Day 3782 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Jeremiah 17:10 NIV

Nowhere to hide

For He who is the Lord is He who knows the mind. And He who knows the mind, who is the Lord, the same is He who knows then the heart and the reasons and refusals thus scattered behind the many choices we’ve made and the better chances, changes that we didn’t choose. Yes, He who came with a life to lose in light of the lost way of life we’d lived, He is the same as Him to whom we shall all give account and receive there a reward as won in response to what we’ve done.

And this means we’re all in big trouble!

Because aside from a world built upon a society based inside of affirmation, there is no other way to secure the needed justification for any action as done either outside or in fact blatantly against the perfect will of God. In fact, in light of His call that, in light of that, we too would seek to perfect holiness out of a reverence of He who is holy, that call for us to be perfect is what now stands against us as is evident in our every failure, every flaw, every refusal to heed that call and live as if it mattered at all.

Which is something we’ve done so often that we’re quite good at it. In truth it could be argued that we’ve perfected unholiness. That we’ve perfected unrighteousness. That we’ve found a way of life in which we live in perfect emptiness thanks to any enmity as waged against He who is both kind and King. Sadly it seems that we’ve only ever, at best, seen Him as but just the first.

He’s just kind. He’s just really nice. He’s this, as the kid’s would say, super chill dude who would never do anything mean on this scene of life He’s seen go so far off the rails that the track’s jumped the train and left there our brain so mundane that we mingle and mix as if drinks and deaths are the things that make life worth living. Indeed, we do so many things that are so utterly upside down that it’s amazing we can find our way out of bed in the morning without our feet somehow hitting the ceiling!

Simply because such is the only way we know to go. Each and every day we only delight to awake and race once more into the day before in which we did then what we’d done for however many years prior. We’re perfecting routines out of reverence for the reward of our never knowing anything hard. And as a people who so daily disagree with everything that is only there to help us grow, well, seems then that every growth is only something we’ll never know.

No, rather we’re destined to stay like this forever.

And while that might seem a good thing to a pride that sees inside itself no hint of a bad thing, the reality is that none of this really depends upon what we think. Life isn’t to be measured according to what we allow to matter. Our time here isn’t to be tested and tried against the plans we’ve made or the trophies we buy. Indeed, this life will turn out to prove to have so little to do with us that we’ll likely be amazed as to just how easy it always was.

And just how hard we made it instead.

Why do we make it this hard on ourselves? What is it about all of this living to pretend that we know what we’re doing that’s so amazing that we’re still willing to all but eternally forgo the peace and rest that He not only designed inside our time, took and has Himself, but literally called us there to share? In Him. Peace and rest. Hope and joy. Purpose and promise. What promise? Peace and rest, hope and joy. A home to call home as hollowed of all the hollow hopes we’d held or held out for before we got there.

But that’s only half of it, isn’t it?

Half the promise? Half the purpose? The half we prefer? Yeah, we’re pretty much perfect at that too. And well, it is quite hard to blame us in light of how hard the fight to get us to this life in which daily we die to the better we could have been as made behind enemy lines as drawn of such foes and challenge and woe. No, we want no such struggle as what it takes to survive.

More than happy just existing.

And that for however long we imagine we might.

But, yet again, we arrive right back at relying on us to play some all but crucial part of the story. We live these lives leaning on our minds to both imagine all the fun and enjoyment we could, and thus believe should be having, but also then to brainstorm the excuses as to all the losses of all those betters that we could, should have been along the way to what’s likely one more day in which we just don’t care.

For if there’s anything we’re more perfect at than that, I’ve literally no idea what it is!

No, we’re stone-cold masters at making ourselves disasters as designed inside every moment in which we delighted only to just not give a rip. We don’t want to care. We don’t want to try. We don’t have it in us to live as if life is still sat before us and thus asks us that take up the crosses that find it. No, we don’t want to care as to our inevitable end. We don’t enjoy thinking about it as it seems only the end of everything we have, all we enjoy, all we hoped to have and be able to enjoy before we leave.

Yes, our lives are lived trying everything we can to stay blind to the fact that we’ve somewhere else to be as met upon a day we do not know as brought by a Savior who we sadly don’t know all that much about either.

Not that we can’t as He’s made Himself and His path most perfectly evident unto all who’ve eyes to see and ears that hear and a heart that cares and a mind willing and able to count the time and see it then running out faster than we can pretend it’s not.

And yet while our eyes can see, they only see what we want to be there. While our ears can hear, they only choose to listen to what soothes their itching. While our hearts do care, it’s seemingly about less and less every day. And though our minds have the ability to factor and thus figure out that we’re running out of time, it’s sadly the willingness to do so that’s left us all but living oblivious to the fact that hope is running alongside.

Indeed, all of us are running short on both time and hope, though, judging from the way we’re living as seen clearly by all, we’re only even slightly worried about one of the pair. For we so clearly concern ourselves not with how little time we’ve left before we leave. Instead we just continue to worry about all we hope to have, see, be or do before we have to.

Yeah, death has been allowed to remain this finality to life that most around here somehow delight for it to stay. As to why we like living this life that way, again, I’ve not the first idea.

Rather all I find myself able to imagine anymore is a closing door that I just can’t run through fast enough. And that door is discernment. It’s discipline. It’s the determining to my life start living as if I’m dying and thus no longer allowing anything in this world to matter as much as I’ve myself long insisted it might. Yes, I seem still, and that somehow, so daily torn between what are two lives as lived for two goals as given with two reasons as aimed toward two places as promised unto all.

And though I know the one I want to find when my forever’s found, still I live as if life on this ground is worth something enough to insist I keep my attention here for a little while more.

And so I’m His enemy still, in some ways at least. For still I do things as if the things He denied Himself are the same that I can’t live without. I make choices listening to voices that I know aren’t His, and that simply because I can often hear them more clearly. I follow those I can see, wanting them to leave pleased with who they thought me to be. Indeed, I live my life still behind a mask sometimes.

And it’s one that hangs on a wall or sits in a garage or is finally on sale at the store.

All of these things have been given so much of our attention that we shouldn’t be so surprised at the sheer brutality of what He went through to turn our eyes back to Christ. We shouldn’t be shocked that He asks us to take up our own crosses and daily kill upon them the things that daily ask us to worry about them. We shouldn’t be so constantly ready to always refuse the chance to lose all that was never life to begin with.

For He is life, and in Him is no darkness at all.

And yet each of us have a life as if lived inside a hall ten thousand miles long filled with so many closets and cancers that it’s no wonder we can’t manage to find what hope is. We have no idea where we’ve put it as we’ve put it inside everything that’s bound to die. And thus so too has our hope lost its life, and thus left us to lose ours too.

All because we refuse to lose this idea inside that says we can do all we want and manage to hide the parts that we only eventually come to be far less proud of than our pride said we’d be.

Indeed, I cannot count the number of times I’ve listened to that lie that I needed something to finally know a happy life, a peaceful life, a life with meaning and merit. So many things have been made my god along the way. And even as I sit here this cloudy July day writing away at what is this 3,782nd post in pursuit of Biblical growth and thus He who breathed it for just such a benefit, I sadly have to say that I’m still doing the same.

I look across this bedroom and see stacks of stuff that I’ve given a month or more of my time, my life trying to find or figure how to hang it up and make it look right. For I’m a collector at heart, and thus have a heart that wants only to have all that stuff laying around as I’ve somewhere, somehow become convinced that it reflects who I am and what I like and thus a big part of the way I’ve lived my life.

And yet it just sits there. Nothing is moving. Nothing is changing. Nothing is growing, shrinking, streaking toward the window to my right looking for the light of life as lived outside these rooms we build only to fill with who we’ve become as nailed onto a wall for absolutely nobody else to ever care about. Yes, I’ve lived my life as if curating a museum of me, one that nobody else sees but yet so many others probably have themselves.

Yes, such is the hollowness of a life spent collecting. It only achieves for us a personal set of whatever everyone else can have as well. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with our having things, problem is that we don’t seem able or willing to keep the things from having us. And indeed, I’ve given worldly things so much room and time in my life that I cannot imagine just how little He’s had all this time in this room in which I stack the stuff I like that has itself no sign of life.

What then am I showing Him?

For if the things that seem to matter to me are things that cannot speak, cannot think, cannot breathe, then what does this say of my perspective on my life? For if the culmination of my life’s efforts is only able to ever achieve some collection of stuff that somebody else will have to sell off when I die, then what did my time here matter? And, in light of this verse for today’s post, what will my time have been measured as measured by He who sees not only the same stacks of stuff that I’ve allowed into idols, but also knows the heart and mind behind it?

Friends, I’m terrified of how little of my life I’ve given to Christ. Not to say that I haven’t as daily I try in that direction most dearly and direly. But still, I can’t remember all the times that I chose to focus on something other than Him. I can’t remember all the times I’ve let Him down. I can’t recount the words I shouldn’t have said or the better choices I should have made. Thankfully He’s helping me to realize some of them, but even that seems only to have just now scratched the surface.

Yeah, I have no way of knowing just how far from Him I am. I just know that His Word says He died to send forth the Spirit to live inside our hearts and from there guide us home. And yet so too I know that every single day there’s so many other things weighing on my heart that I can’t anymore manage to measure the amount that’s Him and that which only pulls me away.

And sure, I could count the things that I’ve been focusing on lately and in that get some idea as to just how misplaced my devotions are. But even still, that would only tell me where I stand now, not in any of those other moments in which I honored Him with a mouth that couldn’t talk my heart into doing the same. And we all do the same. Granted, maybe not as in collecting junk. But we all have something(s) in our lives that are taking His place and stealing our time.

Do we even know why? Do we ever stop to wonder where we are and why it’s still so clearly not at all where or who we want to be? Does a day ever come in which we come apart from the world, if even for a moment, and there finally ask ourselves what we’re doing and why it was so hard for us to stop it for a second so that we could read some Scripture or spend some time in prayer?

Yes, do we ever wonder why it feels like a burden to be with our Father?

I hope we start trying to pry that problem apart because our time is running out and we’ve got no place left to run. Simply because we didn’t have anywhere to hide in the first place.

And that’s what scares me most of all anymore. It’s not the thought of hell or the unending death that I know I deserve. It’s not the suffering that I’ve avoided all combining into an eternity paying it off. It’s not the misery I might still meet along the way to wherever He says I’ll go. No, what scares me the most is having to look Jesus in the face and point to all this other stuff that I lived letting take His place.

And not because He doesn’t already know I have, but because He even knows the reasons I did. And most of the time I don’t. I don’t know why I do half the stuff I do, just know that I really don’t like the outcome sometimes. And thus I find that I’m making choices that are so far away from being the right choices to make that my life can only then forever be so far away from where I long to go.

Because if our choices don’t align with His will and our feet thus never walk in His Way, then all we can ever be is apart from Him who asked us to focus on Him first and let everything else fall wherever it may.

No, I’ve lived my life trying to find that just right place for everything that I thought mattered most in the moment. And yet most of it doesn’t matter at all anymore. What does that say about me? What does that kind of life deserve in which life is only lived focused on everything that’s either already dead or headed that way?

Yes, what do I deserve as defined by He who searches the heart and knows the mind?

Well, considering the long-standing lack of anything good within either, I’d say I deserve then a long-standing lack of anything good.

Yeah, that’s what I deserve in light of a life in which I’ve lived not surrendering all of my heart, all of my mind, all of my soul, all of my strength to He who only ever asked for all of those things. No, I’ve given them to plenty of other stuff, and that often not even caring enough to wonder why.

He knows, and not even all we’ve done but all those reasons we never talk about. Even those reasons we may not know about. For all of us do things without thinking them through, leaving us lost as to a reason why.

Not that we don’t have one, and so not then that we’ll not have an answer to the questions He will ask. We will, we just might not like the answer that comes out nor then the reward that it’s given.

For again, rewards are just things presented in response to someone’s actions or accomplishments. But friends, just look at what our actions have accomplished so far! What do we deserve for a life lived denying Christ the throne in our lives?

It ain’t life, I can tell you that.

As to why I still do things that still sometimes keep Him from being front and center, well, I can’t tell you that.

And that’s what terrifies me the most.

Because He knows.

But yet, if He knows whilst I don’t, can I then truly say with any truth that I know Him? And too then, will He then say He knows me?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold