Day 3922 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 13:14 NIV

The drift

Such is where we’ve come to exist in what is a world vastly warped yet warmed within what remains of a fallen way in which all have walked and only few have won. And that because we’ve long thought of winning as something done best through sinning with faces grinning thanks to the winning of what’s then a way in which we get to boast all about how we’re the ones who get to live without the shame and sorrow as seen upon the faces of those in places that we once were before we found a way out.

Only to have happened into new places surrounded by new faces selling new traces of the same tarnished trophies.

With only one Way out.

And yet it’s the one we don’t want to take. And that’s because this life’s become this never-ending competition to prove we can be the ones who find another, a confusion in which we’re all supposed to live as if we care to be only whatever another already is or at least a confused continuation of what we always were. For here the goal has long been to be like those around us who too live their lives looking to those around them for some evidence of this mysterious best life that’s lived best here, all while never accepting an invitation to the changes that would make things better.

It’s weird to believe in best without the presence of better. Not sure how that’s supposed to work, but when the flesh is so involved has the flesh has long now been, well, it’s pretty impressive what we can come up with and even manage to convince ourselves is right. Doesn’t really make it so, but to those who honestly don’t seem to care to know any different, yeah, our staying the same as we’ve always been and seeking to live like those who have always been those we’ve loved living like and looking to, it eventually just makes sense.

Indeed, it’s kind of like what we talked about yesterday in regard to the call to cleanse ourselves of all unrighteousness as is done alongside the sorting out of minds double-minded. And it’s such a needed request because, well, living life as a light distracted by the dark is like a fish growing unhappy that it can't swim in a landfill. Sure, it doesn't make any sense to want to but if we're only living to please those who themselves think it does and the flesh which has long believed it might, well then it's only a matter of time before we too start living like it could.

And that, perhaps eventually, could, at least theoretically, cause us to start heading for the shallows wherein once in we can hopefully see a better degree of this desire that’s caught fire and grown to all but engulf our better resolve as should always be placed upon both doing our best and thus making the best out of whatever place He who created us created us to be.

But no.

No, instead we live only to know to only ever listen to the flesh as is a victim of what’s truly a one-sided argument as is waged always against ourselves seeking to convince our better half of the lesser needs of a life lived in a place we know we don’t belong. But we do it anyway because it’s the way of life we see so many others living, and that in a sort of fun-filled happiness that just eventually gets the better of us and inspires us to wander closer to that place where wonder what it might be like to experience.

For let’s be honest, the narrow path is most definitely not one that’s all that inclined to entertain our wayward desires as dreamed up by a flesh so much the same.

Rather that’s pretty much the only reason that He who is the Narrow came to this earth to suffer as He did. Wasn’t because He was just bored and had no plans for that particular weekend. I’m fairly certain that the God of all creation could have clearly come up with something that didn’t involve crosses carried and blood spilled.

Especially His own!

But He did do what He chose to because He, for some reason, still delights for us to find that we are His own. And yet this is where these roads diverge, that one we’ve been on from the One we’re called to walk with now. It’s a fork found in our faith fighting against past fealty to the flesh and the many versions and denials of the several deaths we’ve so vastly earned and now fully deserve. It’s that gap created in our coming to understand the chasm our choices have created and the severity of our potentially missing the one bridge back.

It’s just that the flesh don’t understand that. In fact, it’s said that the flesh desires that which is contrary to what God desires, and thus that what God desires is different from that which the flesh does. And, if we were to ever dare be honest, which I honestly doubt many ever will because the flesh is really afraid of such a humiliating humility, we’d be able to both see and thus say that indeed it doesn’t really make sense, this way in which we’ve come to live.

No, it simply doesn't make sense for us to so desire the many delights we do. It’s just that we never really stop to ask ourselves why we do or even what we desire. Rather we just wake up every day back into that fire in which we feel that we alone know what’s best thanks to the ever-present behest and suggest of a world that looks just like us and thus must have at least some decent ideas as to what all to do in order to enjoy the most we can this descent from decency.

Seriously though, have you ever thought about some of the things that you crave in life? Ever stop to wonder where such a wanting came from? Ever worry about where it might lead to? Ever consider that the gravity of following a lost flesh might in fact just leave us for dead in a head so filled with so much lust for fun and frivolity that we never come close to understanding the dire need for our to be found as something holy by He who both holds the keys to Hades and asks we follow Him, growing therein, along the only Way away from it?

For He who is holy calls us to be the same. And yet it stands to reason that He wouldn’t call us to come to a place we already are.

Must then mean that we’ve still a ways to go.

Just then that not to is what it seems the flesh has more than enough excuses it knows.

Most of them just the very desires we’ve been hinting at this morning. Desires like worldly praise. What do we do with it when we’re not in this place? Or cravings like financial savings. Sure, the digits look nice on a screen or piece of paper, but what will any of it truly amount to later? Can our savings save us? Can our comforts comfort us? Can our confusions consider how they can’t? Can’t we see that we just don’t want to consider it?

Any of it?

No, we don’t want to consider such things as the here requested setting aside of a flesh infested with fun and a fair deal of financial success, or at least a couple ideas as to how to grow in such. Don’t want to think about why such things matter so much. Because I don’t think we’re ready really to admit they might not matter as much as the many years we’ve lost to imagining they might.

Just want to consider the delight. The dream. The desire to avoid the dread of our ending up dead without having ever experienced what so many here claim we should.

Guess we don’t really stop to consider why we’re trusting in their flesh either.

No, rather we just line up as those blinded by the bling born by the blind who offer to lead the way for us to see the glimmer and shimmer of a life so shattered as to live for the here and now as if this is all that can matter. Is it though? Is this life really all the life there is to know? Is what we’ve collectively made this life to seem even really life at all?

Or is it not just the fallout of a further fall into a love with that which is lost and thus a leaving untaken the path of, sure, more resistance but also more reward promised?

What have we ever really found here that’s got us so convinced that we need more it than we do life itself? Because that’s the weirdness in it all. It’s that we all literally live our lives, at least a good measure of them, in search of this something that we actually happen to find, but only to find that it doesn’t really feel or fill like we thought it would, which then leads us right back to looking for more again.

Trust me, I’ve been doing it for the better part of 37 now.

For I’m, as of today, a recovering collector. My entire life it seems has been spent seeking for things that I thought were cool to have, fun to hold, held some fun and brought some hope. What hope? I honestly couldn’t tell you. The hope of having something I guess. And have it I’ve had! I’ve had and held so many things that I wanted so badly that I eventually ran out of room in my room and had to start the process of evaluation in regard to what of it all I wanted most.

What of it meant the most? What of it held the most value? The greatest rarity? A line of questioning that found me always believing that some sort of evidence of the success of my existence hinged upon leaving then only that with the most impressive clarity in regard to value or rarity as that considered to be worth my keeping. A mindset that kept me searching for years, and fighting so many arguments within in which I literally gave time in a life that I can’t get back to what’s literally paper and plastic.

A realization I literally had to revisit just yesterday.

That of a life filled with time lost looking for my worth in what is made by human hands and merely written upon by famous versions of the same.

And that struggle that I endured yesterday afternoon, an argument amongst myself ceased in some most random bout of clarity, it helped me realize that, again, it simply doesn't make sense for us to so desire the many delights we do. And indeed, it makes you wonder why we do, or at least it should. Alas it seems that most often it don't.

And yet perhaps that's what's got to change before ever we can: To see the lack of life held inside the things we seek to hold inside this life.

For the coming reality is that nothing here can give us what so clearly here isn’t and thus isn’t here. And as all life is here destined to die, well, you'd think we'd both appreciate the time we have where we are and spend so wisely as to look for life where life might still be found when this sample's finally run out as opposed to what already has no life to give, let alone to us.

But again so often we don’t because the flesh just doesn’t know how. Because instead the flesh knows only to want, not to give. We’ve in each of us these deepening depths of desires most depraved, debased, and yet we never seem all that able/willing to notice just how little they’re giving us nor how much they take away. We honestly anymore measure our losses in the very same dollars we spend our lives trying to earn.

Never wanting to accept that one day it’s all going to burn.

Flesh included.

And yeah, that’s a scary promise to face. And sure, maybe that’s a good part of why we choose to live this way seeking whatever distraction and delight in this life find we might. But what I think we all need to know is that it doesn’t matter what we find or that our lives here grow fatter. Because it can’t change the promise. It can’t stop what’s coming. Not a single human, no matter how rich, no matter how famous, no matter how powerful or popular, none of us have ever proven of the authority to add even a single breath unto our lives, into our lungs.

We have literally only that which God has given us, but now that alongside all this that we’ve made instead.

What happens then when all that we’ve made has gone away and it’s again just us standing before God naked as we came with thus nothing of all we’d made there to show Him in regard to His asking what we did with what He gave us? You do know that that will be the question, right? What did you do with what He gave you? For the obvious fact is that He’s given us life. Now there are those, and many in fact, who live a life thinking that it didn’t happen like that and that somehow life is just the amazing result of millions of little random chances and happenings.

A fact which finds only one more opportunity for the flesh to find something it likes in that belief that none of this really means anything and thus we’ll not have to actually give an account for what we’ve done. After all, we can’t be held responsible if there’s no such thing as responsibility.

Right?

Well, sure, but the issue is that there is such thing as responsibility, and it’s most definitely not something we’ve come up with on our own. Who would do that? No, we’ve certainly never been the ones to seek to so limit ourselves with such things as laws and rules and even expectations. And yet that we have them seems to say then that there’s something of an understanding as to our standing in this whole thing.

Problem is that we don’t seem able/willing to understand that our standing is mostly only against God as is daily evidenced in the many things we delight to have or do or see or be and how, well, again, none of them really make much sense.

Not when you realize that they don’t add to life. At least not in the sense of adding onto life. They may bring feelings of fun or pleasure or whatever other measure of satisfaction or success this swollen yet sullen society has so inspired us to ourselves embrace. But again, what of such things can help us should we be wrong again?

For again, we’ve been wrong before in our wanting of something we thought would matter or help make us happy again. What then are the odds that we might be wrong again someday? What are the odds that said someday is coming soon? What are the odds that we’ll be again surprised when, as if all the sudden, we’ve literally lost our lives and thus have left no time in which to stop and reconsider what it is that we want and why we want it so?

What do we want?

What’s the grand outcome of this life that we seek to find? Material possessions? Massive bank accounts? Impressive sounding job titles? Fast cars? Fancy houses? Millions of followers? Tons of friends who don’t know who we really are? A few more years spent thinking we do?

Who are we? Collectors? Addicts? Super fans? Special fools? Useful tools? Tools without use?

What use have we to go on living if all we’re living for is all that we’ll leave behind one day? And why can’t we seem to ever be able to see that the flesh is to be found amongst those things left behind? That that which feels good now won’t be felt later expect as either one more glory or one more regret as to where we misplaced it? That we’re not here for our glory, our gain, our success or safety but rather as those given to safeguard a message delivered us by He who died to do so so that we’d not have to die twice.

Once? Yes, for every life now owes a death thanks to all the death the flesh has come to desire as defined as sin by He who died to prove He’s of that authority to define things as He so chooses. And our denying Him, as done every time we sin, it’s what He’s defined as deserving death. We may not like it, but He never asked us to as He doesn’t need our agreement.

He’s the Potter, we’re just the broken pieces.

How long will pieces be good enough for us to be? Why are we good with living in pieces, a people scattered throughout soil and sorrow seeking for something of the first to override our experiencing of the latter?

Friends, what’s the matter with us? We live our lives looking for life in things that only exist to please a flesh that is promised to die because of past pleasures sought. What then makes us think that continuing to do the same thing will somehow help us arrive at an outcome other than the shame, guilt, regret that we all know we all know?

It won’t.

If we want something different than whatever it is we’ve found, we have to do something different in order to find it. That’s why Jesus made such a point about His having come to do a new thing. It’s because a new thing is what we too need to do if we’re to find something new, something different than what everyone else has already found and felt.

And He went so far as to surrender His flesh so that we too could see that we not only could we too perhaps survive dying to the desires of the flesh, but that indeed doing such is the only way for us to survive at all.

We have to escape the fall. And no, it won’t feel good. No, it won’t make sense. No, it won’t bring us anything of what we’ve come to see as success or satisfaction or safety even.

There’s nothing safe about the cross!

But He embraced it anyway to save those who are lost and have the rare audacity to start imagining that they’ll thus not be found should they live to continue looking for hope in what they can find.

We can’t find Him. We can’t see Him. But friends, without surrender we can’t share Him, can’t share in Him. And if we don’t share in Him, then we have no business hoping in the promise of where He is.

Let us be careful then as to where we place our hopes and even go so far as to ask ourselves often why we’ve placed them where we have. Because if such treasures are placed in Heaven, then they can survive the questions. If they aren’t, and thus they can’t, then why would we ever think we could?

No, there’s but one way to make it out of this alive. And no, such a promise of life does not consist in an abundance of possessions or pleasures.

Rather life exists in Christ alone.

Why then would we keep looking elsewhere?

And only drifting further from Him in the process?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold