Day 3957 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Isaiah 55:7 NIV

Losing a self

That’s the share, is it not? To lose a self? To not merely weigh the possibility of a life lost being a necessity but to rather both welcome said understanding and then humble oneself unto walking daily into new depths thereof? To no longer stray from the contemplations of a lost soul’s vacations from the very vocation unto which they’ve been stationed but to rather embrace the thoughts of all the times in which we did everything other than anything we should have?

A now lifelong collective of choices that have accomplished our having become what He had to come to leave undone so that the same we might now not merely become but delight in the daily process such fading entails.

And while it is a truly strange thought to think in what’s in many ways still that mindset stayed upon such soured assumptions as our present presumptions that whatever it is that we’re doing, wanting, winning at the moment is somehow always what’s best for us to be so pouring ourselves into, what I know we’ll find once we’ve tried is that a change of mind begets a change of life.

I’ve myself seen it inside myself now a handful of times.

Each one leaving me better reminded of the better He had in mind when He created me to be everything other than whatever I’ve become instead, a better I measure in brand new ways in these new days in which He’s inspiring me unto such friendly enemies as discipline, determination, devotion, a dire direction devoid of distraction and that most often designed inside the very same mind that once thought I was doing okay.

In a life that I now see wasn’t going okay at all.

That’s again not to say that I’ve not had a great life along the way to what is this day in which so much has changed that I find I seek only to change more as I lay awake just last night thinking of all the ways in which life’s again grown sore and sour and lacking the power that is humility and happiness and the hope of both in permanent measures not known in this place in which I am and of which I’ve stayed in what are ways that I am trying to change, but only as slowly as my doubt will allow.

And I don’t know why.

For again, I’ve seen first-hand the beauty of God’s battle waged against us on Calvary. I’ve seen the fruit of such labor as His socially perceived languishing as preferred by a people lost and last in the way of lamenting what they’d become. I’ve seen the lamenting of dying friends found and felt in His coming back again and again to revive me again from what’s apparently a life spent doing what I didn’t know I didn’t know I should have known.

All because the same knowledge has been given unto all of us in regard to right and wrong and their accomplishments of life and death.

Both of which are seen perfectly in Christ.

It’s just that in He alone does the life won by the right manage to overpower the death demanded of all wrong.

And indeed, I’ve literally felt something of that resurrection power in my very own life as I no longer stay up at night soaking in the seedy images that left scars that the seed of salvation has to still wrestle with in nights in which I try now to sleep so that I might awake early and get to spending my time, my life writing these posts and delighting in the quiet of a fogged morning’s peace allowing me a rare measure of the same that I never knew was always there.

Yeah, I wonder often about all I’ve missed in what was a life in which I focused so much on myself that still I find myself doing the same entirely too often to allow for my estimation that I’ve grown into a child of Heaven. No, I daren’t imagine such things as I find the need only to continue this strain toward all things made new in what is a life still filled with so much so old that I cannot for the life of me dare to believe that I’m in any way done.

Each morning proving too that He’s neither done with me.

Which is yet another wonder.

Because, knowing where I’ve been and who I became along the way, and too the echoes of such still seen inside my daily failures to find evidence both of my being found and that finding for me a renewed resolve to dissolve from everything that I once was, I know that He has no reason to continue holding out hope for what’s time and again proven a life so adverse to change that still my mind, my heart, my life get in the way.

I truly have no idea what He sees in me and I wish often that I could see it too as I consider that it might make easier this journey into the new that I so often struggle to accept being as needed as my tendency toward a selfish complacency so often contends against.

Meaning then that all I so often see is the struggle being fought between who I’ve become and who He apparently still wants for me to be.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s that we can’t see it. For such outcomes and finish lines aren’t viewable in life. Because if they were then we’d all manage only to plot and plan a path which gets there slowly so that we might both enjoy whatever we might along the way and still ensure that we arrive in time.

That’s why none can know the day nor hour. It’s because if we did then we’d do only as we’ve done right up until that final moment in which we could reach for faith in a most forsaken and for granted expectation of it being there but only when we need/want it to be. And indeed, such death-bed meetings of Christ are both said to be achieved all the time and thus sadly the general expectancy of many who thus intend upon living still their lives within the very same ways as all the other days in which they did nothing of His everything new.

And while the outcome in regard to eternity is truly what matters more than anything, what both terrifies me and shatters me is the thought of our missing out on the life we could have lived experiencing Him, serving Him, learning Him and then sharing Him with whomever we’re here to so as to ensure that the seed sown inside doth truly reap a harvest a hundred, sixty or thirty times that which was planted.

A life spent going into all the corners of wherever our journey takes us and carrying His Gospel with us, sowing some seeds of such hope and healing ourselves.

Indeed, I wonder of all the people I never told about Jesus in that life back before I knew He’d freed us. I wonder about all the help I could have offered had I accepted His before I did. I wonder about the stories I’d have to tell of people living better by now than they may or may not be as I neither told them about my Father nor likely even met them in those moments in which I could have.

Yes, I shudder at the opportunities I’ve forsaken due to a lost way of life I wouldn’t.

Forsake.

A choice chosen simply because we know perfectly well what it means. The cross pretty much clears up any and all confusion on the matter. Which is why I believe He chose such a path to victory. Because, well, what gets that message across better than the ultimate defeat as seen through eyes still blind to the hope of there being life after this death we chosen to live?

Surely He had to do something that new in order to get through to however many He’d determined to so revive in terms of sight, hearing, boldness and belief.

Something also so shareable that the same could come unto Him and ask Him to teach them how to do what He did.

Something that so few want to do that narrow remains the way by which that life left beyond death is to be found.

Yep, the one place none of us dare to look through eyes that see the tomb as only the final stop on a ride that we don’t want to end.

Simply because we’re still so obtuse as to imagine that life and here are so entwined that they cannot ever be untangled.

But they will.

Question becomes whether or not we will before they do.

Which is the answer He came to give us in His asking us to take up crosses that look like His in a humility that feels like His in what become lives that start to be lived like His, granted, in whatever puny measure we might ever come to experience. For the truth is that I highly doubt any of us will meet with crucifixion as it’s not a thing we do anymore. We still persecute though. Still mock and make fun and belittle those who believe in anything better than whatever the rest deny we’ve all become.

Indeed, we still deny that we’ve become anything so violent or vile that the very Son of Heaven would truly need to come and endure what He did.

I mean, we might every now and then agree that we’ve made a mistake here or there, but they’ve never been that bad!

But friends, what then is bad? Is it something only seen inside the lives of others? Is sin, wickedness, evil truly something so variable that it’s always found in more impressive amount in those around us? Is our selfish meander truly such a different measure than those who’ve chosen to murder?

Do we truly think that God’s so bored in Heaven that He’s keeping score, dividing our darkness into different degrees in some kind of points-based system like those we’re so used to in such things as sporting events and standardized tests and mid-year evaluations as work?

Do we lose a point of righteousness for every foul word we speak? Two for thinking ill thoughts? Nine for stealing something? 20 for hitting someone? 25 for hating them enough to do so?

I mean, just how much do we think we matter that we think we can be measured with some different ruler than the cross?

And do we not hold this weird assumption simply because we tend to think that others should probably get started on their journey to and through salvation before we begin ours both because they need more forgiveness than we do and we thus have yet little reason or worry as to wanting the cross?

All because we again know perfectly well the cost.

Indeed, there’s been achieved on our behalf such a clarity to this path of Christianity that there’s truly left no room for doubt or debate. Jesus literally died to what is the very sinful way of life that all of us have lived. And yeah, we could and often do spend our time trying to find all these lines that we think delineate these many differences in regard to depth of depravity and degree of darkness. But in the end none of it’s going to matter as the only measure that He’s promised to use is that which we use ourselves.

Thus seeming to say that we’re literally the ones all but choosing just how hard both this path goes and too that day toward which each one here grows.

For time itself says that we’re getting closer to finding out who all’s right and who more is wrong in regard to Jesus and the Bible and faith and thus the necessity of salvation evidenced in repentance or rather the more widely-held disbelief thereof.

But my wondering is both why risk it and what all we’re missing when and while we do.

For you see, a sad reality has befallen we fallen men. It’s that we see everything in life in terms of finish lines, due-dates, appointments and the schedules we lean so heavily on to keep us running on time. Problem is we’re running out of time and thus too that to find our own personal stance in regard to faith and that, again, evidenced in the fruit we bear.

And that’s my question:

Do you want to be known at the end of everything for the fruit you’re bearing now?

Let me swing at it from another angle:

Is the person you are the one you want to be judged for having so chosen to be?

Because you see, upon that day when our every choice is weighed and we ourselves sat upon the scales with eternity on the line and there dependent upon just how much we’re surrendered unto our being shareholders in Christ’s sacrifice, we’ll thus be found as either those who are His and lived their lives doing the things that existed as evidence that they knew it or rather as those who He himself has said He will proclaim as having not known.

Followed by a direct order to be gone from Him, and that forever.

Truly one of the most heartbreakingly horrific verses in all the Bible.

Why?

Because for all our lives we’ve often had no idea as to just how much we have to lose as we’ve scantly had the audacity to sit in wonder as to the measure of forever and the distance designed between the peace and horror to be found once we get there.

Rather all of us have spent our lives doing all these little things that we just remain convinced matter more than they might. Not that nothing matters in life because everything does. It’s just that everything matters in life because all we say, do, think and believe, it’s all fruit which tells those with eyes to see and ears to hear everything they need to know about everything we both are and are trying to become.

And this goes for God above and beyond all others as He sees and hears what most folks around us never will.

Does that not terrify you? It does me. In fact it terrifies me in ways that are new all the time. Indeed, I continue to find so many things that I’m doing that I just can’t manage to imagine He might be willing to welcome. I honestly haven’t the foggiest idea as to why I’m even of the audacity to believe that I might make it to Heaven as I know of all the things I say, the things I do, the mistakes I make in both.

And too that each and every mistake that I come to see that I happened to make is but one more time in which I knew of the right thing to do and yet did something else.

Yes, I still sin and that in ways that I hate more and more every time I realize them.

And yet I’m thankful to realize them as my being able to notice them allows me to do something about it so as to not do it again. This is what we call repentance. It’s our seeing of something we’ve said or done as something we shouldn’t have said or done and determining, via our hating of it, to never repeat it. And yes, it’s a most arduous process as it’s one that proves both humbling and humiliating, and by all measure seems to be one that will last our entire stay here.

But friends, what else could we do that could matter so much?

I mean, we clearly have plenty of other options in this world, and have in fact dabbled in many thereof along the way. But have any of the paths we’ve walked, the plans we’ve made, the profits we’ve found or the promises we’ve broken truly achieved for us the hope of Heaven? Can we do anything inside this life the ways in which we’ve lived it to accomplish such an outcome as our finding what we haven’t found yet?

Or do we need to come at all this from a much different direction if we are to find what we neither have nor ever can on our own?

That’s the life that He calls us to lay down. It’s the one spent living as if we’re to be somehow justified in our taking the lead in getting ourselves lost. It’s the one spent trying to do everything we could to please ourselves, to serve ourselves, to glorify ourselves with what is a glory that we have no idea what to do with. For honestly, what is glory to a people like us?

What can we accomplish with it? What will it benefit us to glorify ourselves?

What will it benefit us to gain the world at a further expense of the soul we’ve already lost plenty of in our gaining of so much so worldly that telling us apart is quite the difficulty?

Do we want it to be so hard to tell us and a fallen world apart when He comes, sickle in hand, to separate the wheat from the chaff, those who are His from those who at the idea laugh?

Friends, again, the Scriptures make it clear just how simple this path really is. Easy? No. But simple, yes. And that’s because following Christ is truly as simple as laying down a life. And now it’s entirely easy to see how that is in no way an easy thing to do. And this is a fact we see proved in the weight He carried in not only the agony in which He hung but also in the heavy prayers He prayed and words He said up to and on through the process of dying in our place.

There’s nothing about this call that’s easy because, as said here, it’s taken up in the very forsaking of our wicked ways and wayward thoughts, ways and thoughts that have combined to form the very way of life we’ve lived for, well, all our lives. He’s asking us then to lay down, let go, leave behind all we’ve ever known and to do so stepping into a new life that we thus know nothing about, and thus have little in the way of an ability to uphold well.

He’s asking us to fail. To falter. To admit we’ve both made a mess of everything and have then no ability to believe in our doing anything else going forward.

But that’s the point: To go forward. To move on. To get up out of our life spent burning ourselves to ashes upon the alters of every worldly idolatry and selfish stupidity and to join Him in doing something new, something which begins with the death of all we’ve ever known of life and grows from there into a new way of life in which we will only continue to see all the many failures and flaws that we’ll still need to forsake as we grow in He who is the Way.

And yet that it’s hard is what explains the promise holding so much hope.

After all, what is there to need of eternal rest if we’ve not fought a good fight, run a good race, lived a good life in which we left it all on the line in what we grew to see as our sovereign duty to uphold the righteous will of God as who are but the undeservingly forgiven sheep thereof?

No, if we wish to enter His rest we too need to join in the battle He rested from.

And that is that fought against the sinful flesh we’ve carried.

So then let us stop carrying it and start fighting against it.

Otherwise He will.

And, well, that doesn’t have a history of going well.

For those thus fought against.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold