Day 3916 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 52:11 NIV

The journey away

For that is where we’re all now called to go. Away from where we’ve been. Away from who we’ve become. Away from whatever it is that we think we’ve known or have likely come to be known by. Away from those who helped us learn to be whatever it is that we’ve become. Away from those who have no desire to help us become who God calls us to be. It seems that nearly the entire story of the Christian journey is one written in the walking away from what will prove a great many things.

Problem is that among what we’ve become is found this now almost natural instinct to mourn the losses along the way away.

And that’s because what we’ve become is largely a reflection of a people whose deception runs so very deep that they literally seem to see no problem or pitfall within nearly anything at all. And our having lived learning to live life from those of that frame of mind has caused us to too consider that there are really no good things or bad things but rather only those things which we ourselves enjoy and those that we don’t enjoy quite as much.

Indeed, down here personal pleasure has become the epitome of all human pursuit and it’s anymore so very prized that folks live and die seeking only what they like without ever even daring to consider the potential for cost or consequence. And again, that’s because that’s what we’ve become. And that’s because that’s all that any of us truly want to be. We all just want to live entirely free from any worry given unto the wisdom of His warnings and the words in which they were written.

We want only to think of victims as those who miss out on something, who find themselves left out of something, who are found worthy of only being refused something and thus who find themselves lacking something that the rest of us remain fully content upon enjoying for however long we might. All because we’ve become quite roundly convinced that it’s within our might to prove what’s wrong and how we’re thus right.

And well, when everything we do is seen as the right thing to do, then yeah, it would seem then that we’ve a whole lot to lose should we live to refuse the chance to choose that which we like and that which we’ll not mind losing or letting go. Problem then is that we’ve proven time and again that we can convince ourselves that just about anything is okay so long as it makes us feel at least the same. We can truly talk ourselves into accepting anything if that thing in question brings us some sort of entertainment, enjoyment or other degree of personal devotion.

Not that we should have become this devoted unto things such as our personal enjoyment or our vast and deepening ability to find entertainment so necessary unto the enjoyment of life itself.

But alas, here we are and the only way to get anywhere else on this journey called life is to take a second and embrace the truth in regard to where things stand and why they’re not standing all that well.

And so, well, it would seem then that that first step taken along what is this journey away is that taken, well, away. We have to come apart from this world and all herein which threatens the very calling of Christ and that being to take up our cross and kill upon it all that was to be lost anyway. Issue then rapidly becomes that we’ve become so emotionally if not spiritually attached to so many things that we likely haven’t any idea where to start, and that on top of our already known unwillingness to do so anyway.

Indeed, none of us want to start this journey away because it does lead us away from what are likely to be things that we’ve quite come to enjoy. But that’s the overall problem with sin. It’s not only that it wins the wage of death, which is obviously a problem itself and a pretty big one at that. No, it’s also that the death it demands is eventually two-fold at least and that because we’ve all to die to that which we’ve lived learning to like.

That’s the danger of sin. It’s not only that it leads us away from God but that it does so by convincing us to enjoy that which He hates. It causes us to fail in our call to consider all things against the Word of God and thereby cling only to “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.” To think about only anything that is excellent or praiseworthy and to thus allow for no room even in our thoughts to those things which are not.

Even our thoughts have to change in this journey away.

And, well, that makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Why? Because when you stop to give yourself a chance to catch your breath and feel just how broken you’ve become in what’s become basically just a rat race in which we waste away wanting only to walk and talk the same way so as to gain the same things that everyone else is running after, what you’ll likely find is that every mistake made in life was once just a wayward thought that we thought about a little too long and was then allowed to become an idea we allowed ourselves to start considering until we did that long enough to allow the idea to become an idol we simply couldn’t help but serve via both action and word.

Indeed, thoughts and ideas are what get us into more trouble than anything else. And that’s because we have to at first imagine something being worth doing or wanting before we’ll begin the process of figuring out how to do it/get it.

And then, once that horse is let out of the stall, it’s all downhill from there!

And whilst we should know this having let plenty of our own breed of wildness run free, the sad reality is that we walk amongst a people who live as if such is all but the very epitome of what we’re here to do. That running wild and doing as we please is literally the only reason we’re here at all. That the entirety of this life is meant to be lived with as little self-control as humanly possible.

And we humans have shown for centuries that we can do some amazing things when our desires are all we wish to live for.

The problem is that many of them are only amazingly bad, amazing wrong, amazingly wicked, and thus amazingly worth the death that all such sin is said to deserve.

And while we could do as we’ve done and continue to take our stand within another piece of “wisdom” written by man for man and continue to contend that we’ve not done anything all that bad to deserve something like that, I fear we’d only find that effort as futile in the future as our past meetings with guilt and regret have already proven it to be.

Only meeting such feelings in the future may well prove even potentially fatal depending upon just how long we refuse to even allow ourselves to imagine that we might be a little more wrong than our pride and ego can fathom. And that because, well, I’m pretty sure God’s already had enough of our living our lives only seeking to make sure they measure up to only what we desire for them to be.

Yeah, almost certain that such is what the cross was meant to help us realize.

That the way of life we’ve come to love living is one actually spent loving that which demands our dying due to the vast majority of it being everything from wrong to entirely wicked. And, though the world is obviously intent upon their remaining convinced that doing wrong is doing right thanks to words spoken seeking to soothe ears itching which speak only this lie saying that wrong is right and dark is light, the issue is that the created doesn’t have the authority to even speak unto the Creator.

We like to think we do and many will in fact spend their entire lives believing they can.

But I’ve personally read to the end of the Book and well, that direction, though promised to reach the same finish line, it gets there only to find what is a remarkably different end. Because all that way of life is promised to find is just the ending of life itself. Because He’s told us plain that whosoever loves their life will lose it whereas only those who lose their lives will find it.

And sure, there seems some kind of obvious hope plausibly found in that as we all know we all will lose our lives as such is what remains one way in which we refer to death. For we say things like “so-and-so lost their life today.” And so we all understand that we’ll all end up losing our lives one day. And so that would seem to say, unto those who have ears that are willfully unable to hear, that as we’re promised to lose these lives we’re thus all promised to find life.

But that’s not what He means.

He means that those who lay down their lives in what is an evident share in Christ and the surrender unto sacrifice that He came to show once for all, it’s those who will find life waiting when this life has been lost. And that’s because of what He wrote within a verse we discussed just the other day, that one that talks about “the second death”.

How’s that for fun sounding!

We’re all living in what is a way of life in which we’re trying everything we can to either deny, avoid or elsewise refuse the arrival of the first! Now we’ve got this Word coming along and talking about how there’s the potential for a second promised?

That’s just rude man!

And that because, again, we’ve all grown so fond of life and such a vast number of things, thoughts, theories, experiences, excitements, delights and denials inside of it that we already can’t bear the thought of losing it the first time. We love this life and how we’ve come to live it alongside those who are always none too willing to help us become convinced that everything we enjoy is everything we ought to partake of until we either get sick of it or have so much fun that our minds literally explode.

Indeed, we’re a people who are so impressed with our interests and intrigues that we’ll follow them for as long as we can without ever once daring imagine that they might be leading us in the wrong direction.

And yet we do it so gleefully because we’ve been foolishly walking in the wrong direction for all our lives alongside what is then the worst of all company possible as we’ve surrounded ourselves with those who will tell us what we want to hear as if we need to hear it as they feel the same way in return.

And thus we’ve become a people of such idolatry that any unclean thing is basically everything at this point. And that because if it leads us away from God or causes us to give unto something or someone else that which could be given unto Him, it’s defiled. It’s dirty. It’s wrong and wicked and yet wanted by the world and thus wanted by us as well seeing as how we’ve all become so worldly that it would take an act of God to separate the wheat from the weeds.

Thankfully, since that’s exactly what He’s promised to do, He actually has some help. For we are literally helping Him do the separating via the kinds of lives we’re living and how we’re living them. And that being done in our chosen response to such requests as this.

For He calls us here, and many other places throughout Scripture, to come apart from the world around us. To separate ourselves from those living lives clearly aimed toward hell. To neither touch nor do any unclean thing, anything that could in any way be determined as sin by He who has told us so clearly what sin is. “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”

And we all know this because we are all the offspring of Adam and Eve who took that fruit from that tree of such knowledge.

And thus we have no excuse seeing as how we’ve all again felt regret and know of the Name that came to carry it.

We’re thus doubly aware of the trouble we’re in, and so for anyone who doesn’t choose to do as He here asks and come out from where we’ve been and away from who we’ve become and separate from those who have likely had more than a little too much influence in getting us there, then we’re literally helping Him in His work of separating the wheat from the weeds.

For those who continue to live amongst the weeds doing as the weeds continue to choose to do, they clearly wish to be counted as weeds themselves.

But friends, for what are weeds used? I mean, being in the lawn care game, I know a thing or two about weeds. And yet I don’t know of anyone who likes them. In fact, a lot of people spray them so as to kill them so that their lawn can look better, healthier, more pleasing to the eye and fun to run around on.

Weeds are useful for nothing. Why then continue to live among them? And, as mentioned yesterday of a point Paul had made in regard to how we can’t physically get away from all those who are wicked and immoral without actually leaving this earth, why then not at least begin coming away from them? Why not start making some changes that show Him that we don’t want to be like the weeds we’re surrounded by? Why not begin venturing toward that better life that He calls us to live?

I mean, if He literally died for us to even have the chance of finding it, it must be pretty amazing!

And amazingly good for once!

But see my friends, to find that which is good we have to cut loose that which is not. In order for us to grow we have to loose the anchors that we’ve allowed into our lives that have kept us from doing so all this time. In order to start building better habits that will actually help us to become better people we have to stop doing those many things that keep us stuck living in the suck.

We have to walk away from things, from thoughts, from ideals, from idols, from people even.

And again, as I mention all the time, no, it shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t have so much to lose or let go. We shouldn’t have to stare down the barrel of severing friendships or quitting jobs or no longer listening to music we once enjoyed or enjoying shows we’ve always loved to watch. We should be able to simply enjoy things without having to discern everything.

But in a world this wicked that’s only getting worse, we have no other choice.

We have to embrace the responsibility of doing a little weeding of our own. We have to help Him help us, elsewise He simply has no reason to help us. Honestly, if He can’t look at us and see in us a willingness to move toward Him and to lose whatever that asks, then why would He move toward us when we ask? If we won’t sweep up a bit and shake some dust off our feet and out of our hearts, why should He move mountains?

No, this is a relationship. And as such, this walk deserves to be undertaken with a stanch determination to do whatever it takes to keep walking it out and growing it however we might.

But friends, that’s the point!

It’s that we cannot grow in Christ so long as anything wicked or wrong is allowed to continue growing in us. Again as I say all the time, He died to send forth the Spirit into our hearts so as to lead our souls to that better place we can call home. What then makes us think He deserves to be at best a roommate with sin? Why make Christ share our hearts with that which caused His suffering?

That’s messed up!

No, we have to rid our lives of anything that He died to free us from. It just makes sense, and it’s simply the right thing to do. And, granted, we’re all really new at the doing of things right. But that’s part of the growth! We get to learn. We get to improve. We get to do so with a Savior who’s already laid down His life so as to ensure that our mistakes are covered along the way.

A mercy He’s willing to give because He wants us to be with Him rather than dead in sin.

Why then stay dead amongst those who clearly don’t mind it?

Friends look, I get it. It’s entirely counterintuitive to walk away from what’s seemed to be a perfectly good life that’s seemed that way because it’s been long filled with so much that we’ve learned to like if not lived to love. But maybe that’s the problem! Maybe it’s proven in just how much we struggle with letting go of all that He’s proven deserves to die and thus demands our death.

We should jump at the chance to rid our lives of anything and everything that could even potentially cause us to miss something of all the new He’s still doing.

And so why don’t we? Why don’t we find ourselves excited to lose things? Why do we find it so hard to do so? What causes this struggle in us to leave behind what He’s simply said isn’t good for us? Why don’t we ache to leave the places and people who’ve all but convinced us to so deny Him and the hope only He gives?

If not because we’ve simply all but forgotten who we really are?

Friends, we are the articles of the Lord’s house as His Word defines our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. And well, I think we all know how He feels about those who turn His house into a den of thieves and robbers and sinners and such.

Don’t continue living a kind of life that will make Him storm in and flip the table that is your life upside down. Rather live such a life that shows Him that you’re willing to flip them over yourself. Not because you don’t realize that doing so will mean you’re walking away from what you’ve made a living doing but simply because you’ve come to understand that life was never about what we could make of it anyway.

Life is rather a gift that should be lived in such a way that honors the Giver.

So let us live to honor Him in all we say and all we do. Not because it’s easy and definitely not because such is common. But simply because it’s the right thing to do.

And we’ve all done more than enough wrong. And thus we’ve all only plenty that’s wrong to lose in His call to leave it all behind.

The journey awaits.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold