Day 3941 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 5:8 NIV

Unlearned lessons

And they of a life thus unknown. And that because of the ease we do or do not perceive as promised within what’s been a road we’ve travelled always in preference of the least resistance. Indeed, we do well adore the easy road, and among us there are none willing to blame as, well, unto us all it’s always made sense what with all the comfort and safety either seen or elsewise assumed. I mean, sure, who wouldn’t wish to do as little as possible, enduring hopefully even less?

Even if it only arrives at our being only less?

Alas, that’s the finish line of our lazy logic that we oddly enough never manage to find our way unto realizing. For we’re a people of sight, stuck day and night here inside what is a life in which we gauge the gauntlets ahead via always only what they look like. Leaving then sight to sell the story that we ourselves end up buying for the belief that we’re just scared to have in anything more. Yes, we are a people vastly terrified of every improvement in life as every such growth in even our hope demands we at first confess that, no, we are in fact not there yet.

And even that we may have no idea as to where there even is.

But this demands that we embrace our limitations in terms of everything from intellect to ability. And, well, such are not hindrances that we’re often willing to even acknowledge, let alone confess, let alone embrace, let alone do as they’re meant to and inspire us unto our knees from which we plead for the strength we have not for the battle we’ve not thus ever fought in what’s then a life we haven’t lived.

Simply because all of us know all of life is a battle, a storm raging daily around us in what are little lessons offered of what’s a life we’re welcome to live that’s found always on only the other side of whatever struggle or strife we welcome into our lives. But that’s the problem. It’s that we don’t welcome it. Because we don’t want it. Because we don’t like it. Because it’s hard. It’s scary. It’s demanding in both difficulty and fear but also in what are every other way and worry that we know of life to weary.

Problem then is that we’re of a pride that has sown inside this idea that we can’t look weak. That we can’t show fear. That somehow showing or failures and flaws, our weaknesses and walls will amount for us a shunning of sorts issued from those whom we’ve lived this long trying to at least placate if not at best please. Indeed, we have settled for this shallowed existence in which we allow a sunken and swollen society to remain the substance from which we ourselves pick and choose who we are and what we do.

And thus we do nothing and become the same!

Simply because such is the name of the game that so many here still live as if life is. You know, I rightly agree that there may be in this some hypocrisy seen, and too that I am terrified of it showing forth my having partaken some of the Pharisee’s leaven, but the honest truth is that I daily look around and see only a world that gave up. And I know this to be the case because I myself have known that way.

I’ve known the easy road. Walked it for years in fact. I know the life lived lazy and fat. I know the allure of gluttony, know it so well I once shopped in only the big and tall clothing. And I’m not saying that such an outcome makes us any less of people. I am saying that we can all always be more, be better, but only when we embrace less of what our pride and arrogance think best.

Such as rest. Reward. Indulgence. Idolatry. Idiocy. Ignorance. Ignoring that we were created for more than whatever we ever determine to settle for staying. We were made with a life to be living! And yet we spend it on the sidelines because of the storms that scare us into hiding from the very hope we all but beg to come and find us.

Friends, that’s why He sends the storms!

That’s why life is hard. That’s why faith is heavy. That’s why so much of what we experience all but breaks us. It’s all to help us see what He planted inside that cannot, will not ever be known without something else coming along and blowing away the pastel exterior that we’ve so meticulously painted trying to please people doing the same.

He knows that if we’re ever to grow in the understanding of why we’re here, that He has to at first blow apart the façade we’ve become.

Because despite He creating us to fear, He didn’t create us to fear all of this stuff that isn’t Him. Alas, that idea is one anymore that’s mostly relegated to inspirational posters reminding us that if we fear God we’ll fear nothing else. I’m actually pretty sure I’ve had that poster! I know that I’ve at least liked it on social media every time I’ve seen it.

But is that it? Is the purpose of godly fear really something reserved for a social media post? Is the greatest source of all living hope truly nothing more than just an inspirational 8x10? Can we honestly contain the gravity of the Gospel’s call into something hanging on the wall of what is a room we live in because we’re terrified of going outside because we know what there we’d find?

That we’re entirely unready and because of that unwilling to face life?

That we’ve in fact fought so hard for so long to avoid life because of the struggle and strife that we don’t recall the last time we even breathed?

That for as long as we can remember we’ve been afraid of the weather coming along and blowing away all we’ve worked so hard to have and hold?

What do we have? Why do we hold it so tight?

What will we have left when it’s all left anyway?

What do we have left of us now?

I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know. And that because I don’t know what more I could have been by now. I don’t know the life I could have lived. Not to say that the one I’ve known has been bad. It hasn’t. I’ve had a great life. But sometimes I think it’s in fact been so amazing that it’s left me only that more unwilling to let it go and go on living.

And I say this because I’ve been the kind who’s lived all but locked to the novelty of nostalgia as known for it always being different than whatever is now.

Indeed, I cannot count how many times I’ve spent my life looking back. And yeah, just like Lot’s wife, it’s left me pretty salty as the kids say. I’ve felt so angry here lately as I again look around and just see a life that’s drown in delight and depravity and a world all but dancing through it as if next to nobody wants it any different.

Are we truly happy with what we’ve been and whatever this is that it’s all but insisted life become?

Or are we just so lazy anymore that we’d readily settle for anything so long as we didn’t have to do anything, risk anything, lose anything?

What do we have to lose if it means living a better life, being better people?

Can’t we see that that’s the entire point of everything we face in life? Not to break us but to break apart the lies that we’ve bought that have us believing we are something we’re not? Is that not why we’re always so afraid of trial, of struggle? Because we know it will ask of us things that the past has proven we can in fact offer but our present comfort inside our chosen complacency is elsewise unwilling to give?

When’s the last time you gave anything to anything in life?

Friends, we’ve become a people of bare-minimums. We’re always seeking for only the least effort we can offer to everything. We want only to just get by.

We’ve settled for a life in which our greatest hope is to just survive!

And that’s probably why we hate both the grave and He who came to save us from within it by His beating us into it!

Because the both promise that even though our greatest expectation in life is to merely hang on and hopefully not lose it, that we will.

We will lose this life. We will struggle while still inside.

What then are we worried about?

What are we still so afraid of? Life’s inevitabilities? More of the dreaded storms coming? Their bringing with them fire and failure? Exposing our foolishness and folly?

Friends, the real question is how long do we honestly think we run or hide from all that God sends us? A few more years? Couple decades maybe? Just doing a quick google search and some equally fast math, seems like the average male life expectancy here in the once-good ol’ US is around 75.8 years. I turn 38 next month, and so here at 37.9 I am literally halfway. Now, granted, I am trying my very best to extend that number a bit by working out, eating better, trying hard to take care of myself.

But even then, say I add on an extra ten, what does it matter?

What’s 85.8 years compared to eternity?

And if I don’t, if I’ve at best exactly one more half of what’s then exactly the same amount of time I’ve already lived. Do I want this second half to be just like the first?

Do I just want to repeat everything I’ve already done? See only all I’ve already seen? Know only all that I think I already do?

Never then become the better that I dare to believe I can still be?

Why are we so quick to agree to stop trying for such a belief if not because it’s just not easy?

I don’t think I’ve ever typed so many question marks in a single post before!

But honestly, folks we need to start asking ourselves some questions because I think we’d be quite shocked if not absolutely ashamed at the answers. Why? Because we stopped living life and started running away from it! All because it’s hard. Because it’s scary. Because we’re a people so willfully weak and wonderfully lazy that we refuse to obey the very God who’s so very good that He came and faced down what we deserve so that we wouldn’t have to!

Christ died on our cross and thus in our place all because He chose to obey, to submit, to surrender His will to that of His Father. Not because they weren’t always the same seeing as how He is Him. But simply because the flesh is still the flesh and, having put us on, He knew all the struggles that we do.

We see this perfectly in Gethsemane.

Jesus prayed not once, not twice, but three different times that, if God were willing, He’d be willing to not drink the cup He knew He’d come to drink.

Why?

Because it’s the cup of death!

Nobody wants to drink it as it’s entirely antithetical to life itself!

But here’s the thing, we all will!!!

Every single one of us is facing down the very barrel of that day in which we leave this place and go to find out the final score. Do we really want to go into that day with only what we’ve already done and nothing more? Go look in the mirror and ask yourself if you look like someone who’s ready to face their Maker. Problem is that if you did you’d probably think only about the reflection!

Because we’re again a people of sight and selfishness. We judge what we see and worry about it based almost solely upon how we think it will make us look and feel. That’s it. That’s pretty much the only measure we use anymore. Will this make me look bad? Will it help me feel good? We don’t care about anything else.

But friends, that means we can’t ever be anything else either. And that’s because we’ll always become just as weak and shy and scared of life as we’ve ever been when all we care to be is only whatever this is that we’ve become as is always chosen out of our fear of enduring whatever it would take to get where we’ve never been before.

We absolutely hate every such unknown in life because we know we can’t possibly be ready for what we can’t know. Don’t know how to deal with it. Especially when we’ve spent basically our entire life hiding from it!

But again, how much longer do we really think we hide from God?

See, that’s the thing that the Son has over all of us, one of many at least. It’s that despite His embracing the fullness of our fallen humanity, He was still of the divine humility to know that there is no escaping what God has intended. Doesn’t mean it’s easy. Doesn’t mean it’s comfy. Definitely doesn’t mean that it’s even conducive to life as we know it.

In fact, the point is that it isn’t!

Because God’s purpose for us isn’t completed. If it were, well, we’d not be here anymore. But that we are still here, well, that should go to show that we’ve still life to live. Why ain’t we living it then?

Or is this it? Have we arrived? Is this, whatever this is, is it the fullness of our potential? Are we finished?

Does it matter when He proves yet again that He’s not finished with us?

That’s the whole part of life’s inevitabilities. God is going to do as God sees fit no matter whether we’re good with it, ready for it, interested in it. He doesn’t need our approval! We may be of an arrogance so deep that we think He should at least hear us out as to why we think we can do without whatever fire or flood He intends to send our way so as to blow down these cardboard kingdoms we’ve built. Kind of stupid to think He’d be so willing to change to His plans just because we’d prefer the easier road.

Especially considering how we’re all going to be quite thankful one day when it turns out that His not changing His plans but rather walking in humble obedience unto them achieves our eternal salvation.

Yeah, that one worked out pretty good for all of us.

Doesn’t mean it felt good for Him. Don’t think any of us could be so obtuse as to imagine that it could have!

And yet He literally rose to the occasion knowing that, just as with Ester, He was here for just such a time.

Literally said so all but verbatim in john 12:27!

Friends, when’s the last time you yourself rose to something? When did you last go beyond what you thought you were capable of enduring? When’s the last time you willingly chose the harder road, the higher climb, the rougher life?

And no, I don’t mean deciding to cook at home instead of hitting up Mickey D’s.

But that’s just the problem I’m talking about. We’ve made our lives so easy, so comfortable, so stinking convenient that we don’t know how to struggle. We don’t know what to do with trial. We have no idea what it means to push ourselves past our breaking point because we’ve spent our every waking moment trying to invent all of these safeguards against our even remembering that we have one!

What’s going to happen then when that day does come and we’re all so broken that the only words we can find is “Jesus, save my life!”?

Dear friends, that’s the purpose of every one of life’s storms and struggles. They’re sent our way to help us see that we are not ready for what God is and what that means but that, by some miracle of immeasurable patience, He’s willing still to help us. That He’s trying to help us see a little more of who He is so as to help us understand the more we were created to be.

All because we were created in His image and emblazoned with His will and Word upon our hearts and within our lives. A fact we’ve simply forgotten here behind what are all these walls of worry and weakness we’ve built thinking them able to keep us safe from our ever having to struggle.

Folks, we need to struggle. We need to hurt. We need to be afraid. Why? Because those things are all that can help us grow! We can’t improve along the easy road. We can’t know of hope when we don’t need to hope. We can’t know of life if we settle for stopping here in and for whatever this is that we think we’re living.

We are not living life if we’re not moving in life. And well, what better to get us moving than something hard, scary or dangerous?

Again, we see this perfectly in Jesus. Gethsemane shows His humanity, but getting up, brushing off the dust and facing down the incoming horde shows His humility. We all have clearly that humanity that has always had us asking for God to help us avoid something hard, miserable or scary.

When will we find the humility that gets up, brushes ourselves off and says, “you know what, fine, let’s do this”? Let’s go. Come what may, God will get us through it.

Friends, that’s what faith is!

It’s not the willingness to get up early and dress fancy on Sunday morning. It’s not the five minutes we set aside one night a month to read the Word. It isn’t flowery songs sung by professional choirs. Faith is facing down the fires in life and for once not running away. It’s understanding that if God sends it, He will get us through it. It’s welcoming whatever He intends knowing that He has a purpose for it, and just like so many examples in Scripture, His purposes are in fact for our good.

So long as we love Him that is!

Because that is the whole point. It’s all aimed at helping us to learn both who He is, what that means, and why it doesn’t always amount to our suffering. Sure, there will be some. We will all face trial and feel pain. Those things are just a part of life. But friends, point proven! If pain and trial are truly a part of life, then what is it we expect to find by our always running away from them?

Running away from life doesn’t seem like the best way to find life!

So let’s stop running and start obeying. Not because it’s easy, safe or comfy. No, simply because it’s what we’re called to do by Him we’re called to follow.

He gave us the example.

But it’s our lives that we live either in step with Him or still running from Him.

Which is it?

Start living life and learning faith or keep running away?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold