Day 3804 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:3 NIV

Barriers

And some of they if not indeed barricades all but blocking the way to the better we could have been and thus then breaking still the heart of He who came and died to leave what remains the only Way to the better we never were. And anymore I think often about that man I could have been who hadn’t been what I’d become as that creature who considered such creations as a web of lies strewn throughout not only my life but also that of whomever I chose to lie to too.

Terrifying that I’ll never know, sad that I couldn’t see it back when I could have.

But what we have to ask ourselves is whether the terror and sorrow can be enough to prove us now willing to act upon what we know in this aftermath of a wasted past built upon our building of such barriers as bloodshed and betraying speech? I would hope so, but alas it seems that a fragile heart’s hope knows only the extremities of human growth and the potential toward which such should be always aimed. Can’t force the kind of change that it would take to get us there on the wide scale.

Too many stories to tell of souls for sale to what has always been the only one willing to offer exactly what we want right when we find the want wanted.

Thus also proving our failure to understand the danger in something being too good to be true.

For the truth is that the truth’s good, but its goodness is quite hamstrung by its adamancy to remain itself. And indeed, the truth will not bend, will not waver, will not waste any opportunity to set free the captives which hear it, and that often by not simply unlocking their shackles but rather by ripping them from the flesh to which they’ve all but become welded.

And that hurts!

Which is indeed why it’s well known that the truth does. It wounds as it wants to make realized the lies that have long not merely stood in its stead but had us in fact living instead such different lives that we ourselves had become reflections of he who is the father of the same. Something John 8:44 has to say.

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

And thus we find the fearful fragility of the human failure to break fealty with he who has long been our lead. And within this one verse we read of so many things that we’d never once thought ourselves to be. Or even if just two, well those two are enough to cause us pause upon the perusal of the rest of the sentencing as set forth within the rest of the Word.

After all, if we’re already to liars and murders, well, we don’t really have much further to fall!

And yet the problem is that we cannot even seem to admit even that as rather we live sat upon towers of ivory adorned with every form of worldly idolatry and the many idiocies that make it such a well-loved monstrosity. Such as the lies we speak. And sure, it’s never been on our to-do lists to make the connection because a mankind that lies and those lies murdering mankind, but maybe it’s not such a leap at all.

For if life comes from truth, as truth both sets free but only does so because He who is the both came to prove it can, well then speaking dishonestly is indeed the same as murdering those who happen to hear what we both have to say but shouldn’t have had the desire to speak.

Because, “what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

Heard that in a rerun of the Andy Griffith show a long time ago, and just now double checking to make sure of the wording I learned that it was originally offered up by Sir Walter Scott in 1808!

That’s way older than black and white TV!!

And yet still not as old as the practice to deceive. For sadly such has been around since the very first of us learned how by, well, again he who is the father of lies. “’You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman.” And true, perhaps not at that time nor in the way that they didn’t even really understand death to begin with having themselves been the first of human kind created, and thus having never witnessed the loss of life that all death is.

They just wanted some fruit to eat.

And wouldn’t you know it but they just happened to have eaten just enough that it planted the seed of human deception and dishonesty and every other depravity that has managed to grow from the shattered heart as won within our coming to learn what it was to lie in light of the lack of fear it manages to find. Because they’d known that God has told them to stay away from the fruit of that tree. But the devil telling them that it would be okay, well, that managed to all but erase any trepidation they may have had to do as God had said they shouldn’t.

And, well, there ain’t no getting that horse back in the corral!

Rather we’ve just continued to reap what the devil planted, and too then continue to harvest a hope of deception and again the every depravity and degradation of society which too continues to spring forth from what is the gateway drug of all sin. For lying is easy, but friends, it merely opens a door to the rushing in of all sorts of interest and intrigue into some of these other things that we’ve been told explicitly not to be partakers of.

Alas, “the tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” Proverbs 18:21

Which brings me to today’s question: What fruit are you planting, and that not in only your life but so too in that of those around you?

For you see, the baser foundation of life is that having been given such a gift, we’re all now responsible as to what we do with it. Problem then is that responsibility is basically the first thing to go when we ourselves set ourselves to know our own sampling of the same fruit they were busted eating. And by busted I mean as in both like a cop happening to show up in the right place at the right time to catch a crime in progress, but so too as in broken because that all that sin can do.

It’s builds up walls that keep us broken in pieces behind them.

And having become so broken as all of us have been, well then, it seems anymore that we seem to see so little worth waiting to be won within the work that’s needing to be done.

Simply because still we see no real harm in deception or dishonesty. In fact, we’ve even managed to create these little excuses that we lean upon to excuse it. It’s just a white lie, this story told trying to keep from hurting someone’s feeling. And, well, being a society in which love is only anymore a matter of protected preferences, our not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings is actually considered a loving thing to do.

Yes, we’ve fallen so very far from the simplicity of He who remains the trinity of the Way, the Truth, the Life that we’ve become convinced that life is better lived by all thanks to our lying to one another in the effort to avoid hurting feelings.

Friends, our souls should matter more than how we feel.

Alas, anymore they don’t. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that we live as if the soul isn’t worth all that much at all. I mean, how could it? How could we consider the spirit inside a person all that important when we’re willing to say things that allow them to remain where they are as who they’ve become in what’s become a collective life lived only to die thanks to our continuing to choose to ourselves continue to do the things that our ancestors learned to?

I mean, you’d think we’d get it by now. Just take a look around! Everyone on earth is dying and yet we’re living as if they’re not worth hearing the truth which could set them on course to find life waiting there in that grave that we’re all headed toward.

How is that?

Well, it’s because we’re liars, which, when reflecting back to that verse from John 8, that lands us too in the very vicinity of he who is called the father of such, but so too then also he who is himself referred to as “a murder from the beginning.” And so thus we find that it’s really not far at all to go from lying to killing as, well, satan is the father of both, and that since the beginning apparently.

We’re just the ones who delight to continue on his work as won within that grave that now awaits all of us.

Question then becomes what we make of the other work done to that very grave overcome as was done in what is the greatest love ever known to man? Yes, which is considered, by us, to be the greatest love? And do we not understand the simplicity to be seen in our answering that question via the things we do and the outcome they aim to lead to?

For if we speak the truth which, yes, hurts but also helps as it sets us free from the lies we speak, then we’re doing as Christ does to thus a sharing in the overcoming of the death we had lived for. But then again, if we continue to live only lying to ourselves about the failures in our own lives, or lying to those around us trying to help protect them from seeing those shown inside their own, well then we’re doing as the devil delights and keeping one another locked inside this web of lies that’s become a maze of murder thanks to the truth (which leads to life) being kept always at a distance so as to avoid the hurt it causes.

Yes, we are either sharing in God’s speaking of life both into us and then as He who came to save us from the death we’d chosen instead, or we’re just doing more of that continuing to live and speak and all but breathe death into every life that we may happen to come into contact with.

And again, looking around, yeah, it’s pretty easy to see which choice remains the most commonly chosen.

And it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Why? Because even aside from all the lies that this world has tried to get me to buy, I remember all those that I sold myself. Like how it was okay to be fat and lazy, always eating everything I wanted and doing nothing I didn’t. Or how looking at porn was a fair replacement for seeking a real relationship, simply because it was easier and nobody was there to say no or laugh in my face when I asked her out. Or how stealing things didn’t really cause any harm to businesses big enough to bounce back, and helped me to have some stuff I couldn’t have afforded to buy otherwise.

Or how owning a Bible was enough to please God, as if it just gathering dust could prove an effort enough.

Liar, liar, tongue on fire, speaking fresh hot death unto those who hear the wire as won by man’s tongue as tied to the lies by which we’ve lived within a wanton world walking without the Way the Truth the Life. And indeed, all of us have lied and tried to cover the truth if not bury it so deep that it was all but dead to us and us the same.

And again, we still do this very thing every single time we look someone in the face, or even at our own in the mirror, and cheer them on whilst they do wrong as if so doing is in no way dangerous, dire, detestable or deadly.

All of which are clearly attributes attributed to sin, and make no mistake, though quite common these days, even the dishonesty of verbal deception is itself a sin which thus wins the wage of what all sin wins.

And that is death.

And thus so long as we continue to avoid the truth, and that for whatever reason we may honestly have come to literally believe may actually excuse such a thing, we’re thus too speaking something other than life.

And that’s the truth.

For again in Christ the three are the same as He kinds of rolls that way. Father, Son, Spirit. Way, Truth, Life. Seeing a pattern? And indeed, it’s one that we’re all to both revere and fear as this set of triunes has turned life as we’ve lived it on its despicable head and, though it arrives with an ask of us unto our share in His death unto that life as lived and lost in the sins we’ve known, thankfully His loss of life brings our finding of that He found shortly thereafter.

And granted, our three days may last 103 years, but perhaps that’s only because of His tremendous patience with us, a mercy allowing for us to learn all the ways in which we’ve lived in which it wasn’t life that we were living for, nor thus sharing with those to whom we should walk caring as to their outcome of this temporal existence. Yet how can we make such a claim as our truly caring about the souls of those around us when we apparently see them as worth nothing more than some reason to avoid what we know we need to say?

How can we truly continue to treat one another this way? How can we look someone in the face and not care that they leave us better than they were, or at least aware of the better that all of us can still be? How can we keep affording to keep avoiding the fact that we wear chains on our hearts and how that cannot possibly prove conducive to their continuing to beat? Yes, how can we continue to keep living all but beating and betraying one another, or even ourselves, with all of these lies that keep us lost living lives that are only then avoiding life?

For no, there is no life in a tongue which lies as lies only kill as they only hide the truth which sets us free. And honestly, that’s what the devil wants because he wants hell to have a higher population than Heaven. And sadly, he’s seemingly got the odds in his favor.

But is that it? We just gonna quit because the odds prove it might be hard and the world remains always ready to tell us how much the truth hurts and thus how we’re monsters for speaking it unto the fracturing of feelings that find it feels good to deny Jesus and thus the life He gave to free us unto the life He did so in order to promise us would be there waiting when this one ended? Indeed, are we just gonna give up before we even get going in anything of a better direction than this one that’s led us to a world so broken as this?

Sadly many will because it’s both vastly more desired and thus to vastly more easy in terms of our time spent here. Yes, living to soothe itching ears will win us far more friends, far more fun, far more fame. But friends, fame and fun aren’t all there is to live for. And so settle for the chains if you want, and continue welding them onto those around you if you dare. As for me and mine, no, with us you’ll hear the truth, and even should it eventually leave feelings hurt or even friendships lost, so be it.

Because contrary to common confusion, the truth is that we’re not here for friends or feelings but faith and that forever. After all, everything here is only temporary. And yes, that includes both the pain produced by the truth and but so too the commonly sought comfort of deception. Yes my friends, both will end.

Question is when and whether or not we’ll have played a part in their losing the loss they’re both promised to find.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold