Day 3788 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Corinthians 3:13 NIV

That which won’t withstand.

Such is what He’s always asking me to understand as being the necessity of what He’s asking me to go ahead and let go before I go to where I’m going as, once there, there’s no more leaving left to find. And so anymore I find that I feel that His helping me to come to see the many things that are still in me that aren’t likely to be found welcome where I hope to be welcomed, again, such is what He's asking me to surrender, to sacrifice, to settle upon seeing as something seen as being as unnecessary as He's always known it's always been.

It’s just then that I’ve myself never known many things to have always been as unnecessary as I never imagined they might prove to be.

Rather within this life we daily see some new thing, thought or theory that seems so intriguing that we almost can’t help ourselves but to insist ourselves unto the buying wholesale as much as we might in the moment afford. And it’s in fact this worldly affluence of worldly influence that has been building upon what’s long stood as something of a foundation as poured in place and left us then standing in the same. In place. For in truth, such is what we know best to do.

And having now done so for so long as we have, we likely have nothing but questions and worries when asked to understand that where we stand is both entirely too worldly and thus welcoming the very same outcome promised unto all that’s in this place.

Which is fire, only not the refining kind.

For you see, we all know that there are many uses and thus purposes for fire and flame. It cooks, it cleans, it refines, it removes. It can both decorate but also destroy. It can harden while also harming. It can be used to purify or it can be leaned upon to purge. And it’s all of these varied uses and promises that perhaps find us quite unable to ever be sure as to which process is underway. We just know that we often feel the heat even if we cannot see the flame.

Thus proving that seeing doesn’t always have to precede believing but that rather we’ve just come to lazily like it that way.

Which itself proves that our way is about as far from His as we should ever want to go. After all, He is both fire and refiner. He is punishment but willing to prune. He is just but promises justice, and that not just the kind that we’ve come to crave. No, in light of this post for today, He’s also the justice that we just don’t want to think about. And we know we don’t want to think about what’s coming upon what’s here called the Day because, well, just look at what it said to be coming on the Day!

Mix with that monstrosity of a nightmare our common tendency to not care as to what we do nor what we allow to stay in our lives as something we do repeatedly, and well, what you’ve got there is a gigantic problem that promises to lead us into the refiner’s fire no matter what path we take to get there.

Thankfully there is one path that promises to not leave us there.

But alas it’s the one least traveled in this world what for all the sacrifice and surrender and denial of self that it all but demands.

Not to say that He demands such things quite yet as we can clearly see a world around us filled with those who are clearly not walking in accordance with such a request. But that’s just it, for today, as we’re still here so far from home, for today it is just a request. For today He is still just asking. For today He is still only hinting as to our needing to maybe do some searching of both soul and soil to see if we can even tell the two apart anymore.

And it will remain only a request for however long we’re here.

But that’s what defines the problem that is a promise taken so lightly that we give it no time in our mind. It’s that as defined by the fact that ain’t none of us gonna be here forever. Rather He’s set the years of man at 120, and despite any potential religious debate as to the overall specificity of such a numbering, the point is that our time here is not infinite but rather does indeed have a limit. And be it 120 years or 2,000 more, it in the end simply won’t matter all that much.

For if we didn’t care to do something He asked us to do in 120 then we’re probably not going to care in any of the rest either. And simply put, He has no reason to even give us the 120. In all sad reality, He’s already seen enough and always known enough to have already measured us and determined ahead of the Day those who are His from those only to be sent away from having to spend any amount of time with He who they never cared to come to know.

And thus we see both His brand of justice perfected, but also then the wildly different promises as promised unto all of us who will be found in one of those two very different outcomes.

And too we should also see then the reasons why He asks us now to die to what isn’t life so that, when the Day comes, we’re found so bleak and meager that we can squeeze through that needle no problem. Problem though is that, while we may in some ways see it, it’s generally the putting said squeezing of His fire’s refining into practice that we’re just pretty bad at. I mean I’ve personally been given what are now 37 in which He’s been trying to get through to what remains what my ancestors have always been:

Stubborn and rebellious.

For despite all our advancements in such things as science and technology, sadly I’d say the thing that’s advanced the most is our reliance upon such human ventures to provide for us a work offering the kind of evidence that shows anyone wanting to ask just what we’ve been up to all this time. I mean, just look at all the stuff we have now! We got cars that drive themselves and phones that we can have a conversation with without having to have anyone else on the other end of the line. We’ve put people on moons and sent ships to other planets.

We’re doing pretty good!

Except that there’s often very little good in anything we’re doing because often all we’re doing is all we feel will find for us some sort of solid foundation which proves to everyone around us that we’re special or important or powerful or rich or whatever else has come to matter. Yes, we just want to show the world how impressive we are.

Problem then is that He’s already told us that He’s not even pleased with our sacrifices, and so I don’t really think He’s going to be all that blown away by our continuing to run away from Him and taking His honor and glory as we go, with what’s long been the full intent of us putting them onto, into, unto something or someone else. Mostly just us and whatever we’ve chosen to become pretty much all that we find to be important.

Which is ironically what He will always ask us to surrender should said importance be placed upon anything that isn’t Him. And well, while we might find more than plenty of reasons to find this unreasonable if not entirely rude and borderline hateful, the truth is that He’s got plenty of reasons himself. Reasons such as how He created us to be His rather than the monsters we’ve become making the messes we seem to just enjoy making. Or how He died for us to save us from the messes we’ve made as the monsters we’ve become.

Or how, in light that one, we now have no reason to continue denying Him and will therefore each face again what’s here called the Day upon which we will experience what this very verse promises in light of our having all built a great many of such denials alongside an even more numerous reasons as to why we chose them. Only He too knows then that we’ll then have no reason as there’s never been a reason as He’s always been more than enough which has always then left us not needing any of this nonsense we’ve chosen to put in His place.

And so, His main reason is that He simply loves us so very much that He wishes for none to perish but rather all to come unto repentance which is a general turning away from all we’ve been turning toward before we’re eventually just turned away for having chosen to die living that way.

Yeah, He knows that He is above all both just and fair, and that, in light of that, He won’t force us to spend any time whatsoever in His presence should our lives go on living as if we don’t want to be.

He just knows what that’s like having hung on that tree and suffered the way He did, and well, He did so because He didn’t want us to have to go through what we could make it through.

And so it’s really just up to us at this point as He’s given us His Word and everyone in the world has heard the Name and thus now we’ve nobody to blame but ourselves should we be found upon the Day holding nothing but the ashes of a life we lived building anything and everything but a relationship with He who simply asked that we get rid of the junk before the fire proved it to be what we simply didn’t want to see.

Not that we couldn’t, just don’t want to.

Which is the problem that He’s always there trying to help us solve before our forever is resolved and there’s then no undoing much of anything. No, forever lasts forever, and so our eternal destination is one we’ll be in for all eternity. And He’s just trying really hard to help us be found where dying isn’t all we’ll be forever doing.

What a jerk, am I right?

No, no I’m not and that’s exactly what He and His patience have been helping me to see in ways I never knew I needed all this time. For example, He’s asking me as we speak to surrender to the fact that I cannot overcome a struggle I’m faced with all on my own. And yet, like the Israelites, my pride refuses to accept that I can’t find some way to beat this all alone. And so to surrender to the fact of how I can’t do this, and to thus surrender to the exile of spending time in a place where pride has died, it’s my opportunity to show Him that I trust in His will asking me to do something so dire as to surrender my desire to fight unto the faith that knows I need Him to fight for me because I can’t overcome this thing all by myself.

Or too, He’s also asking me to spend some time reconsidering the things that I’ve allowed to become perhaps more important than they really are. I’ve felt this weight on my heart for months now as I sit still inside a room surrounded with things to hang on the wall but just often overwhelmed with both doubt and then guilt as to why I would. For I’ve long been a collector, and while He’s not against us having stuff, I just can’t help but feel as if I might be dancing on that line of the stuff having me as I give it entirely too much time and thus far too much importance.

For our time is undoubtedly the most important thing we have as it’s the one thing we cannot get back. And so how we use our time is what will define the kind of life we built which is what is here promised to be tested with fire.

And so it just seems that He’s trying to help me to see all that’s within me that won’t withstand the heat. And so He’s helping me by increasing it now as felt in both wonder and worry so as to ignite a hurry to resolve some things before I haven’t any time left to figure them out later. Yes, He’s simply asking me, and all of us, to reassess our priorities and to do so in order to ensure that they will be found able to pass through the Day’s fire without their becoming nothing but ash left in the past.

But often we seem to assume His helping us in this way to be something of an animosity as aimed at the things we’ve come to enjoy in this life. We see it as His asking us to give up what we like, to maybe even learn to hate what we’ve always loved. But no, He’s merely asking us to ask ourselves why we love what we do in light of how what we love is building for us a foundation upon which all we are will eventually be tested. And He’s asking us to do all this because, again, He knows perfectly well what’s coming.

And He didn’t use that eye of the needle analogy for nothing!

Nor the grave in which it was proved!!

And yet that He emptied that tomb ought to also prove that no, He’s not asking us to just give up and live as if we’ll be an addict or a glutton or a liar or a thief or a drunkard all our life. Rather He’s asking us to show Him that we know that we’re not those things and that something drastic has to be done in order to help us realize that in such a brutal way that we’ll never forget it again!

Because yes, all of these things, if left unaddressed, they will, as the evil they are, they will destroy us for as much as His Word will not change, nor then has anything changed in regard to the wages of sin being death. And thus we will not escape with our lives should we refuse to confess that we’ve brought this battle on ourselves due to our longstanding enmity against God as chosen for no other reason than our seeking to please the flesh rather than the Father. And yet, as a loving Father, He wants for us all eternal life, and thus to escape the battle this life is with our lives.

And He helps us unto that outcome by His constantly asking us to reconsider things. To rethink what we’re doing in light of the idea of the kind of life it’s building. To test for ourselves the kind of work we’re doing and the foundation upon which we’re doing it to see for ourselves whether or not it can withstand the winds of change picking up. For again, His Word isn’t going to change, and so neither will that promise of not all sleeping but all in fact changing.

Yet that’s just it, just how much will change upon the Day when all we are and all we’ve done is tested by the Son and there and then either found worthy of passing or merely only left passing away?

But I suppose that, like the Israelites then, maybe the only way left to find that answer to truly be both the only one we have and thus the only we need is to surrender, to submit, to acknowledge His sacrifice as given us in Christ and thereby welcome His pruning in whatever way He alone knows we need. For let’s be honest, rarely do we know what we need to do or to be as we’re rather quite always focused on our wants instead.

And well, wants aren’t really much of a foundation to be building much of anything on as, well, they change just about as often as the tides and the sands upon which they wash.

Friends, point is that yes, He asks us almost always to reconsider some things we’re doing in life as to get to the heart of the matter which is why we allow them to matter. He’s not saying that nothing we like, do, want or enjoy doesn’t matter or mean anything. He’s just asking us to always try and make sure that nothing in this life as lived within this world is allowed to matter more than He does.

For He remains the Rock that most builders have rejected and will reject still ahead. Many in this world will not allow for any room in their hearts to He who came to save us all. But that’s doesn’t mean we should do the same for again, Word not being changed, there is no other Name that we can lean upon or look to that will find us welcomed in His presence.

God will not accept anyone who’s lived building and/or leaning on anything less than a relationship fully reliant upon Christ. And nor then can we allow for anything else to remain any part of our heart’s or hope’s foundation. Not that we can’t enjoy things along the way, but just that we need to understand that those things we do enjoy along the way need to always be understood as things that are only temporary as nothing in or of this world will last.

So do not continue building your life on anything found here. Because one day we won’t be, and it will be nothing but tragic if all we have left is only the ability to point at all we’d built in a life then forever behind us. Build something that will withstand the test that He’s told us is coming.

And, well, since He’s the One who told us it was coming, seems He’s probably the only best choice for both the foundation and the building.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold