Day 3945 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 3:13 NIV

Accursed

Reckon that such is what we were, many still are and even more will remain. And that all because despite our attempts to pass the blame for the lives we’ve lived so vastly tied into the flame that burned against the Name, turns out there is no outrunning the years spent rigging the game against He who came in order to save from the same as we’d became. No, for God knows those who are His from amongst all of us who’ve lived as if we weren’t as was done within our ways as won against within the punishment of Christ.

A punishment we should have endured in response to how we’ve wasted our lives.

Simply because He didn’t. And sure, granted, He is the very Son of Heaven whereas we are all merely sons and daughters of our fellow heathens. But still, He accomplished more in His mere 30 or so than I ever have in my going on 38. In fact, looking back I see a wonderfully tragic mix of memories I hope to keep and mistakes I can’t manage to forget. And yet for a long time in there I lived as if that was it. That the entirety of my life’s experience was to be waged and won within the continuing to live as if I knew what I was doing.

Not knowing the mistakes I was making.

A fact which finds me now daily worried as to those errors I’m choosing still without knowing yet what they are as still they seem the right choices to make.

Perhaps showing forth entirely too much reliance and trust still placed upon myself, the very last place I should seek to have any of the either found knowing again what I’ve managed to do before with them placed in places similar. Similar only because I still sound the same and look quite alike as well, though my voice has changed now that I seem to be finding it in ways in which I didn’t realized I’d lost it along the way and, well, my appearance is somewhat different as, well, losing a buck thirty will do that to you.

And I wouldn’t change the either because I actually find, still rarely of course, these seemingly misplaced moments in which I don’t mind myself quite as much as my past mistakes have made me along the way.

Indeed, I absolutely hate looking back on all the mistakes I’ve made as I’ve always tried to be the one to live a good life, to make those around me proud of me, to uphold my family name as it was were worth even more than my own. And yet I look back across the expanse of what in many ways seems now only a tragic escape from the very gravity of reality and see only that I tarnished pretty much everything I’ve ever touched.

Yes, far from the midas of mistaken lore, the life I’ve lived looks not as it were led by someone who turned whatever they touched into gold. Rather it’s all now rusted, those things, thoughts, theories that I’ve trusted. Sad to say I’ve known well that idol’s way of a life in which I’ve crafted a museum curated of and by and only for me alone. For I’m the only one who’s ever known what mattered most to me and why.

Well, me and He who plans to part the sky.

And yet that’s now what terrifies my life. It’s knowing my tendency to be tragically unready whenever His will wants for me a way in which I’m not ready to go. I know that I’ve so many times turned a blind eye and unwilling heart toward the life He’s asked me to live, a life finally given unto it coming apart. And it makes sense why none of us would want to follow in footsteps.

For we know where they lead as either read from the pages of the Bible or heard in a sermon on Sunday or driven past on an Easter weekend.

Yes, we all know of the cross and the life there lost and the reason why as well. It wasn’t because He was bored in Heaven and looking for something different to do that weekend. Wasn’t because He was just more angry than normal and decided to come mingle with His misconstrued masterpiece. Wasn’t even that He was shocked or surprised by the lies of a life we’d chosen to live as if life itself were our own portrait to paint.

It was simply because the brush was never ours and we apparently just weren’t going to ever get the picture any other way.

And so Christ came.

Not to have the fun we all still so often try to find. Not to experience the comfort we all live as if we can’t breathe without. Not to taste and see what’s always been apparently so amazing about this lost way of life we’ve all found ourselves living. No, it was rather a measure all aimed at one moment in which one act was chosen, a misery undertaken that was chosen because of its ability to accomplish in some an understanding as to the gravity of our continuing what those first of us are still known for starting.

Yes, Jesus came to put back on the tree the fruit you and me should have never taken to begin with.

Simply because He knew, knows still that our beginning by our continuing within only the commonality of a fallen and still falling humanity is only ever going to accomplish our ending.

Because He who defines sin is the same as He who then determines the cost thereof. And yet, by some undue stroke of truly amazing grace, He chose to die our death by taking our place. A weight we should all be so able to imagine and yet the one we live as if we’re unwilling to even fathom simply because we’ve become nothing more than a continuation, a reflection of those who refused to lose their grip on what isn’t even a life having lived it so very far right.

Indeed, it will prove the greatest sorrow amongst man when one day the Man does truly part the clouds and come back to this then fading ground to sort once for all of forever the wheat He’d planted from the chaff which grew alongside it.

Letting the both grow together so as to exist somewhat testing the other. A chance for blending taken entirely too lightly, leaving then the wheat still almost entirely unsure sometimes if it’s really worth trying this hard to stand so apart from what is a world that all but refuses to let us go. And this we know because we today carry in our pockets those metal and plastic rockets that shoot us back up that tree looking for more of that fruit of what remains a knowledge we’d all be far better off not knowing.

I think often of all things I wish I never knew. All the things I’ve said and done that I’d never known the audacity to. All the days I spent this life living as if this life were mine alone to define however mine eyes so blind could but barely see fit to make fit in what still doesn’t make sense. No, so little of this life in this world seems to mean anything anymore. All because we’re told every day that everything matters more than it did the day prior.

And our having succumbed to algorithms and other such tunnel visions has left us prioritizing profit and popularity, the very leaven of the Pharisees as was sown inside the assumption that they had it all figured out all because the people got out of their way in the streets and cowered before them in the synagogues.

As if such worldly praise and present comforts are worth anything at all beyond the moments in which we make ourselves believe they should be.

Issue then is I don’t think we will ever be able to so prove so misuseful unto He who created us unto good works and now knows the measure we’ve each lived apart from them here in whatever distance we’ve traveled from who He created us to be.

The very distance Christ went both with that cross carried and then His lifeless form carried further still into a grave some of us still struggle to believe He might have really left behind.

Not because we doubt the hope held in that He did.

Just because we know the cost owed would He could.

All because we know it a price we cannot afford, even with all the affluence and importance we’ve seemingly collected along the way to wherever this is that we are. We don’t even know as we’re most days entirely too busy still repeating our same old nothing to notice. A busyness chosen as it keeps us distracted from the very choices we’re still making that are still paving our very way toward our still owing what Christ apparently didn’t pay on our behalf.

Not that His sacrifice didn’t accomplish eternal atonement for all. No, just because if we’re still bearing the same fruit we were before we knew of Christ and the price He paid for us to live new lives, then we apparently didn’t remember to accept the gift.

For it was given with the implication that it would change everything.

And so then, if it’s still changed all but nothing in regard to how we live our lives, then I think it fair to surmise that our price is still owed.

For we’re told that it’s by the fruit that we’ll be known.

What then are we showing Him grown?

Because the fact of Calvary is that He came to put back on the tree the fruit we never should have taken from it. Not that we’ve all of the sudden forgotten the knowledge held within our having each partaken of that fruit of that tree of that knowledge of good and devilry. No, in fact we all know more now as to the difference between them than we did before.

All because that cross opens our every eye to the very way of life we’ve each chosen to live.

And yet His having had to die should be now seen in the way we live our lives in what are ways so vastly different and in fact eternally removed from who we were and what we did back before we knew that we ourselves are in every way daily new.

For such are His mercies, are they not?

They’re new every morning. But then, why does He have to keep giving them if not because we’re still needing them? Why then do we need such a daily measure of mercy still if not because we’re still not doing as we should be on this side of His hanging on that tree as what became a curse for all of life ever lived the way it was? Is the way we live our lives today the ways in which we lived them before?

Or is there something new in regard to the fruit that we’re bearing on this side of His bearing the weight of carrying our wrongs and nailing them back in the place from which we’d taken what wasn’t ours, fruit which helped us learn all the wrongs we’ve learned to like so much?

Sadly I doubt there’s much as, well, how could there be?

Indeed, this is the kind of contemplation I seek for all the time anymore. Not because the Word asks that I seek for some way to justify my life as my life is only to ever be justified in Christ and He gives that gift freely unto all who seek for it, knocking upon the door of Heaven in the humbled humiliation of having to come as if a prodigal beggar unto the one place we were made to belong.

No, it’s rather simply because I know that I’ve lived a life that has left me so vastly aware of just how much I don’t belong in that place He’s made for us all to come. And so I feel obliged to daily die in whatever way dare I might to that very life in which I lived as if I both weren’t a son made in His image nor with any interest of even trying to pretend I was.

And thus I know my tendency toward letting Him down and thus all but disowning myself on His behalf.

You ever think about that?

That our every sin is a choice made on both sides of this dividing line separating here from home and Heaven from hell? That it’s not merely a choice made on our side, in our lives, that thus impacts only us? He feels it all too. Because sin is missing God in the moment. It’s our choosing once more to ignore Him as we instead turn our attention and intentions unto a direction, a devotion that’s placed someplace other than Him.

Sin is our knowing the right thing to do, which is always whatever would honor God the most and bring Him the most glory, and rather choosing to honor ourselves, to serve ourselves, to refuse to deny ourselves.

A choice thus showing, and that every single time, that we know nothing of Christ as we continue to live the same very lives we’d always lived before we knew of His Name.

Bearing the same fruit despite what He went through to nail our mistakes back onto the tree from which we’d each stolen the knowledge of the right things to do, and thus our awareness too of all the wrongs we’ve chosen instead.

Friends, that’s the very weight of faith. It’s that carried in our humility understanding that we’ve always known the right things to do as we’ve always had His voice behind us, before us, beside us leading us toward our doing of His will for our lives. And thus we’ve always known all the times in which we did something else.

Some call it a conscience. Some refer to it as intuition. Still others think of it as going with their gut. But friends, doesn’t matter what we call it, the outcome is still the same.

It’s all both our understanding of the difference between right and wrong, and yet our still living as if such understanding is somehow our own.

But, riddle me this: How can a people so clearly adamant to never be wrong have actually been the ones to come up with what is a conscience or intuition that judges them as mistaken?

No, that comes from somewhere else.

That comes from someone else.

And the sooner we accept that, the sooner our entire lives begin to change as it helps us see that we will indeed answer to whomever created this ability for us to understand the difference between right and wrong, dark and light, good and evil. And that understanding will then cause us to recount our every choice ever made in which we didn’t do as we probably knew we had the reason to, the responsibility to.

Alas, if there’s one thing our ego hates it’s personal responsibility.

Which is why He asks us to join Him and die daily to what isn’t the life He created us to live!

A calling still resounding from that very tree upon which all of we have looked and mocked, laughed, jeered and sneered as if He were the only One truly cursed.

No friends, let us never be so bold as to try and forget that that was our place. Those were, are our sins. That blood was ours to shed. The nails ours to feel. The crown of thorns ours to wear having thought and lived for however long as if we were the kings, the very gods of our own lives.

Yes, He died in such a way that we consider accursed so as to open our eyes to our having cursed our own lives by having lived them in so many ways that deserve fully the full brunt of God’s wrath shown in that scene in which we watched Him bleed as He hung in an agony that we thankfully will never feel, but only if we share what He calls us to in our too taking up of crosses and killing upon the losses we’ve won within a life lived lost as to the gravity of God’s reality.

A choice that is by no means easy.

But friends, that’s the thing about life, about faith, about love, about mercy.

None of them should care so much about what is and is not easy.

Because none of them stop or walk away when things get hard.

“Now my soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.”

From Gethsemane to Calvary, we see Christ achieving the gravity of what has been for all of us a life lived lost in sin. The pain He felt wasn’t just in those hours He hung there. It was met in the years prior too. In every moment that He healed someone who was enduring an illness or injury that only exists because we’re fallen away from God. Every time that He was argued against or asked to leave a certain place. Every rejection He felt from Judas to the Pharisees. Every doubt He endured as to whether He could do what someone was asking Him to.

Every blow from the whip.

Every drop of their spit.

Every gram of that cross placed upon His back.

Every second spent hanging there for the very ones looking as Him and laughing.

Every moment in which we, even still today, do something we know we shouldn’t.

He has known all along the weight of our every mistake as even His very words ask from upon that cross in regard to why God had forsaken Him.

How can that not break our hearts, shatter our minds and insist then that we change our lives?

Because God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that we could, in Him become what we hadn’t known either!

Friends, how can we continue to live as if we know nothing of Jesus as is done every single time that still we do wrong when know of what’s right? No, there has to be a change. There has to be a choice. The problem is that He’s already made His.

And His was to become the curse for us.

How long until we come to terms with our having lived a way of life that shoved upon Him every misery He didn’t deserve, and, in that, finally determine to do not just something, but in fact everything different?

He can only pay our debt if we admit it owed.

And so then, until we do, the curse is still ours.

The death too.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold