking in all of creation:

What glory?

For what glory have we gained within a life in which we’ve walked along all along as if we knew well enough what all we were doing to have never risked the making of the many failures we’ve managed to find and feel anyway? What glory can come from failures so allowed to remain unfertile as unplanted in light our longstanding desire to refrain from embracing the consuming fire that offers to burn away our blunders before they in fact becomes the buildings that He tests by the same upon the coming Day?

Because our every mistake has long been but a lesson made to do as every growth has always meant to. Granted, it’s a growth as gained from a largely backward degree in what is the mostly uncivil engineering of a life left mostly only to die in denial of past mistakes alongside a presently continued disagreement that messing up could ever possibly measure up to our looking as good as our ego so desires.

But if the end result is us bettered, then friends, what does it matter how we get there?

For in all reality, fear and failure are arguably the best teachers we could ever ask for. Why? Because they’re miserable. And every misery makes us try harder to avoid it. And we know this because none of us like being afraid. None of us enjoy failing. Nobody in their right mind seeks out that way of life spent falling and fumbling everything somewhere in between failure and fear. But that such is a reality known thus far by all seems something that we should seek to harvest some sort of good from despite there seeming to be none.

Because we should always seek to never give up on the doing of good and seeking for better for we will in fact reap that harvest of that hope of life bettered if we don’t give up.

But we do. And that all the time. Indeed, there are so many unfinished improvements stacking up in the corners of our minds and lives that it’s amazing we can contend that we’re even alive at all. For life tries. Life moves. Life may make mistakes and get things wrong thanks to plenty of impure influences and a blind willingness to trust both who and what we can see. But life doesn’t let itself stagnate upon such struggling or strife.

For life has a life to live.

And so do we! Why don’t we then? Well, again, because of either failure or fear and our amazing ability to find the both, and often at the same time. In fact, fear is a failure to find the faith that believes that we can do the better that we’re afraid we can’t. And too, failure is a fear as felt in our realization that we’ve tried to improve many times before only to have largely returned to the very same ruins that we’ve come to consider castles.

Yes, in this life we’ve built a great many mansions of selfish ambitions as always aimed at that better day that we alone have sought to make. Issue then is that our every manmade mansion has turned out only a mundane mausoleum made of and meant for the sorrow as met at the foot of a recent burial.

For indeed, we all know our deeds deserve such a planting six feet under His sight. In fact, there are many past mistakes that keep us still awake at night so frantically trying to find a way to make them right that we agree to lose the rest we know we need trying to do what we know we can’t.

And why do we do it? Because we know the day is coming that will test all we’ve done and, despite our gruff exterior, inside we’re little more than kids who’ve been handed the keys to tanks and learned to pilot them by basically bulldozing every opportunity to do better that we’ve been so lovingly given from within the patience that is He who is the promise of the coming of a day when our place will be forever finalized.

There’s just that whole separation between Heaven and hell as measured by the distance between life and death. And again, our knowing perfectly well that we deserve the latter of either matter has made us decide to both keep running in fear of what we know is coming and too continue this building of something that we hope will distract Him enough from our many failures in regard to faith.

Issue is we’re just using a bunch of worldly junk to put some lipstick on what is us the pig returning daily to our wallow within the world’s willingness to do always as little as humanly possible.

And well, there’s really nothing that can be made all the pretty nor then impressive about a pig’s pen.

Nor then the one in our hand that’s for some reason still writing all this trying of ours to do something, find something, buy something that can come to become a foundation firm enough to accomplish what their every counterpart has always only failed to do. Which is leave us feeling eternally confident should His presence be met by noon. Sadly anymore we’re so busy trying to find some other way home that we don’t even know the time and we’ve largely stopped numbering our days as, well, we’re truly petrified of just how rapidly they’re draining.

And too we’re terrified of just how drained and tired we feel in the wake of having made so many mistakes that we’re even now all but afraid to try much of anything anymore.

Which oddly enough might finally be the place we’ve always needed to visit.

The Land of Inability!

For it’s only when we come to realize, and then understand, then accept and finally embrace that we’re eternally unable to become what we’ve so clearly never been that we can finally find the humility needed to ask of Him the help to do what we’ve always known He’s already done. Which is pave the Way by which life is found in that place where forever is no longer a hope but in fact our home.

Yes, Jesus is the Way to that Life that He has been living since He died to sin in this world that we’re all leaving too. And when we do, well, then is the day when our every work will be weighed and, yeah, most of it found basically hollow and thus heavily laden with every ounce of worthless want and wayward wish as was poured into such a pointless foundation as a life spent thinking that something we could do, find, force or figure out all by ourselves would somehow overcome our inability to then have let Christ lead the way.

We just want to get to Heaven without feeling helpless.

But friends, we are.

In fact, I don’t really know but that we’re more helpless by the day. Why? Because we’re running out of them in which we could and should be asking for help. And even if we are, even then, especially then we know that we need it in what is only a growing urgency to find more of the failures we’ve allowed to remain largely hidden in the walls we built of the many lies we’ve believed. Indeed, I’m personally finding an intensely growing desperation to realize as many of my personal failures as possible.

Not because I believe that I can do much about them, but simply because I can only know I’ve repented of them if I know what they are. For again, He can’t forgive what we won’t confess. And so I don’t want to leave any mistake unacknowledged as my only hope is for Him to cover every single one of them. And so I want to know every single one of them so that I can ask Him to cover them.

Because that’s truly the only confidence I have anymore. In fact, I believe that humble reliance on Christ is the only confidence that’s ever truly existed. All this nonsense about self-confidence, it’s just another lie aimed at our continuing to rely upon ourselves to measure up to what the world around us expects. And personally, just when I think I couldn’t be more finished with all these worldly expectations, wouldn’t you know it but I catch myself worrying about another!

And friends, I’ve lived long enough to know there just ain’t much life in that.

No, there’s only ever been life in Him. And too should our confidence be only in Him as well. Because only in Him do we have this promise that provides us confidence in that He hears us when our words and ways are walked in step with His Way and will, and that as such, this confidence allows us to believe that we have received anything we’ve ask when having approached His presence to lean upon His goodness, kindness, provision and promise.

And this confidence that causes us to contend that He hears us and thus inspires us to enter into His presence through prayer and with petition, it is a showing of our ability to take hold the opportunity to believe in Him in what is then a stark contrast to our old way of leaning exclusively upon ourselves, which is a sharing in the same trust that Abraham had credited as righteousness. And such a righteous hope as this cannot put us to shame for we know that the righteousness of God has long been the overall outcome desired in what's long stood as a call to be holy as He is holy.

And thus our faith accomplishes for us a trust-filled and reliance-based belief that He is there, that He is good, that He then gives good things to those who ask for such in accordance with His will as sought first and foremost before anything else in Heaven above or on this earth beneath. For our such belief shows God that our treasure is not only In Heaven, but indeed our treasure is stored within Him as it's daily sought from Him in both guidance and guarding, as well as the necessary grinding needed to get us toward the better He created us to be.

Indeed, this is why it's said that He will give us the desires of our hearts when our hopes are placed in Him. For friends, when He's the goal, not even our failures can prove final as He will be glorified. Our fears cannot prove fatal as He works with us to daily overcome them. And if upon that coming day we're found working toward that end on our end, then our end will prove only the very beginning of the everything better that our every hope has always been.

And thus no, hope will never put us to shame for we know that He who promised is both trustworthy and true. And that gives us all the confidence we need to fight this good fight to daily be better prepared for His impending return.

For it’s a confidence built upon the Rock that is higher than we that allows us to see that all we need is to continue in Christ who is our Life and thus the only Way that we can finally come to agree that death is gain. Yes, every other worldly version of confidence as placed in man has long been all about only our trying to keep from dying so as to either continue enjoying the pleasures of the flesh or have a little more time to keep trying to find a way to stop feeling guilty about having done the same.

There is no confidence to be found in doing wrong as there is simply no place to hide what all He’s already seen. And as life doesn’t have reverse, neither then is there such an outcome as that largely sought ability to go back and anything any differently. No, we’ve made the bed, just that somehow He thankfully managed to beat us there and leave it behind.

Why stay in the grave?

No, that’s just the place in which He came to save what was waiting for Him within. For all of us have sinned and there fallen so short of the glory of God that we became enamored by the glory of the grave for that way of life it allowed us to live without a care as to the counting of any costs or consideration of any consequence. But friends, just because we can’t count and stopped considering much of anything other than ourselves, that never made His will go away.

Just left us living on the losing side of it.

And yeah, that’s a very scary place to be. But friends, staying there is a choice, and thus one we simply don’t have to choose. No, rather we can now come unto the cross with all of our foolishness, failures and fears in tow and let them there go in exchange for the confidence that is a life spent under construction by He who is both Savior and Creator.

Which is truly the most wonderful of blending as, well, we need both the saving and too, in the forever thereafter, more than a lot of help creating something better than whatever it is that we’ve built by ourselves.

No, to sum it up all nice a simple like: Put down the hammer as He just ain’t gonna be impressed with this mess we’ve made in all these years spent living as if He wasn’t coming any time soon.

Yeah, a life dressed in denial of His promises probably isn’t the best way to be found on the good side of what’s coming.

And it is coming soon.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold