Day 3837 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 59:13 NIV

The reliance

As if only upon violence as a way to ensure a measure of compliance in which we’re silenced except to say that we like it this way that we’ve been instructed to go in what we hopefully know to be the worst direction of all those given in what are an endless array of options and things to choose from. Alas, no, even anymore our audacity to choose is something we lose as we join the ranks of those rebelling in this telling of a lie of life left lying beside so many others, sisters and brothers, who’ve themselves bought this most profound of disbelief in everything better than everywhere we’ve been.

Thus too where we’re going soon.

And that simply because as the ones who only feign the ferocity to call the shots in our own lives and their living, we can only also only fake the meaning that we mean for them to be making. And that simply because when society is allowed to make any of our choices, direct any of our voices, offer any of our vices that we still find nice and needed, then we’re but enslaved victims of whatever wind of want and woe this place may come to know. For where the world goes, those found in tow go too.

Leaving then me and you, all of us in fact all but clasped to the chains of a lack of change from what our ancestors were. No, instead of our doing in this new day a new thing, we rather repeat the whethers or nots as designed inside every other previously fallen mankind. Yes, it seems that still our world delights to deny, to debate, to decry the promise of a date with He by whom we even measure the year.

Meaning then that He’s worth a version of our time, just never much of its actuality.

Instead we’re all quite actually willing to take so much of so much for granted that we’ve even granted one another a forged stay of execution as if we’re each a warden with what’s then the power to protect our protégés of pride in this way of life in which we’ve all died to every better we could have been by now. And we do this, all of this applauding and approving, a life spent affirming what we know to be a grievous evil all because evil’s what we’ve all become.

And we just can’t risk being one of those already scattered few who do stand up both for something else and thus against something too.

No, we can’t afford to fall out of man’s approval, and so we fall for whatever man wants approved.

All so that we don’t lose our welcome in this place we weren’t meant to be staying.

Yet these days we live like we are, and that in basically every way possible. Though I guess that such is just bound to seem best when every measure of any better is itself lying dead in the streets crushed under the feets of those who think freaks any who don’t fall in line behind the blind asking we none of us see the truth of where this way leads, much less say anything about it that some deaf person might accidentally hear.

Revealing in a moment that they’re neither as blind nor deaf as this world’s convinced them they are.

Indeed, what could come would could we even half of us wake up? A quarter even? A fraction of that perhaps? Yes, what might change if you or I were the first to try? Alas, how can we know with our souls so sold unto this assumption that a world greedy for gumption is where we’re to always find our safest shore? For sure, it does seem that mankind can offer us quite a lot anymore. And even most of that is but its frail hesitancy to pause all punishments always ready and waiting for however long we’re dating this idea that we’re here to serve them.

Yes, this world will treat us as if we belong and love us as such so long as we go along with what all is going on. But you break away from the breaking of hope itself, well, then you’ve got quickly that other thing coming.

And that other thing isn’t quite so loving!

No, rather if you rebel against man’s rebellion then you’ll all but instantly find yourself upon the receiving end of so much yelling and telling of how you’re a cretinous monster that you just shouldn’t bother to show your face in, well, much of anywhere or around anyone anymore. Because you’re not wanted if you’ll not blend in. You aren’t welcome if you won’t welcome another living your life for you via the choices they make and this widespread corresponding insistence that you be good with it. You’re not to be listened to, looked at, looked after if you’ll not look for what the world claims is there.

Indeed, you’ll find here no love there if you won’t go where this world has gone to get their version of it.

But that’s just it! What is this world’s version of love? What does this world love? And more importantly, why’s there just so little love in it? I mean, we daily see the decay of this way that this world has chosen to go. The hatred draws deeper in a darker measure almost every moment anymore. It’s truly as if the thing we’re very best at it is despising anything and everyone. And we’ve got an endless number of reasons to do so.

After all, we’ve got the entirety of human history from which to draw whatever of said reasons we might need/want to use in order to lose the ability to love one another freely without understanding that the same can be accomplished without false compliance.

You don’t need me to go along with what you’ve got going on in order to know I love you as my sister or my brother. We don’t have to be going the same direction to have a mutual appreciation for the measure of responsibility borne inside the freedom to choose. We don’t have to see things the same way in order to understand that we’re each the only ones who need to see what we’re doing and where we’re going as we’re bound to be the only ones standing there anyway.

We don’t have to see eye-to-eye to appreciate this life and the fact that we each must decide for ourselves what we do with it and what we won’t allow done to it, in it.

We don’t have to believe the same thing to embrace that we all believe something.

But looking around you wouldn’t know that! And that’s because these days you’re considered not alive if you’re not living for whatever the world’s chasing toward. Again, if you’re not an active participant in the world’s present rebellion, as they change almost every day, then neither are you to be considered a worthy recipient of whatever this place happens to perceive as love and kindness for the moment.

No, you have to either do what everyone else is doing or at the very least cheer them on while they do it if you’re to feel as if you’re loved and welcomed and wanted within what is a world that’s crumbling right before our eyes.

All because the masses are blind from a battle that’s been raging since before we started counting time by Christ.

Yes, this place has been lost in some measure of enmity against God ever since God made us. I mean, right from the start this whole thing started falling apart thanks to man’s rebellion against God simply telling us what to not do so as to not lose the legitimacy of that excuse that we didn’t know and couldn’t see. Indeed, can you imagine how much more free we’d be had we truly never seen or heard or elsewise come to know so much of what we’re now having to break ourselves to keep pretending we don’t in hunt of the loss of personal responsibility that every such understanding presents?

If Eve would have just left that fruit on that tree then even still you and me we wouldn’t have so much of such personal responsibility as borne inside every measure of our having met an understanding or realization of something. If our eyes hadn’t been opened to the knowledge of good and evil then nor would our hearts be now so often consumed with cooking up the lies we try to convince ourselves might do the trick and get us off the hook for having so messed up the difference between them.

But friends, nothing we do can undo what another did.

We can’t erase the tragedy that took place that did open our eyes to seeing what’s wrong, our minds from understanding why it isn’t right, and nor then our hearts to having to carry either the worry won over how many times we’ve blurred that line so as to dance all over it or the lack thereof still underway in what is a mankind still dancing on the wrong side.

All we can do is choose for ourselves when we come into an agreeance with the malfeasance of our man and our own part that we ourselves have played in what is so clearly a losing hand.

Problem is that we’re not allowed to make such choices when the only voices we listen to are the very same as they who insist to choose for us via forced compliance in what is a rebellion still clearly underway. No, in this world we don’t get a say that’s worth being heard unless we say what the masses want to hear, do what they want us to do, agree with every single thing that they themselves have decided to do, and thus go along with a world continuing to lose the fear of God in exchange for the friendship of man.

Yes, we’re daily watching an entire society reject God in their continuation of this vast vocation of turning their backs on Him as they instead turn their hearts and heads toward laying in the beds they made thinking themselves safe in so doing. All because we’ve all become so diluted and indifferent that we can’t anymore seem to see any different.

All because the world has convinced us that there is no difference between right and wrong outside of wherever everyone else has drawn that line for themselves.

Indeed, these days we’re all but expected to just go along with everyone else’s delusion as designed inside hearts so very depraved that men think they can become women and women then men as both of them prey upon children via violet colors of violent horrors as strewn upon every street sign, billboard, broadway blaspheme and hollyweird fornication.

It’s even in school libraries!

Why? Because even the world understands that if you can manage to start a child off on the way you want them to go, even when they’re old they’ll not know to turn away from it thanks to the reality that our younger years are the formative ones leaving us formed into who we’ll likely remain for the rest of our lives.

Save for some outside force that shakes us free should such become the need.

And friends, it has! We are all in dire need of being shaken awake from what’s long been a slumber so deep that we daren’t even speak anymore. It’s as if we’ve all traded our voice for only that which knows only to say yes, well done, good job, proud of you, rock on, you do you, live your best life, you go girl!

That’s all we hear around here.

It’s but the endless silence of a world caught so fully compliant that nothing then is ever considered wrong. Even rebelling against God! No, such is our favorite pastime these days, as in the days before as lived in the lives before lived by those who’ve gone this same road before we started trying to make our mark by merely making our own version of mistake and misunderstanding as we stand idly atop it wherever we’ve chosen to all but stop living along it.

Yes, we’ve all pulled over onto the shoulder of a world doing things that should make us shudder at the mere thought of them. And we’ve been so indifferent and become so desensitized to the lot of it that we don’t even mind actually seeing it anymore.

Just last night my family and I were just trying to watch a show on TV and nearly every commercial was for some slasher movie, one of which touted that it is currently the number one movie in the world!

My how proud we should be of just how far we’ve fallen!

And indeed, many are in fact. Even have a month dedicated to celebrating that. Yeah, we’ve reached the visible fulfillment of what was warned in the Word in regard to who all would become and most would remain in what are there deemed the very last of our days:

“People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected.”

It’s all right there in 2 Timothy chapter 3, and too literally unfolding as we speak right before the eyes of you and me. For daily we see a people continuing to rebel against God. Daily we see an increase in the number of those choosing to turn away from Him. Daily we see some new revolting revolt and the obvious oppression that all such undertakings understand as necessary in order to bolster the ranks. And daily we feel, or at least I hope, that even we are oppressing ourselves via both the lies we tell and those we believe as told us by others.

Friends, we’re going down in flames and yet the world calls it fun.

All because God’s thus far immeasurable patience has afforded us all what is today another chance to choose for ourselves what it is that we want to win and what more we’ll lose in order to have it. And that is the question. What do we want in life? What do we want from life? What will do to get what we want, and what are we willing to lose in order to get it?

It’s this very premise that forms the foundation of the Word’s warning that fear of man will prove only a snare. It’s a promise because so long as mankind is allowed to instill their rebellion in our hearts and minds, so too then shall we be whatever this world decides and then descends to become. We will end up wherever this world determines to go so long as the only way of life that we care to know is that lived pleasing people.

But friends the danger is that people are rebellious. People are negligent. People are oblivious to the dire state of things thanks to the blindness that is in them, the defiance that is them as a result of their having had their own consciences seared as with the hot iron of humanity’s insistence upon this endless contention against the very God who created them!

How foolish must you be to continue to turn away from the God who made you, loves you, saved you from the very death that you’ve chosen to die so many times that you don’t even realize you’re doing it anymore?

And how foolish must we then be to just go along with those so far gone that they just don’t seem to care where they go?

Friends, all I know is that I have known that life spent rebelling against God and that it simply does not bring the hope, joy, peace, purpose that it seems we all want in and for our lives. It might bring fun, might feel good, will probably reward us in more friends and fame and fortune than we know what to do with. But when the lights go out and we close our eyes, we’re the ones who have to live and die with what we’ve done.

And I just can’t live with knowing that I’m willfully rebelling against the One who went to the grave in order to save me from every wrong that I know I’ve chosen.

Because I know none will live if the only life they have lived is that spent rejecting God.

For why would He reward that?

No, such is why the Word says that “they have received their reward in full.” It’s because God will give us what our hearts desire. But friends, if all our hearts ever come to crave is just the world’s brand of free as bound in chains made of both doing as we please and ignoring that none of it pleases Him, if we never want to acknowledge God, well then He will do the same.

Told us so Himself.

Friends, please stop living in step with this common denial of Christ. He’s said if we deny Him then He will match our efforts. We don’t want that. Truth be told, the world doesn’t want that. But sadly the truth also shows that the world just doesn’t care anymore.

We can’t afford to live out the rest of however many days we’ve left in that same mindset. For while the rebellion may be fun and feel good and find us popular and perhaps even powerful, everything here ends. And as for me, well I’d rather, upon the end of this life, find the end of suffering and exclusion and loneliness and rejection than the end of a life in which my reward was found.

No, I want forever to be the best, and if you’re of the same idea, well then I guess it’s best that we stop running with a world running from God and instead learn to walk with Jesus.

Because He’s the only chance we got.

After all, He’s the only One who knows the way to life after death. And well, that sounds far more hopeful than anything mankind has ever produced. Yeah, I think I’ll rely on the One who came to die so I’d not have to as opposed to all the rest who just continue to live as if we don’t all deserve to.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold