Day 3968 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Ezekiel 36:27 NIV

The captivated captive

Among the hardest things for us to see through eyes that know not the measure of their own blindness as has been purchased by what have been souls themselves sold unto the darkness that has ushered them into the living of what are lives lived lost inside this lust for what is essentially death itself which is the wage that is won by all sin, yes, even those we see not as sin but rather as friend, the hardest thing for us to see is the chains of our chosen captivity because, well, as it will inevitably, albeit eventually, turn out that we’ve been the ones forging them upon ourselves.

And, well, it’s hard for us to see the loss, the danger, the death inside of what we’ve come to believe is life.

Because, after all, we’ve been alive for all our lives and so this causes us to confuse this idea that sin is death seeing as how we’ve not died yet. And, since we’ve not died yet, then maybe there’s nothing of all we’re doing that’s truly as dangerous and deadly as some strangers may say. Because, after all, neither do they know our hearts nor why then we do what we do, want what we want, chase what we chase, waste what we waste. And indeed, we are all quite solitary creatures when it comes to our efforts unto creation.

We alone know what we’re doing as is being always done to get us where we hope to be going, plan to be getting and expect to find waiting once we get there. And so this finds us always quite apt to distrust anyone who speaks anything that in any way goes against anything that we’re doing that, to us, seems quite necessarily done thanks to the plans we’ve made for the dreams we have of the hopes we hold as if hope can be held.

And yet it’s in this general approach to hope as is undertaken as if hope is something which can be so taken off of some store’s shelf or found in the middle of some crowd somewhere that’s unfortunately left us so lost inside the crowds that storm the stores seeking to buy what someone else told us will make us better and thus life the same. All because we’ve become so easily tricked into thinking that everything’s meaning is proven best in the migration of the masses toward it.

The more people who are looking for it, waiting for it, hoping for it, the more we’re able to imagine our need to do the same. And that both because we, as a people of an increasing herd-based mentality, know only to do whatever everyone else is trying to and we’ve in fact done this for so very long that in our continuing to do it we then see nothing wrong.

Because of all we likely don’t yet realize that we seriously misunderstand, the fact is that we do understand that were we to ever venture near the admittance that our following the masses has only left us basically leaning upon what is a world, one visibly crumbling at this point, to continue to instruct us in the manners in which we should live our lives and the measures we’re meant to use so as to ensure we again never lose this ability to always assume we’re doing nothing of everything we shouldn’t.

Which is the very lie that is causing the world around us to collapse into such a growing confusion that we’re all just down here literally cheering one another on as we each make it up as we go nowhere.

It really is quite the show!

Unfortunately it’s one that’s becoming harder and harder to watch for those who are growing deeper and deeper in hope.

As in real hope. The kind of hope you can’t hold. The version of hope that you can’t buy, that you can’t try on, that you can’t drive home. The hope that is always just out of reach and a little beyond the scope of our vision, and that on purpose. Why? Because a hope we can find is no hope at all. And, well, I contend that this is proven better than anywhere in the Gospel of Christ and, well, where He left it.

Because, in the Gospel, He left here. He left us. He walked among us for a few decades and then died to what sadly remains the sinful flesh in which, for which we all still walk in what are entirely too many ways. And yet He did this so as to, as He promised, send forth the Spirit unto those who He knew would accept it. Technically He sent forth the Spirit into the world and thus it’s available to all of us.

But let’s be honest, it’s not really hard anymore to determine those who are seeking His Way from those many more who probably never will.

Indeed, folks are making it pretty obvious anymore just which side of this eternal line they’re walking in what are lives in which not even being blind would help miss all the madness and mental atrophy being shared amongst humanity. No, the decay of society is something so evident and prevalent that the only way to avoid seeing it, hearing it, feeling it at this point, is to go live in a cave in the woods and never come out.

And yet, odds are the odds would even find us there as they come barging into every nook and cranny they can find seeking some place to hide their twisted deeds as are also being shown for all to see because such is the surest way to find assurance that what you’re doing is right to be done.

For truly, anymore this society is so swollen upon the suckling of stupor from one another that lies are truth, good is bad, dark is light, right is wrong and the only way to have fun and live a successful life is to do as the now all but entirely lost common sense would have told us never to even consider.

All because we’ve become captives of the cancers of what is a culture of confusion as crafted inside every single delusion that’s left us all so deluded, diluted that we haven’t anymore any remembrance of who we were, who we once wanted to be, the world we once saw, the hope we can’t see. Simply because we don’t look anymore. Instead we’re very much a one-day-at-a-time kind of people these days. We’re always so intrigued by living in the moment that we don’t even know to count the moments anymore.

Probably because we’re so numb to life itself anymore that we make not memories in our moments as, well, there’s not really any point in remembering our mistakes, right?

No, those are the things we hide from prying eyes that aren’t really prying at all. Because the truth is that nobody cares about whatever anyone else is doing anymore. Not sure that anyone ever did. Seems like some might have at some point. But anymore we’re all so vastly lost in our own little worlds being catered to by algorithms serving us an endless buffet of funny cat videos and political updates that we don’t know anything else that thus isn’t going on.

All because if it’s not actively happening to us then we know nothing about it. And, further, if the algorithms suppress it then we’ll probably never see it. And, well, if we never see it and thus know nothing about it then we needn’t really concern ourselves with it as it obviously then can’t ever really impact us that much.

Kind of like Jesus.

Because, again, He left us.

He’s not here. Can’t see Him. Know far more of those who live as if He never did than those few those many consider freaks who live believing that He did, does and is nearing His returning to come and prove it once more to the tune of millions of shocked faces seeing as if for the first time ever the vital necessity of adhering to a hope that simply asked that we be holy which is really nothing more than the setting apart of something marked for special use from amongst what is the rest that is as common as, well, most are seeking to be anymore.

We don’t want to be set apart anymore. Rather we want friends and fans and followers who subscribe to our endless flow of ideas given us always from others. We want to see our numbers grow and so we grow to say or do whatever it takes to get the clicks and earn the likes and bolster our belief that, again, what we’re doing is as right as what hopefully grows to be millions of fans and friends says it is.

Indeed, we just want to do whatever someone else is doing because we see the success, the fun, the enjoyment they’re having and can’t think of our lives being lived any further, any longer without our drinking from the cup upon which they’ve drank themselves drunk trying to do whatever this seedy world wants us to.

Which is basically nothing but what they tell us.

And so we do it. We become at first captive by the appeal and allure of celebrity thanks to all the glitz and glam involved, the fortunes of those famous helping them find all the friends and followers we too want to have so as to all but confirm our having become convinced that we’re again doing nothing wrong. And then we slowly become captives not of the famous folks but rather of the fakery of their finery. We welcome these unseen chains of our doing things, saying things, believing things and buying things simply because another human told us to.

All because we want to feel as if we belong right where we are as such is the surest way, the fastest way to feel at home. To feel alive. To feel as if we’re not losing this life to what is a way that’s racing away from the Way that is the Truth that is the Life and yet only promises it to those who do as He asks them to rather than what some famous person suggest they do.

And it’s in this that we find again that line drawn in the proverbial sands of time in which we take hold of a life lived either one way or the other.

We either continue doing as we always have, which is both easiest and finds for us the simplest and quickest form of what’s already proven to be an endless assurance that we needn’t ever change anything, which sounds awesome to a people now completely terrified of changing anything in what are lives in which we do continue to find quite a decent return on our investment of our souls unto the gaining of what’s a growing portion of the whole world, or we do something different than that.

Like, way different!

As in the kind of different that seeks not self-appeasement or social agreement or the widely perceived success, security even of what most here believe such things to be. Indeed, we do something that actually starts with death in our dying to all we’ve been living for, all that pretty much everyone else will go on racing toward, and from there seek only to die a little more every single day to every single way in which we’ve walked in which we slowly learn that we never should have.

Because we grow to see that sin is bad. That doing wrong isn’t right no matter how much money you might make. That “friends” who tell you what you want to hear so that you’ll do as they want you to aren’t really your friends at all. That indeed, the wounds of a true friend are more loving and thus life-giving than the kisses of those who seek to soothe itching ears and placate wayward hearts and encourage wicked minds to only more wickedness seek to find.

And make no mistake, it’s again increasingly obvious that the vast majority of people in this place are so captivated by their own captivity that they will both keep doing all they can to encourage all their fans and “friends” to settle for the same chains as they all then gather together to make fun, mock, persecute and just in general hate any who dare walk in the freedom that they think they’ve found in said chains as are now being shared by more and more as the darkness grows and grows.

Which is, again, a darkness we’ve all already known and thus know perfectly well how to enjoy just as much as so many still are and will continue for the foreseeable future. Meaning then that we can always find our way back should our try for anything different, anything better ever let us down or prove harder than we expected.

Which it will.

Because the truth of everything from life to faith is that nothing is meant to be easy as we don’t grow when we’re not pushed as we’ll instead always just turn back for what is easy as it will always feel far safer, bring less failure, thus always leave us feeling less foolish and, odds are, sure up our following of those who themselves are doing nothing but whatever they always have.

And, because we’re a people of such a depth of pride and arrogance, most things will let us down as well when they inevitably don’t go our way.

Thus meaning that even He who died to save our souls will perhaps prove a disappointment when we, like the rich young man who thought he might always be able to fall back on buying his way into Heaven, hear that He really does want us to sell everything we have to the tune of even letting go our stranglehold on our very own lives so as to follow Him with crosses in hand ready to do as He did so as to find where He went.

Which, yes, is Heaven which, yes, sounds amazing. But why?

Because God’s there.

And God’s good.

And yet we’re not.

And this is why something has to be done that involves doing everything differently as a show that He has done something new and in fact continues to inside our very hearts, souls, minds, lives. And we do this by, again, taking up crosses and doing as most here never will. All in what is a self-sought testimony that we are trying as if it all depends on us because we finally understand that it all depends on Him.

For salvation is accomplished via God’s goodness, mercy, compassion and kindness. Thus it has nothing to do with man’s efforts, abilities, prosperity or popularity.

In fact, those things are the things which often tend to get in our way as they forge again and again more and more links for our well-known chains of sinful captivity.

A captivity that He left so as send back the Holy Spirit who, amidst the process of leading us into all truth and there reminding us of all Jesus had to say on the subjects of right and wrong, dark and light, death and life, will do just that so well that we awake daily only to look up and see things that shouldn’t be the way they are. This is a process called discernment and it’s one that involves our testing of the spirits to judge those who are from God from those who are not interested in such a hope.

An undertaking we should all be inexpressibly thankful for getting to undertake in light of the fact that everything will return to that from which it came.

A promise which proves that those who are from God will return to God and there be welcomed to spend out their retirement years resting for all eternity from what was in every way a life lived in struggle and strife as is sure to be found in the daily laying down of a life.

And too that those who lived knowing nothing of what it is to a life so lose will find then nothing of any reason for Him to welcome them into, unto what they’d spent their lives never once seeking.

All because He is a supremely just and fair God and, as His very own Word literally promises, will in fact give us the desires of our hearts. Which is a fact already proven in that, having seen that the thoughts and attitudes of the human heart had become only evil all the time, He thus has given all of us over to a depraved mind in which we, like Nebuchadnezzar, walk these streets amongst the rest of those living like animals and there doing what the animals are doing.

A process ceased when we, like that king, come to our senses and realize that He is God and we are not, a process called repentance in which we turn from a life lived as if we’re nothing but animals toward a life lived as if we are the holy creation of a wholly Holy God who thereby has every right to ask us to be holy which is, again, nothing more than being set apart for special use.

Which seems something that I don’t understand nobody wanting to be seeing as we all want to feel as if we’re special, useful, good for something, alive with some sort of reason, purpose for being.

And yet sadly we see a society continue to sink back into the drink of a life spent so drunk on selfish delight and vain delusion that nobody here seems at all willing to lose it.

But friends, what is there to keep?

What are we holding onto so tightly that we can’t make room for the hope of eternal life? What in this world is so gravitational that we can’t give it up for the chance to live our lives as if we’re leaving them behind and finally going home to God?

Why don’t we want that hope? Because it asks we do something different? Can’t we look around and find any reasons that we should want to be different from what society’s become? Friends, this world is becoming increasingly lawless and this is a fact as easily evidenced in the “progression” that’s found us decriminalizing such things as doing drugs. We’re literally to the point of just voting to make things permissible because we don’t want to quit doing as we shouldn’t.

Is that the best we can do? Literally just set out to rewrite the rules so that we needn’t feel bad about not doing better?

Truth is that such is both what this place has always been and thus will for a while more be. All because we as a people are so adverse to personal responsibility that we now actively seek ways to make it legal to avoid it. We’re to the point of using the law to applaud our doing of what once broke it.

Just like those people did with that golden cow.

We want things our way and, well, we’ve proven that we’ll do some messed up stuff to make it happen. But friends, I’m begging you, just look around! Is this truly who we want to be, where we want to be? Or as I asked yesterday, do you believe in better?

Bottom line is that the majority here will succumb to the pleasures of staying put. And, well, we all have the freedom to do the same. Just know that what we do determines where we go as our actions have both consequences and commendations. Many here will live out the rest of their days seeking their commendations first and that because society still lives as if laws are meant to be broken and thus consequences cannot happen and thus we’re free to do as we please and in this make our pleasure our god.

But I contend that the better idea is to welcome the willingness of He who is God to lead us out of that common way into a life spent trying every single day to grow in the hope of Heaven as is to be awarded only to those who come apart from this place, never again seeking to touch, say, think or be an unclean thing, and rather seek to become holy as He is holy as is done only in our upholding of His Word rather than a wicked world’s fallen will.

In the end the choice is ours. Problem is He made His choice and it involved dying to sin.

What then do we think He will think if we continue ahead rejecting the Spirit that He’s sent to lead us back home, a choice made simply because the same Spirit at first deems us criminals, but only to free us from the captivity that all such miscreants both choose and thus deserve unto a life of hope and freedom that begin to captivate us in such ways that we turn from ours back unto His and follow Him wherever He leads?

Indeed, where do we think we’ll end up if we never find reason to follow He who left here and went home to Heaven?

And even more, how can we look around and plausibly remain captives captivated by a way of life that lives as if He never did and still doesn’t?

I for one find no hope in that.

But that’s probably because I’ve personally become quite so captivated by what hope is that I’ve long since stopped looking where hope isn’t.

And I pray you’ll join me because it’s a journey that only gets better and better all the time as you live trying to find He who came only to leave so as to Himself break free from what He calls us to also leave.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold