Day 3849 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Malachi 3:14 NIV

The gain

It seems that we’re all quite capable of rather easily understanding that most things in life that are to most likely prove those having been most worth doing are oftentimes the very same as those which bring at least some measure of misery or uncertainty or similar experiencing of discomfort as is designed inside all we just don’t like. And while this makes sense, unfortunately it would seem that the sense we’ve elsewise sought to make of it has made of us an unwillingness to endure that which we don’t enjoy.

So much so that despite the degree of personal growth or even potential hope we rather decide to most often descend away from such dangers as personal displeasure and social discomfort.

All for the sake of never again having to seem as if we are but these who so continually manage to fail or fall short of the fun and fame being so clearly sought by every other name given amongst man. All because our greatest concerns are anymore so centered upon men that we know only to worry ourselves weary in regard to what they want, what they do, what they expect us to do as is to be done in accordance with how they themselves do or even do it not.

Indeed, we don’t even seem of the ability to stop and consider whether or not anyone else is doing as we’re feeling we should. Rather we just politely fall in line behind the blind before us who’s but the second back from the three blind people in front of them all seeking for the very same futility that we’ve managed to so culturally agree upon as just not being worth the risk of whatever weight may be won within the wait through which only a war ever comes as waged against the good enough we could have quite easily continued settling for.

Which is in fact a choice chosen so common because the commonality of our community has come to consider all such things as any possible consequence as good enough reason to reach no further, try no harder, do no better and want no father.

We’re always happy to pretend we’re happy right where we are, even if such a lie depends upon every eye not accidentally coming to see any of the every glaring hole and vacancy as filling our lives and thus holding hostage our hearts and their hopes all done in the guise of self-protection as is anymore always sought from anything and everyone who could, if even only theoretically and highly presumptuously, ask us to do anything we probably just wouldn’t want to try in light of how capable we would likely prove at being able to fail.

Yes, if failure is an option, then the option(s) which lead to it are then to be forever considered not options at all.

Simply because a people of pride cannot afford the risk of looking bad nor feeling the same.

Not when we have within this world so many other ways to go and roads to walk that wouldn’t ever show us unto the suffering of such horrors as personal failure or spiritual degeneracy. No, we’ve simply too many alternative understandings and corresponding undertakings that we can readily choose from that all almost completely alleviate that risk of looking silly or feeling stupid.

So why embrace any request that comes with such a clear suggest of such miseries as struggle, failure, denial, refusal, disagreement as designed in what unravels into what becomes basically a life lived all but fighting yourself every single day through every war waged over what you should say, shouldn’t do, have tried and just don’t want to try anymore? For all of this is simply seen as roundly unnecessary in our world today.

All because in our world today people have taken comfort and complacency and so entwined them together that they’re but to ever be perceptively confused for one another.

For indeed, in this world today we don’t have to do anything we just don’t want to. And well, when that thought has become so easy to buy and come by, why then would we ever agree to do anything we don’t want to do? What’s the gain to be gained in going along with what our soul’s laziness just doesn’t see as being worth it? What’s the benefit to be found in our coming down from our having designed a way of life in which we never really fail or fall short or find ourselves feeling some other sort of foolish?

Yes, as fools who have become so foolish that we live as if we know nothing of foolishness in our own lives but rather only ever notice it in those of those around us, why then open that door back up to our falling back down from this tower we’ve lived on under crowns so shiny that we just don’t care what anyone else thinks we should do anymore?

For we know they look nice and our lives mostly the same.

Why then change anything?

Indeed, change has become something of our mortal enemy these days. Why change when we can just call it “living our truth”? Why humble ourselves to upholding the holy expectations of He who made us when we can far more easily make, ourselves at least, convinced that we know better than He ever could anyway? Yeah, why even consider that God could know better, especially when the path onto which He asks is one so clearly paved with so very much of what nobody really wants to experience?

Why take up crosses and deny ourselves when we see literally millions doing nothing of the sort and still seemingly enjoying quite pleasant lives?

Why must we die when we see the world living it up in what’s become a life so free that there surely can’t be a better or more full nor fulfilling kind of freedom?

I mean, if you just take a second to look at those around us what you’ll find is that it’s so very easy to live doing only what’s personally pleasing that everybody is doing it. And well, they’re not really seeming to have all that much trouble so doing. And well, if something is so easy and so common that it’s become the common undertaking undertaken by basically everyone, why should we be any different? Why should we miss out on the adventures that the world around us is experiencing? Why should we forgo the fun that others are having?

Why should we go about as if mourners before the Lord all solemn and such as if life is over and we’re just to be glum thanks to the gloom we’ve found in the room we’ve made for He who comes to take away all the fun that everyone else gets to have?

Yes, why should our lives be lived as if we’re already dead when so many around us are truly living their very best life?

Well, because our best and His best are amazingly different!

Our best and His best are in fact quite amazingly opposed! In fact, our idea of our best life all but centers upon this position of His being all but forever deposed from the office of Creator so that we can thereby all but take over and thus better ensure that our ideas prove the ideals that we’ve long known them to be. For indeed, nobody can know what’s better for us than, well, us.

It just makes sense doesn’t it?

That as the only ones living our lives we should then be the only ones living our lives? After all, we’re the only ones who will face the consequences and pay the fines. We’re the only ones who will cross the lines and do the time. We’re the ones who are faced every single day with every choice we have to make. We’re the ones who know best what makes sense to us as we’re the only ones who know our minds and are able to make them make sense of whatever we’re trying to decide as being either sensible or nonsensical.

And yet this way of thinking has us believing that we’re literally the only ones that we can either honor or disappoint as determined by whether or not we uphold our desires or rather agree to let them be tossed into the fire that dares say they might be still refined a little more.

Yes, how dare God so contend that His plans for us are so much better than ours?

He doesn’t know where we’re going! He doesn’t know what we’re trying to find or do or be along the way. He doesn’t understand how much our plans and dreams mean to us. He doesn’t realize how badly we want the things we want in life. Indeed, He isn’t living our life and so how does He know better than us what we should do or where it is that we’re on course to go?

Because friends, He has lived our lives. He has walked the streets we walk still today. He has faced the flames of fortune and fame as promised Him literally right out of the gate! For He Himself was tempted by the very same devil that still tempts us with the very same stuff that we still tend to want.

I beg you to go read through Matthew chapter 4 because what you’ll find is a pretty complete, albeit quite short list of pretty much everything wanted by man. I mean we’re talking power and prestige and riches and fame and fortune and food. Yes, a starving Jesus was reminded by the devil that He had the power and authority to tell some rocks to become some bread that had to have sounded really good at what was the end of forty days of fasting.

We won’t even go forty seconds.

Indeed, put down your phone for a few minutes and see just how empty and uncertain your life all of the sudden seems.

We’re so far gone that we don’t know what to do without something from the world helping us to live life itself!

But yeah, we know best! We can do this! We got this under control and just so happen to know so much better than He ever could what is to be proven best for us! How dare He say otherwise?

Well, because having Himself literally walked in mankind’s shoes and carried in fact the full weight of our every mistake upon His back, He does in fact know where we’re going and that, contrary to what we so clearly tend to believe, it isn’t some “best life” that we’re bound to find!

In fact, He knows that our way leads to nothing of life at all.

All because the simple fact remains that should we refuse to honor our Father and uphold Him as righteous Creator as is to be ever done by our allowing Him to go on being the only One who created anything in or of or with our lives, then we so too then only choose to refuse the rest of all He is. But friends, while He may be the One daring to say that He knows of a better way at what is the clear dethronement of our own, so too is the One that gave us life.

And so while we may be able to for now deny Him the honor He’s due in the sort of humility for which He asks, denying Him that will only inspire us to continue denying Him more. And that path leads only to our denial of life itself as He is the Giver thereof.

And sure, that probably seems like a really strange leap to make: Our denying His guidance becoming our denial of life? But friends, the fact is that God doesn’t divide. We can’t have just those parts we like as are proven in such things as His wonderful promises for us whilst utterly rejecting those other aspects that are hard or scary or come at such a personal cost that indeed our very lives are counted as all but lost so that we can hopefully better come to more fully understand the fullness of God as was given in Christ who too laid down His life so as to show that it could not only be done

but that it can be survived.

Indeed, Jesus came to this earth with the express purpose of dying for us so that we too could die in Him to the sin that has had us so lost inside ourselves looking for that better that just isn’t there. We are not the source of our own betterment, much the same as how we’re not the ones who gave ourselves life. That’s why He calls us to honor our father and mother. It’s because they had a hand in our being here and thus without them we wouldn’t be.

And friends, same then goes for Him as He is the Father of all we see.

God created everything from you and me to all the plants and animals we probably overlook and even the cosmos that we’ve largely stopped reaching for.

Indeed, mankind has achieved a great many things, but our most constant achievement is giving up and walking away just as soon as we have. For we live this life as if it’s nothing but a piece of paper covered with boxes to check. As soon as we accomplish something, we just move on and forget all about it because we don’t understand persistence. We don’t appreciate perseverance. We either try something and find that it works out or we walk away and work on something that will.

And we have given up on so much in life simply because it was too hard or scary or humiliating at the time. That’s a realization that hit me like nuclear bomb yesterday!

But more on that another day.

For today the point is that we’ve become a people who trade futilities in this constant estimating of something’s worth as measured against its perceived challenge. If something is to likely be difficult, it had better bring with it a promise that makes it worth the misery. Because it’s just too easy to find something easier that pays off far more quickly and thus gives us that shot of dopamine that our pride thrives on.

It doesn’t even matter what we have or what we do so long as our doing it and having it makes us look good and feel the same.

Such is the sad entirety of almost everything we do in life.

It’s all just a matter of what’s good enough to make us look and feel good enough, a matter made for mundanity in light of how we’re a people who vastly prefer that which is easy simply because we’re far less likely to mess it up.

And so yeah, why opt for that path that we will mess up? Why embrace that life that we don’t know how to live? Why follow a God that we can neither see nor hear? How on earth is that supposed to work?

Friends, that’s the thing! It doesn’t work on this earth. In this earth it doesn’t make sense. To this earth it does seem foolish, futile, silly and just plain stupid. After all, who in their right mind would deny themselves all of the pleasure and treasure this world has to offer in exchange for some theoretical treasure stored in some place we’ve neither been nor then have any idea how to find?

Who would set themselves up to fail so spectacularly as to walk humbly with the very God that the Gospel of Christ says we’ve so offended that He even resorted to killing His Son just to get some sort of vindication over the very sins that, to do so, we’d have to start out by admitting we’d committed?

That’s like driving up to a cop and running down a list of every law you’ve broken and traffic violation you actually want to be cited for and charged with!

Who does that?

Especially in a world so filled with so many telling us we just don’t ever have to whilst also doing the fun things that we’d probably like to be enjoying ourselves?

The fact is that this world has long considered it foolish and thus futile to serve God. They see no point in it. Why do it? Why endure any of all the things that His path and His way involve and incorporate? After all, so many are living just fine lives without any semblance of humility or self-control or personal responsibility or even common decency. Why then should we take such things upon ourselves and thus walk amongst those having fun as if nothing more than walking reminders of death itself?

Well, because maybe it isn’t quite so foolish to admit what you’ve become and find in that same humility the audacity to ask for help in becoming something better than this world wants to be.

Sure, it may seem unreasonably hard to follow Jesus, if not unnecessarily so in light of just how many in this world don’t. But friends, the problem is to be proven in that whole understanding of what it is to gain something as defined by what’s best to have gained. Because yeah, this world has a lot to offer and thus an equal amount for us to gain.

But the one thing that nothing in this world can give us is more time, more life.

That is a gift that only God can give, and in fact the very promise that He tells us His path will gain. Those who follow Him will live even though they die.

And so well, if it all boils down to what we stand to gain as opposed to remaining a worry over what we have to do in order to gain said gain, the promise of eternal life just far outweighs everything this temporary world has to offer.

Just don’t expect to hear that from the same world that’s living as if they’ll already live forever.

No, everything here ends. Just how futile is it then to turn onto that path that leads to life everlasting?

Sure, the world will consider us fools for walking away from all they’ll come to enjoy. But friends, the real fools are those who seek all their enjoyment in things that end in a life destined to do the same as lived in a world promised an end as well. I’d just rather the world call me a fool, and even sometimes feel like one myself than to reach the end of this life and only then realize I missed my chance at something better simply because it was a little bit harder.

After all, you’ve probably heard that saying ‘no pain no gain’.

Yeah, Calvary proved that one perfectly true.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold