Day 3799 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 16:25 NIV

Let it go

For if to lose this life is to life find gained, then to surrender our share of such is something of such substance as to show forth the faith that our now longstanding standing in place has never been able to allow us to say was in any way ours at all. And while we may have tried our very best to believe always otherwise, the simple clarity is met within the world’s familiarity with both what crosses achieve and thus what Christ accomplished for those who in Him believe.

It just all comes down to whether or not we believe in Him enough to actually follow within the path that He himself came to pave so as to save all of they, who are still all of we who know well we need all of what He did and to share in at least a portion of the same if we’re to find the same as the outcome for which He came to lead us all.

Which is souls saved.

The issue then arises in that for our lives we’ve not had the audacity to even consider the imagining of just how much we deserve what we cannot then comprehend He didn’t. And this is the proverbial and persistent breaking point held inside of every attempt unto this kind of belief. For the Christian faith is unlike all others in that while yes it offers, so too it asks. And that’s not to say that other religions have not their questions.

It’s just to say that they demand in no way the extremity as is found within our sharing of a life lain down.

Rather most other beliefs retain this ability to refuse such a limiting of all this life’s enjoyments and elations. And that’s not to say that a Christian’s faith is without the same, for there is joy and excitement over here and inside of us that are, themselves, quite unlike those offered unto those followers of mere human religion as built upon and based within the processional replication of simple procedure done only expecting boxes checking on some list of things we can actually accomplish.

Christianity asks us all unto that which we cannot.

For let us be honest, there be no more unnatural thing than laying down one’s life. I mean, for all our lives we’ve all fought with all our might to save ourselves from such a sacrifice. In fact, I dare say we know so little of the word that we cannot at all even come close to ever even beginning to share in what His suffering has now coming unless and until we’re far more willing to escape willfully what all we know in search then of the difficulty of even admitting all we don’t.

And indeed, even our human understanding has become something of an idol sat before us. After all, everything we do is something we only agree to once we’ve wrapped our minds around every possible outcome that could come around in whatever the end of the matter may be. We have to at first understanding everything before we’ll ever try anything.

It just offers us this sense of safety, of security, of success even. Yes, knowing the plans, procedures and prosperity to be produced offers us a greater willingness to try for the gain for which our hearts are aimed.

But there again we find that Christianity does not so align.

For there’s this underlying current in Christ that speaks life to this losing of such, and that to such a degree that in Him daily we see something new we’ve not yet seen and thus not yet sacrificed of what’s long been a life lived only at the very edge of everything seeking there always only the understanding that stands always in the way of the only path in that we’re ever going to be able to take.

Which is why He asks us to understand this:

That whosoever desires to keep their life will themselves lose the same while whomever delights to lose their life will find in that a life in which they might delight.

All because every life owes a death but not every death will know a life.

And that simply because this life we’ve lived so in love with all that is lust and lie, it’s only the same as what fastened us to the frame of this string of days always done the same. Yes, in our lives we’ve known so little change because change brings consequence and every consequence a cost and every cost a charge as levied against an account we already know all but eternally emptied.

Simply because we’ve given entirely too much of ourselves to all the things we sought to find in what was a faith that to us life they’d bring. And we’ve just now not much willingness left to wager upon the wander away from this good enough place that’s proven itself time and again to be entirely that.

Just good enough.

Friends, question is since when was good enough good enough? Since when was already known an excuse to know nothing else? Since when was a life underway a worthy replacement for the life on the way? Since when was a life underway going our way of worthy equity to the life promised on the way by He who is the Way that is the Life that’s on the way?

We’ve been talking about this for days, but as approached from the idea of idolatry as such is sadly all we’ve long been living for. And in fact, we’ve lived in such love of our every such handheld hope that we anymore hold no hope for much of anything not held in hand. Because we just don’t know how. We can’t understand how that works, that belief in something that you can’t see, can’t feel, can’t follow and succeed. And indeed, even our own success has become an idol sat before.

For again, we’ll do nothing if we do not at first understand it well enough to know well enough that we’ll find only success in the venture.

Which has left us doing next to nothing thanks to our amazing ability to understand roughly the same.

But I suppose that such is perhaps to be found of valid reason. After all, who can blame you for not doing what you don’t trust to be worth being done? Indeed, I think all of mankind would agree that there’s no reason in ever even trying to do what we cannot promise to be worth the effort, the energy, the excitement, the complexity of finding oneself perhaps growing into an appreciating of difficulty and a thus newfound worry won within every past preference for complacency.

Yes, such is where I find I live my life now. For I feel afraid every time that I find myself still standing in any of the places that I’ve already been. Not because I’ve not been in some beautiful spots but simply because I believe I know little of beauty having apparently seen it in places that I now would never go back to.

And while it’s a strange experience to sit with all these realizations as to the destinations we’ve visited in search of the dreams we likely found once there only to see now the danger we were in through hindsight helping see the problems we found in those dreams we’ve had, feeling that afraid of making more of those mistakes really helps you reconsider the fire!

Which is where He calls us to come as He himself is the Consuming kind of such.

Alas, for all of life we've stood at His edge in wonder as to whether the fire might burn, believing mostly only that it always would. And our having always thought we’ve always known what both fire and crosses do, so too then have we always found reason to avoid risking them. For in all actuality, there is no risk involved in either flame or the surrender seen upon that scene of Christ’s suffering upon Calvary. No, we don’t need to feel fire to know it’s hot, and nor do we need to be nailed there ourselves to know we’d rather not.

Because we do know enough of both to know for sure that fires do burn, and that to even ash if endured long enough, and too that crosses only kill as there’s just no way a human could survive all of that.

And yet the fact remains that in this faith none enter the flame alone but rather in battalions. And even if our battlement is spent always only following feebly behind the example of He who is the Beginning, well then what should it matter if even should the fire burn away even a majority of who we've been? For if facing the flame means knowing a deeper measure of the Name, well then what have we to lose?

For if life is found in a life lain down, then it seems we know the Way. And indeed, we could have and should have all along anyway. For this is what is Christ did for us to begin what is supposed to be a share in He who is the Way to the Life.

And friends, that's just the Truth.

But yet as trustworthy and true as any truth may prove, still it waits just beyond that longstanding insistence upon our understanding it. Which leaves the many we spoke of yesterday still standing upon the wide-open and easy in light of their common understanding that life is not only best lived inside of such but in fact only lived filled with both. Wide-open and easy.

And it’s because of our own sharing inside that understanding that still we’re standing in what is a place we’ve all always stood beside those we thought our brothers, our sisters, our mothers, fathers, friends. But friends, if they’ll not lay down their lives for themselves, what then makes us think they’ll do so for us? And indeed, as another of the Gospels reads, Christ adds a little addendum unto the message He’s here sending.

It’s in Mark’s version, 8:35 to be exact.

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

Same message, same wording even. Just that little addition that may make quite the difference in our understanding as, again, always needed before we’ll ever even consider trying something. “And for the gospel.” What is the Gospel? It’s, put simply, that God came to earth in Christ to lay down His life to atone for the sinful ways of fallen men, of whom we are all a part. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and thus have been rendered in need of a Savior who could pay the debt that we all owe which is the death that all sins knows.

So the Gospel is that Jesus came to free us by giving His life for us and then calling us to do the same.

Why? Because you just can’t go on doing what caused another’s dying unless you just don’t care that they did.

Thus the call is for all to lay down a life so that another might live. But yet the big point here being that the other who will live thanks to our laying down our lives is us ourselves. It’s only the bettered version of ourselves that He at first created us to be. Yes, Jesus gave His life to set us free from who and what we’d become so that, in Him, we could again become the children of God that He who is our Father so clearly created us to be.

And the ask is so big, that being our death to what’s been the only kind of life we’ve even really known, because so too is the promise being given unto all who answer the call and come into their share of all Christ is, but too of all He did. And again, friends, the Gospel tells us that Jesus came to ransom sinners, of whom all of us are. And that He did so by laying down His own life so as to offer up a sacrifice that would finally and forever satisfy the entirely justified wrath of a holy God who called us to be holy as He is holy only to watch us all become anything and everything but.

Thus we should see the simple clarity in this call to lose a life if we ever hope to find the same, and too then a dwindling worry as to the laying down of what we’ve known as is to always be done not knowing what we don’t. And make no mistake, there is plenty of this path that we will not understand until we’ve reached the very end. But friends, if He who laid down His life to save ours calls us to follow Him, can we not trust that He knows what He’s doing?

After all, He’s literally the only One who’s ever humbled Himself into the confines of sinful flesh in order to become our sins for us so that He could then sacrifice that kind of life spent earning again and again the again justified wrath of God.

And if He’s willing to suffer like He did for us, what then do we think He won’t do to get us through whatever we may have to go through to get to where He did all He did for us to go?

No, if Jesus would pick the tree and hang there in that agony for you and me, well, I then believe that we can trust Him to not lead us wrong. And so no matter how skinny the narrow becomes nor then what all of us we’re forced to flee along the way behind He who is the Way, I know we’ll find it worth it in the end. Because while it may hurt now to lose any of all we’ve been, of all we’ve seen, of all we’ve wanted and still wish to have, to hold, to be, if the outcome is life then we’ve nothing to lose.

Only everything to lose that was never life anyway.

And that’s the difference. It’s not that He asks us to lose our lives, only to lay them down so that, once lying lifeless on the ground, we can then understand that everything we’ve been living for was never living toward anything alive. Rather all we’ve ever known of life is only all that’s kept us from He who is the Life as it’s all always stood as an understanding met in the worry of losing. For truly, this world tells us constantly that this life is ours in which to gain all we can ever hope to find of this world we’re in and will be for some time the only place in which we know of life.

The empty tomb on the other side of that cross taken up says otherwise.

Which then do we believe? That life’s better when life’s safer? Or that life only begins when all that isn’t alive has reached its end?

Friends, be it the fire, the grave, the cross, they all help us learn the difference. For all the above only kill away all that was never able to give us life.

Because life cannot come from anything without its own life to give. Christ already gave His own life.

What makes us then continue to think that His asking us to lay down our lives, just like He did, may not go just like He said it would?

No, whoever wants to save what isn’t alive will find only a life still then same. But whomever lays down a life lived for all that isn’t alive will themselves find life because of it.

So what’s it to be my friends? Continue living where we have for what we have that hasn’t life for us? Or let go of what we’ve come to know so that, with more room then, we might come then to know all we haven’t of that life we haven’t lived because of our having lived for all that wasn’t life?

Hard question.

Perhaps.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold