Day 3940 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 5:7 NIV

Not my will

They’re words that take most of us a lifetime to mutter, the time chosen through the stutter and struggle of what is a war waged within ways that are defined as our own but of which are but on loan from either He to whom all of life is owed or rather to the sea of sin from within we’ve drank our souls drunk upon the many delights of a life lived in the dark and there afraid of the light. A fear felt for years due to failures found to uphold the violent simplicity that is humility.

All because we know of humility as only a violence aimed against us and whatever this is that we’ve so completely become.

Which is why this narrow road home remains so hard for however long we’ve left to either walk it or war against. In truth the fight is the same as it demands equal effort given but in two different directions. For we’re to either wage war against the flesh, putting therefore to death that which desires that which is opposed to the delights of the Spirit, or we wage war against the Spirit as is done within living to delight the flesh.

Either way, war is waged.

Just then a decision as to where it’s aimed and why.

The hard part is that we’ve learned of this life in which we walk and wait and worry and want for what are an as of now still untold number of ideas, all of which seem unto us as these ideals that may well prove to, even if only ever eventually, accomplish the very sum of our life’s meaning and purpose and merit and promise. Yes, each of us have fallen both for the lie and in love with the same that has us stayed in what’s become a life so drown in delight that we see the storms but for the fright.

All because we’ve become well equipped to weather the whether or nots we’re used to in what’s now long been a life lived as if nothing much really matters, all because everything seems to matter. And it’s this ongoing uncertainty as to what matters most here along this coast of a life found always in a speed the same that has became an inability to reconcile who we are, how we feel with where we deserve to go and why. Simply because we still seem mostly of the mind that always dares stop and ask why as if we need to know the purpose, the promise before we’ll ever endure the pain.

As if we honestly think we can avoid it somehow.

And granted, perhaps we can. At least to a degree and that for maybe a time. But friends, this is where the line breaks and our lives the same. It’s this gravity of reality in which we find that time exists only where it ends and thus finds us needing to make a way to move on from worrying about what can’t move with us when we go wherever we might. And yet we’ve all warred so long against this truth that we anymore seek only that which we’re promised to lose.

Things such as comfort. Beauty. Strength. Youthfulness. Exuberance. Excitement and delight. They’re all ships that are set to set sail, pass us in the night and leave us thus still marooned here in this mistaken way of life we’ve fallen in love with living. And what’s amazing is that we know this having known them to leave us when we perhaps needed them the most. And yet still we seem so stuck inside this assumption that they’re still a given. That we can rely on them. That by our building them, maintaining them, thus truly prioritizing them, that we can then ensure they stay.

But dear friends we’re not of such magnitude to insist any such thing.

Rather we’re but souls akin to driftwood destined to be tossed about wherever whatever winds we choose to want choose to blow.

And again, this is the life we know, this time spent spending time on what matters most but only for a moment, and then, once the matter that’s mattered most has met its match and lost the moment, we’re moving on to something that we consider to matter more. And it’s this persistent pliability in regard to our chosen list of priority that has become for us a sort of rubber band belief that has us bouncing between so many different things that, again, none of them can matter all that much.

Let alone enough to inspire in us the sort of humility seen doubled within He who never once doubted the purpose as He’s the same as wrote the promise.

And that on literally every human heart.

Just seems then our lives have been given unto the giving over of graffiti to the grace and majesty that was painted underneath so long ago.

For anymore none of us seem of the willingness to hold fast to much of anything. Rather we’re always more than willing, and perhaps even sometimes pleased to just move on to other things. To just sort of chalk it all always up to the general course of life itself. That we know things will come and go and do in fact mostly agree with that.

It’s just those forsaken storms and struggles that come along and burst our bubbles and leave us left living as if we’ve nothing left to leave but yet everything still to lose. And it’s weird, this way in which we wage this walk. For we’re none too happy to fight so fervently for whatever happens to seem to matter the most in the moment. But just as soon as even that which matters proves only to risk being left to shatter or be torn to tatters, we just give up.

We walk away.

We accept defeat, agree to our weakness winning the war within us and just move on seeking yet another wind to blow wherever comfort and excitement may again be known.

Because truth be told, such things are all we know to care about anymore. Never mind their constant temporality, we just enjoy them so much that we can’t bear to imagine our lives without them. For even a moment! All because to us the moments always matter more than anything else might. We are truly a people who would trade forever for the opportunity to feel better or be happier or mostly just avoid something that risks either.

And I know this because we have.

Because, in contrast to Christ, we’ve all chosen to live a life in which we find fervency for only that which is prone to failure or folly. We’re faithful only unto that which is faithful unto us, and thus we’re faithful to nothing as we seek such fealty in only a world fallen short of such a thing. This world has nothing that can offer us anything. And yet we seek still for only that which is here and known by others as if our knowing it too would be enough to mean we’d never lose.

Anything.

Even life itself.

Because, again, we seem all but convinced that we’ve the power or authority to make such determinations.

And I know this because I know we all know how to be angry with God when His will doesn’t go our way!

Such has been the subject of our prayers for years. Here we read that during His days Christ prayed in ways that expressed His very breaking before the weight He knew He had come to carry. He knew that His time here was to end in something that any rational person would fear, should fear. Because, Son though He was, He was also man. Both of the divine and yet too of mankind. He shed Heaven to be here, to become us.

To save us!

And so He knew all these things that we know too. The pain. The fear. The struggle. The worry. The weight of life! Yet He knew them all in ways that most us never might. Because we’re not tasked with atoning for an entire creation. We’ve not the duty to literally carry the sins of this world on our backs. And we most definitely don’t have to ever understand having to endure all He did with the realization that He didn’t deserve any of it.

Now we strive to keep that lie alive in what are minds that know the sin He never did. For He was truly innocent, the only spotless of all we lambs of God’s pasture. Though He knew no sin, for us He became sin so that, in Him, we might become the righteousness of God again.

And I say again because such is what we all once were. For all us of us were in fact created in His image and have thus, again, had His Word, His will written upon our hearts.

How then have we reached this place in which we’re so often filled with so much doubt and anger that we think of Him only when we need to, want to blame Him for His Word, His will basically waging war against ours?

Do we not yet understand the simplicity of His purpose?

It’s not to harm us. It’s not to hate us. It’s not even to kill, at least not yet. No, rather for now His purpose, His preference remains that all of us would come unto repentance and, in this, turn both back toward Him and thus too away from all that was never Him.

This is why we all love the wording of Jeremiah’s 29:11. It’s because it does, in context or not, offer us the hope of His promise being for our good, a promise made in and of His goodness to bring us hope, to bring us home. But friends, in context, that verse is given unto a people facing down the proverbial barrel of a life spent in exile!

They were leaving their homes, the only lives they’d ever known. They were losing everything because they’d acted, lived as if God was nothing.

Sound familiar?

And yet we act as if we deserve to avoid life’s trials? That we’re somehow owed some at best mythical ease and tranquility within what’s always been a place in which such things so clearly do not exist? Now that’s not to say that such things as peace and east times aren’t possible. It’s just saying that we have to be insane to continue expecting them in the one place that we’re promised to lose everything.

A promise made all because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

A mistake made monstrous should we decide to keep making it on this side of learning the Name that came to save us from the same.

The Name that’s spoken of here as having, during His days, offered up prayers through tears and turmoil as He was bent, broken, beaten and bleeding all because of things not His own doing!

Why then do we do them still if we know now just how much misery they make?

Or is it that we don’t know?

That we don’t want to. Because, for now at least, it seems we might not have to. And indeed, we might not. But friends, such a commuted sentence is only given unto those who God deems fit to be so let off in regard to their already so well-established failure to prove faithful which is widely and rightfully well-deserving of punishment.

Why?

Because He clearly defined sin as earning the wage of death, and has since gone in fact so far as to prove how serious He is via the sacrifice of His very own Son.

A gift given in our punishment taken whereby commuting our sentence of everlasting death owed and deserved by all for all we’ve done against Him so willingly, so willfully as we have.

Yes, Jesus came to willingly, willfully lay down His life as was spent for some 30 or so years carrying the weight of knowing what He had to do, all culminating in His doing it.

All to achieve for us all all that we have never, ever wanted to do.

Because all He’s ever asked is that we deny ourselves the seeking of our rewards here, where everything ends and rusts and rots and risks being stolen or elsewise ruined, and to instead seek such treasure as pleasure and peace and hope and relief in Heaven where nothing ends as there time doesn’t exist.

Yet sin doesn’t either.

Which is why Christ had to come and walk through our fire!

Because sin isn’t welcome in God’s presence. And thus, as sinners who’ve sinned so much, so often that is no longer merely what we do but in fact now as that by which we are known, He knows that we’d be only rightly turned away unto the very worst side of the coming Judgement Day if not for His doing what needed done to erase, to cleanse, to atone for what we’d done so as to make us right again in the eyes of the very Father we’ve gone against.

In short, as with any parent for any prodigal, God just wants us to realize both where we belong and why it isn’t here in what’s become a world so vastly lost within a way of life lived so very wrong that most here still seek here their every reward, such as peace and comfort and purpose.

A choice which will only prove worthless as everything here proves only to perish.

That’s what He’s trying so hard to help us avoid.

Perishing.

Losing everything. Enduring the experiencing of such violent lifelessness that there’s just no coming back from it. Because, well, as much as He knows that Heaven is forever, He thus knows hell is too. And well, as with any parent for any prodigal, He wants only the very best for us.

And well, being cast into eternal fire and finding there only unending suffering, that just doesn’t seem like anything that anyone should want for anyone.

Let alone their very children.

Which is, again, what all of us were and have now the promise of becoming once more. Were because we were created in His image. Once more because Christ had to be born into our image so as to, being seen like us, inspire in us a willingness to do our share of what He did to bring us back to an understanding of who we were always meant to be and how it has absolutely no resemblance to who we’ve become instead.

Yes, God chose in Jesus to leave Heaven behind to come find all the ones who walked away from the 99 that never did.

And no, that to us doesn’t make any sense as we’re a people of quantity, especially when it comes to again such things as peace and comfort and enjoyment of life itself. We want all of those things in as great a measure as we might prove able to experience them. Leaving us quite unwilling to endure anything that asks we set them aside for even a moment.

Friends, He sat them aside for 30 or so years.

How then can we honestly claim a share in Him when, again, our prayers have been mostly prayed all but demanding He do things our way and see everything the same?

Our way.

Our will.

Our wants.

Our worries.

Our fears.

Our tears.

Our failures to find the reason as to why life sucks so bad sometimes.

For again, it’s not to break us apart as Christ already took that beating on our behalf. And that would simply go against the promise we all know of Jeremiah 29:11. Because if He destroyed us, as our sins so fully deserve, well, we’d have no future then would we? Have no hope either. Have no life in fact.

But friends, what do we have? What is this life? What is this way that is our own and why is it, albeit perfectly impossible, so stinking important?

Because we want to experience more comfort for however many years we may or may not have left? Because it would help us avoid some of the pain and misery of this monster we’ve made of and by ourselves? Because we think we deserve to not have to endure suffering or struggling or facing down something that’s hard or heavy?

Friends, it’s our cross He carried!

And we’re told here that He did so well before that wooden kind He dragged up that hill.

No, He spent His entire life here crying out to the One who could have come up with some other way that didn’t involve the brutality that He knew was coming.

The very One who didn’t because, well, there is no other way.

Because every sin owes a death that someone thus has to die. And yeah, that is a supremely heavy weight to have to carry.

One in fact so heavy that we all do all we can for as long as we can to live as if we don’t have to even acknowledge.

How is that fair?

It isn’t. It’s not fair. It’s not right. It’s not possible if we were to ever be honest. Because, again, every sin owes a death. Jesus came with the express purpose, which He upheld fully, of paying that debt for every single one of us. But what I think we so often manage to misunderstand is just how long He carried the weight of our wrongs. It’s become something we relegate to a weekend holiday every spring.

Indeed, we live as if He only suffered for a few days.

Friends, Christ carried our weight for decades, centuries even. And that’s because God has always known, all along, every wrong turn we’d take, every foul word we’d say, every single prayer we’d pray asking only that He see things our way and do everything always the same.

Don’t we understand that He can’t? It’s just like with Christ’s life. Yeah, surely the God of all creation could have come up with something else, some other way that didn’t involve watching His Son die, nor then Christ suffering the way He did.

But friends, if He did anything else that didn’t require death, then His very Word would mean nothing.

And what would anything mean then?

No, God is a God of supreme justice but also of surpassing patience. And we see the both in the life of Christ Jesus. For He embraced fully the misery of being found on the wrong side of God’s wrath, and He did it all so as to accomplish for us His ability to now intercede for us, washing us still daily clean of all the things we still get wrong.

Every such mistake still made because still we insist on living this life our way.

All because we still seem to apparently assume that our will is somehow better than the will which made the Way. All because we think we know our will would help us to avoid the pain.

But for how long?

Either way the truth is we’re living a life obeying something. Question is whether or not it leads to life or just to our still thinking that we’re already living one despite the sin we’re living in.

Reckon that answered in whether or not our will is broken knowing the suffering met by He who didn’t refuse God’s will knowing there was in fact no other way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold