Day 3871 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Revelation 18:4 NIV

A part or apart?

For in truth such are the only two options when it comes to living a life, and indeed either are to be considered both such extremes that we should in fact seek their extremities. Problem then is that we’ve since chosen to chase the many extremes of the many scenes seen inside the things shown of a world that’s grown only deeper in its chosen contention against the God of all creation. And so our having chosen to chase the world’s way of what is a life lived to waste itself has left us each holding what is too a wasted life.

All because we settled for the wrong space to place our pursuit.

See, that’s truly the only difference in those two words that define the only two choices we have whilst in this world. It’s the space. And yet it’s also that of a proverbial table flipped as well. Because, well, the space seen in the choice labeled “a part” ironically denotes a lack thereof. There is no space in our being a part of this world for said pursuit all but demands we continue to here grow ever-deeper and once there ever-darker. Simply because such is so clearly what the world has determined to do.

And thus if we’re to be a part of this world so too must we resolve to leave no space between us and whatever it is that this place is or wants or does or even demands we don’t. And I actually think that that’s why so many buy into this lie of our having the ability to live a “good life” whilst living as a part of a place that demands that space as separate from God. Indeed, this world wants as little of God’s interference as possible.

Right up to the point that we daily watch an entire civilization dissolve away from such things as civility.

Indeed, we are by all means growing more and more uncivilized all the time. We are in fact at those times in which it’s not even seen as a matter of even potential shame to do the things that both righteousness and even personal responsibility would have at one time never even considered doing. Yes, the mask is off and we’re seeing a monster in every mirror now that there seems to be less limitation to our investigation of this insinuation that it’s on us to determine our vocation and live this life as if a staycation.

Yeah, this world is filled with those who live as if this world is their home, that their lives being thus lived within are the only they may ever have, and that, as such, they may as well both live it up in regard to every personal enjoyment they can purchase in the form of exciting promises as well as pretend there’s never to be any problem with such a dwindling degree of discipline.

For surely nothing bad can come from our striving to do less and less right!

Right?

Well, we sure live in a world that lives as if be it might. But be that as it may, doesn’t really do all that much to assuage the coming day in which all we’ll have to say is either the Name we gave our lives to learning how to both pronounce, and if possible, please or simply that that we by then know somehow less of than we did back when we had the chance that that day will have taken away.

Either way, every knee will bow and all then that’s to be left is for our each to discover how the rest of our forever will go.

But by all means, let’s all continue living as this life in this world is the one that we won’t leave.

And indeed, why won’t we leave? Why won’t we go? I mean, don’t we know what this world is? Again, my friends, we’re seeing anymore plenty of evidence of just such an identity every single day. It’s witnessed within such wars as those waged over words and rights and worries and wrongs and how each of us seem perpetually persistent upon this perspective in which we’re never wrong but we can sure tell a whole bunch of ways that everyone else is.

Especially those we disagree with.

Yeah, we hate those losers who don’t see things the way we don’t either.

Ain’t it odd how we never manage to notice our own spiritual blindness but are increasingly laser-focused on the many failures and failings and shortfalls and fumblings of those around us? I tell you, I don’t know how, but we all seem to have so individually perfected our own lives that it’s now our own eyes that find they’re able to see the perfection in our own lives and thus that missing in those of those outside of them.

Which oddly enough seems something of a spacing itself. Just strangely us from the place and thus amongst the people with whom and within whom we’re so clearly trying to fit.

Not sure how on earth that’s supposed to work, but I reckon that at this point we can all basically pull up the proverbial chair and just see how it goes.

For the world as a whole has determined the direction it’s determined to go. And we can tell this thanks to all the things that so many are so increasingly determined to do. Question is, and it’s one that carries with it an answer that will in fact determine whether we like His answer or not when we on that day ask if we can come in from the rain and pain of a life lived and lost here in this place, whether or not we ourselves determine to go and do what this world’s done gone and done.

Simply because selling your soul to the devil isn’t really something done in class action fashion. No, such a choice is a personal one by all means as it all means all there is to mean to he or she who makes that choice. Now that’s not to say that there’s not redemption from such a chosen enslavement, one thus to be paid by an outside entity with the means to secure the means of our freedom from captivity.

There is.

It’s just to say that once enslaved our chances of seeing any reason to ask for His help dwindle themselves every single day.

Why?

Because, like those of the famed Stockholm syndrome, we too grow too fond of our captors even to the point of seeing them not as hostage holders, nor thus we the hostages being held, but perhaps even eventually unto the very extremity of seeing them as our friends. And sure, such is by all means a means of coping with the situation(s) we’re in when we see very little if any way out of them. But to cope is nothing more than to find a way of effectively dealing with something that’s elsewise all but impossible to deal with.

And yet in this case we’re the ones who dealt the hand!

We’re the ones who took the hand that is that of him who we’ve been told comes only to steal and kill and destroy, and who is in fact so skilled at the three that he does them in ways that we enjoy! That’s indeed what makes it so very hard for our to do as we’re here called to. We don’t want to come out from what’s all but become a place of so much personal space that we each daily live doing nothing but what we want.

Who would give that up?

Who would walk away from what in every way feels such an unbridled freedom? Who would surrender their opportunity to do as they please unto a heart changed into trying to please another? Indeed, who would try to please another who nobody sees? Who would turn their lives into, aim them unto the furnace of affliction as is fixed and fitted to fight against the few who do? Indeed, who would do what so few seem to see any reason to?

Isn’t it far easier to do as everyone else is doing? Especially when what everyone else is doing is in every way easy?

After all, staying where we are is always going to be the easiest thing to do. And though I asked in a recent post that you not trust me but rather dive into the Word yourself and seek there your own personal relationship with He who is the Truth that is strewn both within the words you’ll read within and then the wisdom that will then begin to grow within what then becomes a personal relationship that itself decreases in space as we grow closer to Him, you can trust in this.

For I once weighed over 300 pounds and found no struggle whatever in doing nothing but what got me there. Because let’s face it, eating Cheetos and laying on the couch playing video games is just undeniably a whole lot easier than getting your lazy rear up and even going for a walk. It’s easier than going to the gym and finding there just how weak you’ve become. It’s easier than learning to cook your own food and maybe even how to treat your body more like a temple and less like a science experiment.

But sitting here today, I can say without question that easier is not better.

And so then neither is our staying where we are living as a part of what this world has both already become and is in all but every way only becoming more by the day.

Sure, we’ll find more success that way. We’ll have more friends that way. We’ll have more of what we find fun that way. Because that way is easy to repeat having each of us already come to know it so well.

So what?

Do we not see what’s coming down the line this world’s walking? Can’t we take a second and gaze into the guess as to what may come next? I mean, if we’re basically already to the point of literally just killing those we disagree with, where does that really leave us? Where can we go from here?

Again, truth is we have but two choices, and well, they too involve a single space.

Either we remain a part of a world coming apart or we come apart and have no part in what this world will continue to do. And how do I know that this world will continue to do what it’s already chosen to? Because it’s easier! Repeating that which has become normal is normal. Doing as everyone else is doing becomes the very thing that we delight to do because we can always find this safety we love to assume inside such a crowd.

Indeed, our being a part of the crowd allows us to feel both safe and at home. All because this world promises to be there for us, either through actual promises as spoken by those who themselves likely have no plans on leaving or merely thanks to our plans of never really needing to fall back on that need for help. All because, let’s be honest, we don’t need any help so long as we remain determined to keep on doing as we’ve already chosen.

That’s easy.

We can all repeat that which already is. But friends, as I asked a while back, what about what already isn’t? Because you see, this world already isn’t good. This world is filled with those who already aren’t righteous. This world is in fact only filled with those who are not already righteous. And so, again, where does that leave us to go? What more can we become other than only more of whatever we already are?

For nothing changes if we change nothing.

And sure, coming apart from what are in every way lives lived as a part of this place is quite the extreme place to start. After all, we all know so little of change that it seems kind of crazy to just start with one of the biggest changes we can fathom. But it’s kind of like a bandaid. Sure, we can try to pull it off real slowly. We can pour some water on it in hopes of loosening the sticky. We can hope and pray and beg real nice that it comes off without any pain or misery.

Or we can just grab hold of that sucker and tear it off like we’re willing to welcome whatever may come and however it may feel so that we can just be done with the waiting and worry.

Personally, I’m a rip the sucker off kind of guy. For why put off until tomorrow what we’ll probably only have found by then are only a hundred more reasons to shove off even further?

No, just do it. Just go. Just put your boots on, set your stuff on fire, treat any and every bridge you come across the same, and resolve to not stay the same.

Again, extreme? Probably. But friends, what other choice do we have? How else can this possibly work? Would it be easier and feel less painful to take our time and approach this process of utterly changing our lives in a far slower and more measured manner? Yeah. But would doing it that way not also leave us with plenty of spare time in which to keep asking ourselves why we’re doing it at all? And wouldn’t that only give us more opportunities to admit we don’t really know as it’s not really fun? And wouldn’t admitting that potentially only leave us quite willing to quit?

You bet it would.

That’s why the Bible doesn’t play around. Gets right to the point. Tells us what we need to hear and expects us to do something with it. The ‘it’ in this case being this call to come out from this proverbial Babylon that is about to be destroyed. And you see, that’s kind of the problem. It’s one found in that we both don’t know when but yet we already see how. For again, we daily watch on as this world all but continues to burn itself to the ground.

At this point God may not have much to destroy with all the fire and brimstone stuff. Just give us all a few more years and who knows but that we’ll have devolved into yet another world war, another civil war, another cold war in which every heart has become so frozen inside a hatred so frigid that we find it fun to just go around killing one another.

Oh wait, we’re already there!

But yeah, by all means let’s stay!

It amazes me how we’re actually to the point of literally doing God’s work in His stead. For anymore we all act as if we’re gods ourselves as we sit in judgement on those who are different. We work alongside those of similar opinions or beliefs to wage war against those who refuse to see it our way. We hate what we determine to be evil and inflict whatever punishment we can think of upon those who are found doing it. We’re separating ourselves, as He promised to, into the wheat and the chaff, we just call it republican and democrat.

We’re even helping Him destroy the world and all life hereon.

What a wonderful thing to be a part of. My how proud we should be for having taken part in all the destruction and decay we see. Yes, let’s throw a party! Let’s have some fun. Let’s make some friends with those aren’t friends of God.

Surely that can’t go wrong.

No my friends, question is how can that go right?

This place is crumbling, and yet here amongst her we all still so often sit as if we’re still kind of unsure if we’re ready to give up and walk away. After all, we’ve all put a lot of time into this thing. We’ve all done a lot trying to build up this way of life into the amazing existence so filled with fun and freedom that it has in fact in many ways become. Yeah, you’d have to be dumb to leave all this behind.

But is not dumb better than dead?

Because like it or not, that’s the outcome that awaits what this world’s become. God has said that this world is passing away. He will destroy this place thanks to what we fallen men have delighted to do within it.

Why then remain a part of it? Why continue to seek our part in it? Why should we continue to go along with it when we can clearly see what comes when a people live apart from Him?

So often we stop at this crossroads of wonder in which we ask ourselves both what we have to gain and what all we’d have to lose. And sure, looking around at the lives we’ve all fought so hard to make in this place, it does seem asinine to leave it behind. For that feels something akin to just admitting both defeat and too that we gave so much time and effort to what was a losing battle.

But again, so what?

We’re all going to lose all that’s here anyway.

We can either do it the slow and hopefully painless way. Or we can rip the stinking bandaid off and burn every bridge we come across on our way out of town.

In the end the choice is yours and thus I can’t make it for you. All I can do it what I’m every day trying to and that is find some way to help us all see that while we may think we have so much here to lose, we have nothing to gain if all we hope to have is found here. No, there is something better than what we’ve become, and honestly, that part shouldn’t be so hard to see as so many seem to assume it is.

No, we have no reason to remain a part of this world that’s so clearly coming apart at the seams. And while it seems that most are content with that outcome, I’d rather be called a fool by them than by Him. Not that He will stoop to such lows as these we know such as calling us names and making fun of us. But He will reward each of us for whatever it is that by the end of this ride we’ve done.

Seek please the reward that’s to be given to those who did as He has asked us to. Not that promised to the more who didn’t see any reason to.

For let’s be honest, we’ve got every reason we need to come apart from this world. And if you don’t believe me, just look around and ask yourself if what you see is truly what you wish to be a part of.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold