Day 3928 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 4:1 NIV

United

In suffering. For there must be something seen of a soul’s sharing in their understanding as to the severity of their own salvation. Because such a glorious gift given demands then that we give it something in return. And yet, having each of us so fallen from His glory, falling so woefully short always thereof, we’ve nothing to give unto He who is our glory, our hope, our mercy as needed daily. No, we have nothing fit to offer such a King so very kind.

Except such a humility that it elates in the sharing of a life lain down in sacrifice as chosen, yes, chosen so as to rid itself of sin.

All by admitting, in humility, that we who have come to love what He lives to hate cannot then be the ones who empty ourselves of the same.

No, for what one becomes is that by which they will forever be known. And so, in this, we are all sinners in what are lives stained of an all but almost stoic resentment against our Creator and an anymore growing contentment within it. Yes, we are a people so fond of failure and folly that we follow those who chase after the both as if their lives might truly depend upon their being caught in a daily degree only ever deepening in depth.

This world loves sin having become those the Bible forewarned would come to become what we’ve all so sadly been for quite some time. Indeed, as we read of Scripture, “All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.”

Some translations even go so far as to bestow a moniker deserved by all and yet all but ignored by most if not seemingly boasted of by a growing many:

Children of wrath.

For that is what we’ve all well earned having all of us lived a length of life looking for only mostly more of what’s wrong alongside those many who put such for right. Yes, each of us have fallen into sin, doing the most shameful of things in body, mind, spirit due to our widespread dismissal of the now rather dismal state of our sullen society. A culture of almost complete chaos and confusion, right down to these days finding folks apparently unsure as to their gender.

How much further can we fall? And just how much will those who do scream all about how they enjoy the ride as their shabbily painted smiles barely hide the lie behind the eyes that look unto sin as if it a win of what is a life worth living?

It isn’t.

For there is no life to live in or with that which wins the wage of wrath as won within the Promise that came to tell us of another.

The first of which found within the next part of that passage given us over in Ephesians. That being that despite our having become so sinful and wayward that we’d thus earned the title “children of wrath”, it’s instead that “but because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.”

Going on to point out then that “it is by grace you have been saved.”

A gift given because God never gave up on the plans He still has for us. Plans such as those we all know of from Jeremiah 29, hope and future, but both as are to be only ever found only after we’ve endured what is still a time of exile spent far away from where we were, who we were, how we lived and why we’re alive. An exile we all experience in life within those years given foolishly unto the sin which separates us from the love of Him by finding us showing no love for God.

An exile that Christ came to overcome in His laying down of the sinful body and calling all of us to do the same so that, by sharing in His sacrificial surrender of that which demands a death, so too might we share in the victory He won there over the grave that we’re all still to enter, but of which now a few of us haven’t to remain. For such are His plans as are still being unveiled even in this time in which we live in which there is so much so wrong that it takes no Biblical scholar to see that something’s off.

It’s increasingly easy to see the depths of all human depravity. And so too for us to become in Christ the very reflections of His light of life that He died for us to become.

For again, going on in Ephesians 2, “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Why? “In order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”

He offers still to so freely forgive all that so fully doesn’t deserve it in order to, as with the people of Israel which fought and yelled and rebelled against Him for those 40 years in that desert after He’d done so much to set them free, even still for you and me He relents upon the destruction our many denials deserve so as to work in us a work so good that our having lived so bad in the past becomes an evidence of His goodness for all to see inside of us the changes His mercy can make in the lives and hopes of those who turn from their sinful ways and seek for once His glorious frame.

All to prove that “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” All because “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

It was all planned in advance back when He at first knit us together in the wombs of our mothers and called us then both fearfully and wonderfully made. Knowing all the while that we’d all only eventually grow to empty of our once fullness of fear and lose even more of the wonder with which we were once full as well.

All in the name of sin that called our names in those just right ways that found us unable to find a reason to not partake of what has often seemed a better promise than Heaven.

Simply because pleasure will always be nearer now and thus easier to find.

A fact found in each of our own lives as have been lived for what has been a past so shameful and soiled that we do need now His fire sent to all but boil if not burn away the dross in which we’ve all lost what could have been a life lived far better than even those rare moments we now consider best as are found often only behind us and never before us along what is a road that’s darkening thanks to a world doing ever the same.

But that’s why Jesus came.

He came to bring the Light that cut this night and ends this fight as fought against what is a faith that simply asks we do away with what’s now promised to be passing the same. Away. For indeed, due to the depths of sin won within this world and the common way in which all of us have lived, everything here is now promised an ending in what is a timing we do not know. A promise in which we could find hope if only we knew where to look and why.

And that’s because our having no idea as to when Christ is set to return is meant to help us learn of the dire intensity meant to be found deepening daily in regard to our desperation aimed at finding Him before we lose all that we’re promise to.

We should ache for Jesus to grow in us so that we can begin our growing in Him and thus our sharing too of His victory over death and the eternal joy that such now promises.

But alas, it’s hard for us to remember that which we’re still living.

For as Ephesians continues, it finds Paul speaking to the Gentiles who had been adopted into Christ via their faithful surrender unto the same. He’s talking to them in regard to their former way of life lived as Gentiles do, a life they had since left behind, leaving it then something of a memory in which they could “remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”

A point made in that having left their old lives and ways behind, they were “now in Christ Jesus” who died on that cross so as to save those “who once were far away” by tearing the veil that allows us all to be “brought near by the blood of Christ.”

Because in Him there is no separation. Not of time. Not for nationality. Not for depth of depravity. No. Jesus came to collect all those who are the Father’s from the four corners of every country and confusion toward which our sinful desires and delusions have driven us.

“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations.” All because, “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.”

“Through the cross, by which He put to death their hostility.”

This, friends, is the death in to which we’re called unto a share of what Christ did via crosses our own now carried.

It is to, as Paul writes in his letter to Corinth, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” Saying further that, again it is because of these that the wrath of God is coming. All because, again, “you used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived.” A life that we are called to surrender, to lay down, to let go and leave behind.

Why?

Because if we are as made new in Christ as we’re called to be, then so too “you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.” Even going so far as to no longer “lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”

For again, Christ’s entire intent was to create a body, a bride in which there is no more separation from one another, nor therefore from the God who at first created us to be His.

Because in Him “there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free,” because, “Christ is all, and is in all.”

And as Colossians 3 goes on, “therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

United.

Both with one another in a sort of brotherly love that seeks to zealously yearn for the growth of one another in every matter, manner and measure of what is defined as a fruit derived of the Spirit, those only grown when the fruit of the flesh is no longer tended nor ever again sought.

All accomplished only when we do as called here and embrace the suffering that is sure to come whenever we do finally wise up and stop seeking for only that which is passing away and rather pull out of the race and simply agree to watch the world run on ahead doing as the blind are promised to.

And make no mistake, it will mean suffering, this laying down of the life we’ve so fully known and thus learned rather well how to live. Indeed, I feel quite miserable all the time whenever I think back about some of the things I once did. Feel even more miserable when I find myself sliding back into them in the infrequent moments in which I do. Equally miserable when I’m finally shown humbly to the witnessing or hearing of things I still do that ought not be done by someone who so claims to be a follower of He who came to lose.

We do understand that, don’t we?

That Jesus’ every intention here was always to shed the flesh, put it to death? That everything He taught, and all He teaches us still, that it’s all aimed at trying to instill a continued dying unto the flesh whereby we can finally begin learning how to live for the Spirit? That we cannot do the both no matter how hard we try? And that simply because one is now bound to die whereas the other promised only a narrow victory there over?

Friends, this is why He calls His way narrow. It’s because it’s in every way something of a grindstone against which we’re all dragged through flood, famine and fire so as to refine us into the soldiers this world needs us to be who stand boldly upon the Word of God and that so much so that we seek daily to become a better evidence of the providence, provision and purpose proven within.

We are called to be His hands, His feet, His people!

Both because such is what He longs for us to be and what we should want to be too.

Why?

Because if we’re not then we’ll die. And that because of our sins. And we’ve in fact so many of them that we’re destined to die twice.

No, it’s never been the first one that we all know of that should worry us so much as it so often does. For friends, the first death is simply that to the flesh and of the same. Such is the grave that so many here live their entire lives in dire fear of. It’s that grand finale of what’s likely to sadly remain a time in which so many lived to please the flesh only and in fact did so well at just that that they’ve just no way of seeing any joy to be found there waiting when the flesh they’d lived for is finally lost.

Why live like that? Why live any further that way of life that has us thinking we’ve something here to lose?

We’re going to lose everything here anyway.

Why not start getting ready? Why not start doing it now? Why not join Him in our shedding of the sinful skin in which we’ve been walking so that we can thereby begin to put on the Spirit into which we’ve all been invited to come and live forever?

Yes, why not surrender that which is dying, and so deservingly so, and step today into the new for which He came?

Because friends, His new never ends. His new direction is aimed square into the heart of forever. His plans are for us to have the hope of a future found after what is this life spent in exile a million miles from home and that because of a million mistakes we’ve made that have led us here.

It seems I find this need to mention all the time anymore that we were created in His image. And that because, looking around, we don’t see Him anymore. Rather all we see is sadness, sorrow, shame, suffering. We see such anger and resentment and refusal to do anything about it. We see every single day a people broken and breaking only further away from the only One who can put us back together. We see a society collapsing in such disunity and disarray that we need to do something dire, something desperate if we’re to ever even begin to imagine something of forever.

Friends, that’s why He came. It was to show us how to set aside what is a flesh that all but yearns for death within what’s been a way of life spent seeking the same.

He came to die to sin and to there and then call us all into a sharing with Him of that sort of suffering that just helps us to finally understand that though it’s fun, though it’s common, though it feels good, though it will remain largely normal and continually applauded because of it, sin just isn’t worth it.

Because there is simply no amount of personal pleasure or power or praise or profit that will produce a way to pay what we’ll come to owe should we continue to do as we know we shouldn’t.

For anyone who knows the right things they should do and doesn’t do them, this is sin for them.

And no matter what this world is trying so hard to make itself believe, every sin earns only the wage of death.

Friends, we owe that price ourselves for the many times we ourselves have fallen short of the glory of God into rather a continued love of sin. We all owe Him a death. Thankfully Jesus came to lead us into it in just such a way that we too, in Him alone, overcome it. For anyone who lives by believing in Him, they will live even though they die.

Not if.

Though.

Even though we die, in Him we shall yet live.

That’s why He calls us to take up our crosses daily and follow Him. It’s because if we want to share in His victory over death, we have to share in how He got there. And it wasn’t by pleasing the flesh. It wasn’t by seeking personal comfort. It wasn’t found in fighting for selfish gain or vain glory. No. His victory over death was only accomplished, and is thus only found, in dying to the flesh and leaving for dead all that the same would likely continue to crave.

And again, it will mean suffering as so much of what He calls us to surrender and sacrifice is that of which we’ve made a life. He is asking us to let go of everything we’ve probably come to love, everything that we’ve probably come to find enjoyable, everything that we’ve learned to believe comfortable, profitable, promising and hopeful.

He asks us to lay down the life we’ve lived and all for which we’ve lived within it.

And while that’s not easy, such is why the promise is so amazing.

For He wouldn’t call us to do something without a reason big enough to do it. And friends, what’s bigger than Heaven and the eternal hope, joy and peace He’s said are waiting within it?

Yeah, we all have a lot to lose in this call to the laying down of a life. But friends, we’ve got far more to find if and when we do.

All because those who have been united with Him in a death like His will also be united with Him in a resurrection like His.

And so there you have it, the very roadmap to Heaven. And wouldn’t you know it but it’s the one He said we should look for:

That of a life fully united in Christ.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold