Day 3791 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 135:18 NIV

And so will those

As is all of all who’ve indeed ever now found themselves to be lost in the awe and allure of what are basically only the enemy’s lures as left for those lost to find in what’s for all been a faith as has long been sadly placed inside of things that had themselves neither sight nor sound, breath or belief, love and thus life. No, I sit here still myself surrounded by things that are but addendums unto a life, but alas aware that for a good while there they were allowed to be more of myself than I ever cared to be.

No, looking back on a life in which was lost life itself as outsourced to things sourced from the soil, it’s a special miserable to be sure.

Thankfully He’s called us expressly to understand that we’re not necessarily bound to go back that way.

Rather He, all throughout the Word, asks us to surrender, to sacrifice, to count as loss all for that we’ve lived in what becomes again a love alive as was always meant to be what defines a life as opposed to those treasures as stored where treasures can’t stay. And it’s weird that while we’ve all indeed had a great many things we’ve held both close and thus dear that have each long since because things thrown into the trash or sold off in garage sales or elsewise forgotten to the fog of all our many yesterdays, the sad part is that still we do the same.

And that basically every single day. We each awake with hearts set upon still housing hope within what’s been what it always was. Just a bunch of stuff. I mean this with as much honesty as I might honestly muster but I truly cannot remember all the things in my life that have mattered. There’ve been times, and of them many, in which the things around me meant more to me than I could, than I do. Indeed, it’s such a strange confession but I must begin addressing the longstanding lack of care as given to really anything other than everything here.

It’s been my life. Some call it collecting. Others define in that lane a line defined as hoarding. But whatever the word the warning remains the same and that is that it will all be left behind as nothing escapes this world alive.

Much less that which was already lifeless to begin with!

Yes, such is the missive of the cross we’ve all been missing. It’s that life is worth something, and that sometimes it takes suffering to see it. And thankfully He endured it. He embraced it. He set to waste it, that wasted way in which we’ve walked after what was only in and of and thus promised to stay within the world from which it came. But the problem then is both that we’ve all so clearly missed the message but also that we’ve missed it so amazingly that we seem to have come upon this almost certainty that we might here stay for however long we may never want to consider that we can’t.

All because where your treasure stored is the very same as where your heart is stayed.

But friends, it really doesn’t change anything, for here none will stay, neither the things we’ve made nor those who’ve agreed with us that they all might mean something. Doesn’t change anything. Why? Because God’s never really been all that big into popular vote. He’s never really considered culture’s confusion to be of any real welcome within His many decisions. In fact, He only invited one guy up that mountain where He literally laid down the law as left us in stone so as to see, forever, just how serious He truly is about this life and what He wants done with it.

And among the entire length of Scripture, even all that written both shortly and then still too even long thereafter that scene as seen upon Sinai, in not one place will anyone find even a single word written aimed at suggesting that we allow stuff to remain of any importance to us.

I mean, as amazingly miraculous as all that stuff that they saw unfold in the desert on their way to the promise, it’s what was still to come that came to bring the Promise to us that has since proven by far the vastly more miraculous!

And that is again the cross as carried up Calvary by He who is the Christ who came to give His life so as to both open our eyes to seeing what we’ve done both in and thus to our lives and then to, in Him, begin again with a new plan in mind. A plan made and meant to die as is to be done unto all of that which was again already dead to begin with.

Yes, Christ came to lose His life as lived in this land so as to show us all as clearly as any can that there is nothing here that we need to survive, but that, in fact, everything here can and will cost us our lives too so long as we allow it to remain of as much importance to us as it so clearly, and that quite sadly, come to be considered. And make no mistake, at this we all now owe so many lives for having allowed so much of so many lies into our lives that hell’s unending demise is truly deserved by all.

An image complete with warnings of fire and fear as felt by who should be all of us in light of how all of us have fallen in love with all that isn’t Him but that thus only distracts us from both Him and then what He did to set us free from what had been, may still be a life of almost perfect slavery. And indeed, we find this idea written in an almost perfect clarity within Paul’s letter to the Galatian church. Galatians 4:8 to be exact.

“Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.”

And while, as the people we’ve become as who are but reflections of the culture of chaos we’re in, we likely hone in on that one word that sets off so many alarms and warning bells and screaming sirens and Karens who scream even louder, and thus miss what’s perhaps the most important word in the verse. For while “slaves” invokes all sorts of feelings and things, the word there that should mean the most is the one that starts the whole message.

Formerly.

It’s a word that invokes an idea of history, of a past in which something was that isn’t now. It’s an idea that inspires us to consider for once the movements we’ve made in what have become a way spent thus walking away from either what or where we once were. Indeed, and at that it’s a gift in many ways as it speaks to the many ways and the many days in which we’ve changed into what’s become a new kind of life thus apparently being now lived for something so very different that the past itself is now what seems lost.

And having each of us lived our lives in our pasts seeking those things which have not breath, a past now lost is a very good thing!

Because it means then that we’re not who we were then as we’re now hopefully seeking for something that is so very different that we too have ourselves become the same: Different.

Indeed, I am completely convinced, and yet somehow still increasing at that, that our chance to experience a life lived different is both the foundation of the Gospel and thus all that should really be allowed to matter. Why? Because it does have breath as it’s built upon a Word still alive and active as is shown in every single one of those who even still today turn away from their old ways unto a life spent then following the Way that is still so remarkably unpopular that none of us have any reason to do so.

And why do any do so? Because a life lived seeking life in idols can only inevitably leave us all but just as dead and entirely empty as all those that we can have and hold here have always been.

For they leave us like them, without eyes to see or ears to hear or words to say, all because they all but become us as we give them each a little more and then a little more and then just a little more until these trophies and trinkets have become of more importance than anything else we’re doing. Indeed, they can even become more important than the lives we’re here to be living.

Again, a fact I must myself confess to having experienced far too many times to ever again trust myself to fix the problems I face!

No, for the issue is that we cannot fix the problems that we either can’t or simply won’t admit we have. And yet, as a people so long living so lifeless thanks to the lifelessness as found within all we’re hoping still to find, so too are we all but completely blind to the importance of anything other than whatever it is that has become an idol to us. And while the idea of an idol likely makes one think of some little golden statue as sat upon a nightstand or something, or perhaps that singing show, though I’m not even sure if that’s still going, the reality of idolatry is that it can be found or forced into basically anything.

I mean, you could even all but worship a water bottle and nobody would really ask you why. We’re literally to the point in which people are looking for signs of the divine inside bags of potato chips or the markings made by a toaster on a piece of bread.

Yeah, we’re gone in the head!

Which is why He came to bring us back to both our senses and thus back to life as we should have been living it. And that, as done by He in what’s become our only best example of a godly life lived, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that we likely still consider to be important. He literally even pointed out to this one guy that He hadn’t even a place to lay His head! Rather Christ came with here no home, no bed, no job, no salary, no hopes for promotion, no new car He was wanting, not even a list of things to get at the grocery store that, oh yeah, didn’t exist either.

In fact, as found within His war of words as waged between Him and he who came and comes still to tempt all with stuff we simply don’t need, even then Jesus said, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

And yet we’ve even managed to find a way to idolize food.

Friends, my point is that we can, and likely have, make an idol out of almost anything. Doesn’t have to be silver or gold. Doesn’t even have to be something we can hold. We’ve all idolized plans and dreams as found inside our hearts and minds. And yet all these things, they all only steal our time. They rob us of resources such as effort and excitement as could otherwise be placed upon the kinds of treasure that He told us we can store in that place where He promised nobody could break in and take them from us.

And so why don’t we?

Why do we instead still seek our fortunes in the one place we know we can’t keep them? Why do we sow our faith into all these things that themselves haven’t any faith to give? Why do we give room or importance in our houses or hearts unto things that don’t need a home and haven’t a heart to even want one? Indeed, why do we want these things that haven’t any sign of life within them?

What then can they give us? What can paper prove? What can metal make immortal? Can ink write a life that manages to skip the dying part thereof? Does plastic produce a promise worth as much as we give to have it? No, for nothing made by humans can helps humans with what are our most profound needs. Sure, these things can give us something to look at or take care of or make someone else impressed by the affluence of our existence.

But do we need those things?

Do we need more stuff to look at? Do we need something else to care for? Does it matter what anyone else may think of how important or impressive our lives here are? Will their awe and approval inspire God to open Heaven’s gates? Or will pleasing people only still prove us far from servants of Christ?

You see, He’s the One who said that anyone who doesn’t take up their cross and follow Him isn’t worthy of Him. And, deduced out a bit, if we’re not worthy of Him then how, my friends, could we ever be deemed worthy of what He did? And if we’re not worthy of what He did, which we’re not, but also not then willing to admit that He did it, well then how could it have been done for us? And if it wasn’t done for us, then yeah, it’s easy to see why we would likely still place our hope in all this other stuff.

But He did do it for us, and not just to free us from what has been what is now formerly a life lived in slavery to all sorts of soil-based superficiality, but to inspire us to “not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

For His kind of freedom is the free indeed kind. Not some part or portion, no, it’s full and forever.

Or is it?

See, that’s the question that each of us should be asking as it’s also the very one we’re all literally answering any time that we place any time or effort or interest into anything around us. And again, it’s not that we can’t have stuff in this world as even His Word reads that He knows of the things we need. But friends, this is the line that separates idolatry from appreciation. It’s that drawn by our understanding that He who meets our every need is the same as He who should have all of our everything.

Yes, God alone deserves our focus, our attention, our intentions as given unto the things that we both hope and thus trust to lead us to what is still that prayer that the best is yet to come. And indeed, with Him it is as He is alive and seated so firmly on that throne that in Him is even life unending. But friends, without Him we’re also without anything He is or offers.

And well, what of all He offers, of all He is, of all He already did can we find replaced or equaled in anything around us?

Will pictures on a wall take the fall for you? Will that car in your driveway offer to carry your cross? For you will your boss at work lay down their life? Will you lay down your own life for you?

I ask that you take the time to go back and reread that last line and let it sit for however long you might need it to.

Will you lay down your own life for you?

Friends, that’s what He’s asking when He calls us into sharing in Him. It is the loss of everything we’ve known of life and thus all we’ve wanted and/or won within it. Will you lay it all down, let it all go if that’s what it takes to know in your soul that you have a home waiting for you in Heaven?

Shouldn’t even be a question.

And yet we all know of the guy who Jesus told to go and sell all he had so that he’d have nothing to stay in his way of following Jesus with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his strength.

Dude walked away upset because he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

What is there in your life that’s holding you back from giving Jesus even more than you may think you already have? Because friends, He’s not asking for partial custody as given in weekend visits while we spend the other six days with all these other things that are thus given more time and obviously seen then as of more importance. For what we give our time to is what we’re saying our lives are worth.

What’s your life worth, and is there any life to be found in it?

In Him there is, but friends, without Him, no, not so much. So let us all take some time to assess our situations and seek out anything that is in any way taking anything from all that we could and thus should be giving unto He who literally did everything we could ever need.

After all, He’s the One who laid down a life for us to have forever the same. How can anything that doesn’t have life do the same?

Be careful my friends, idols are waiting everywhere for us to agree they matter more than they can.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold