Day 3984 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 3:17 NIV

But different

I’m convinced that this is what makes most so unsure, uncertain, unconcerned even when it comes to the Gospel of Christ. It’s that within this life we’ve all managed to find what feels to us a freedom all but perfected. I mean all of us do every single day so many of the things that we’ve, in our version of liberty, come to see as things so worth doing that we worry only about our ceasing from the same. Indeed, we seem a people entirely afraid of our ever having to let go of whatever it is that we’ve come to learn to think we love.

For love is a powerful thing to be sure, but perhaps to be sure is a powerful thing all its own.

And, well, maybe to be sure about love is what this life is meant to mean. Maybe this time is ours in which we’re supposed to grow until we know for sure what love is and what that means and why it means not all these different things that so many all around seem to assume it might. For after all, how could one thing accomplish so many meanings that are in fact so very different that they lead folks in what are millions of different directions?

It just doesn’t seem to me that the cross was carried to so scatter humanity unto the winds of such personal want and self-assurance. And yet, this seems exactly what for which we’ve chosen to use it. It seems that everyone has indeed done as we were explicitly told not to do and indeed come on to use our freedom as a cover for evil as is covered because we know so many things that we do are wrong but yet, rather than changing and turning away from them, instead we take His freedom for granted as if mercy is a given.

And, sure, it is. And yet that is only because mercy must be given and that to only those to whom it isn’t due. For if mercy were the result of effort, intention or accomplishment, then it would be nothing more than a wage which could then be earned and must thus be earned as none will work for what others receive freely. There’s just no fairness in that, and so that is something that all of society will logically stand against as, well, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Why strive, suffer or struggle for what others have no such turmoil in finding? Why should some need to scratch and crawl toward the same outcome that is found by others without so much as moving? Why would anyone work for what others are freely given?

But you see, that’s the thing about His freedom. It’s that it is freely given. Mercy too. And He gives them free to me and you both because He knows we need them as our pasts now stand condemning us before Him thanks to the sin in which we’ve walked in what’s long been a love so deep that we lost sleep at the mere suggestion that we leave any of it behind and too that His freedom would bring about such hope that we’d finally learn to let it go.

Because no matter how great, grand or glorious something may seem to be to us, when presented with something undeniably and indefinably better, the matter of change becomes a non-starter.

It’s not something we need to waste our time considering anymore.

That’s why the promise of Heaven is so astounding. It’s not only that it’s a place of such things as peace and rest and joy perfected but that they’re perfected for what’s a people who have all lived not seeking anything of any of them. That’s amazing to me! That He promises us something so incredible not despite but in spite of our having spent so much of our lives all but blatantly not caring about, well, much of anything at all. Let alone peace or rest or joy.

Not that we’re not intrigued by such things because we all most certainly are. Rather the issue is that, again, we’ve come to this almost concreted certainty that what we’re doing is what we have to continue doing because it’s being done in what’s long since become our estimation of freedom as it finds for us every single day our enjoying something, our winning something, our experiencing of something that makes us feel good, which is what we’ve learned to measure happiness as.

And perhaps rightfully so.

But still, is our being happy whilst doing too those many things which make us feel such things as sadness or sorrow or shame truly to be seen as the same thing as true freedom? Does the freedom He offers us go only so far as our personal pleasure? For in truth, that’s pretty much only as far as our versions go. Again, that’s why it seems that human freedom, as is seen and shown inside of how we live our lives, it only seems to lead us in what are those directions in which we ourselves delight to go.

Should we be then the only ones to define for ourselves what true freedom really is?

Has not our freedom been used for the doing, saying, assuming of things in the past assuming excitement or pleasure or happiness would be found, that perhaps were in fact found, but that have since spoiled into such miseries as guilt and regret?

Having each of us experienced plenty of such miseries, does this leave us feeling as if we’re still best to define what freedom is?

What’s suddenly hitting me as entirely ironic, and that in the most odd of ways imaginable, is that I seem to have literally spent the majority of this now-passed weekend dabbling in this idea of personal freedom only to have been awakened unto this freezing new Monday with this overwhelming feeling that I’ve done gone and made a serious error, truly messed something up. I mean I feel entirely off from my head to my heels.

It’s as if I’ve opened a door that He had helped me seal shut and in has come barging all sorts of ill feelings and even worse thoughts.

And it was just music!

But you see, such is our understanding of freedom. We think of it as nothing more than the opportunity, the ability, the right even to do as we please. We seem to believe in this kind of freedom that finds for us nothing more than the seeking after that which pleases us or makes us happy or invites us back to the excitement that, let’s be honest, most days just lack.

And yet, how is that?

Honestly, how is it that our day-to-day lives are seemingly so obviously lackluster despite our having this apparent freedom to do whatever we want? Might this then prove unequivocally that maybe freedom isn’t something best for us to measure? Might it mean that maybe freedom means more than our doing whatever we please? Might our having used our freedom to do things that once brought us pleasure but now only pain all but hammer home that final nail into the coffin that is our consideration?

Indeed, why do we seem so adamant, so certain as to the necessity of so much of what we’re doing? Is any of it really that big a deal? Is more of it a bigger deal than we might imagine?

Are either of these the kind of questions we’re asking when our entire outlook on freedom is nothing more than our doing, saying, thinking, assuming only whatever makes us feel good?

Is freedom truly about nothing more than feelings and emotions?

Well, from all the commotion around us it would sure seem that’s what we’ve all come to assume. And that’s because, well, the commotion around us is being caused by what we likely can’t see or understand is a commotion within us that’s being caused by all of these differing and thus diverging desires that design this direction in life that has us going a million miles an hour trying to scour all of what are a million different ideas as to what best to use our freedom upon.

Is that what freedom should become?

Just a way of life spent wracking our minds trying to find something that both makes us feel good and yet that won’t only make us feel bad later on?

For the sad reality is that such is the overall expectation to be met inside so many of these ideas in our head. And again, we know this already! Because each of us have done things, wanted thing, won things that have held such an allure about them that we become of the belief that we just couldn’t live without them. No, we had to scratch that itch, buy that toy, try that food, take that trip. All because, unto us, freedom is seen as this overall lack of limits that thus achieves for us this depth to a life’s potential experience that all but demands we experience as much as we can.

But, again, so many of those things that we just thought would make us happy or help us feel whole only ended up leaving a hole where happiness once was. Because, let’s again be honest, such things as sorrow or shame, those aren’t the same as happiness. Not even close! And yet all of us have lived in accordance with this strange understanding of freedom that inspires us to try everything and ask why we should or shouldn’t only after we already have.

Friends, how can that go anything but bad?

I mean, granted, I get it. I understand this sense of plausible deniability that’s always there to be seen inside our just doing of things without thinking them through. After all, what we don’t know is what we’re not responsible for. But the issue will prove that, well, perhaps we’ve known more than we’ve let on. Maybe we’ve known that some of the things we’ve used our freedom upon weren’t likely to go well. Perhaps we did know that watching that movie or listening to that song or repeating that joke or talking about that person whenever they weren’t looking truly wasn’t the right thing to do.

And yet we’ve done all such things thinking we had the freedom to do them.

And the difficulty in all of this is, well, we did. We do. We indeed have the freedom to do whatever we want to do. It’s called free will and it’s thus the will to be free to do whatever it is that our will thinks will achieve for us the best possible outcome.

But the problem is that freedom of choice doesn’t actually coincide with freedom from consequence.

We may have the opportunity, the ability to do whatever we please. In fact we have all but perfectly proven that our being pleased is what we’ll overwhelmingly determine to do whenever given the opportunity. We have proven of a perfected ability to please ourselves and thus put ourselves and their pleasure perpetually first upon our list of priorities.

But again, having so often found anything of shame or regret or remorse, doesn’t that make the case for a pause in our cause?

Because the truth is that true freedom isn’t just doing whatever we want. Now that’s not to say it’s not a part of it, or rather what we’ve used part of it for. But the reality is that true freedom is found in the Lord, not us. And why is this? Because, contrary to what we’d likely continue to contend, we don’t know what’s best. If we were to be honest we’d even have to admit that sometimes we don’t care. Sometimes we just want to take the easiest road possible as that’s the one that typically seems to offer the most reward the quickest.

And, being a people of such decaying patience, we seem to understand this insatiable need to be pleased as fast as possible.

Indeed, it’s anymore almost as if most folks think they may literally die if they don’t get to do something they’ve allowed their hearts to become set on doing.

But friends, that’s the problem!

It’s all a heart condition. Our approach at freedom tells everyone watching where it is that our hearts wish to go, want to see, desire to be. Tells them what our hearts have become! And, well, this is really bad news!!

Why?

Just look at some of the things people are doing under this guise of it being their freedom to do. Look at some of things you’re doing in your life!

That’s why I feel so sick to my stomach this morning.

It’s because I again spent an entire weekend thinking about myself and what I wanted, what I liked, what I thought my heart needed. And yet, all it ended up achieving is only this feeling of a doubt so deep that I now think that I’m just getting everything wrong. And sure, some would argue that that’s why they don’t want anything to do with the “Holy One of Israel.” Maybe it’s because this faith in us becomes this sort of thorn in our side that only causes us to live in fear of having fun or feeling good.

And maybe it does.

Maybe this faith has caused me to become so worried and weary that I almost dread doing anything because it seems that anything I might do would probably only be wrong somehow.

Or yet maybe that worry is won from within what remains of that mind that’s of this world that lived only to find some reason or excuse to do whatever I wanted as if I could somehow know best. Maybe it’s because once better begins to grow, the only fear it comes to know is that of our tendency to set fire to everything. Maybe it’s because this process of sanctification is supposed to start a fire that burns differently as it burns different things than our passions long have.

For our passions, our pleasures, our very priorities have long burned for only this lusting idea of our doing only whatever looked good, felt good, sounded good, tasted good. And this idea has caused us to become so consumed with our consuming the things of this world that we now know only to stand terrified as to the self-limiting nature of faith.

We don’t want to do without. We don’t want to miss something that might be fun. We don’t want to give up those things that we have enjoyed. Because, when freedom is all but hinged upon happiness and enjoyment, then our walking away and denying ourselves anything that we’ve otherwise learned to enjoy, it’s just entirely counterintuitive.

Indeed, it’s anymore as if the cross is something we only turn to begrudgingly as in it we see, in Him we see only the sum of everything that we’ll have to give up and stop enjoying.

But friends, maybe that cross stands where it does for what it does because He who died upon it knows that so much of what we’ve learned to enjoy is only everything short of what true joy really is.

Now I know that it’s hard for us to imagine that another might know better than us. After all, we are literally the only ones who will ever live our lives, have our thoughts, know our hopes and dreams. We are the only ones who will either enjoy our pleasure or suffer in it being lost or left behind.

Or are we?

See, again, this is what we in all of our fallen freedom seem to misunderstand. It’s that, no, we’re not the only ones who know our lives. We’re not the only ones who live these lives. Christ literally came down to this earth to take from us, each of us, the weight of our every single mistake. He came to walk not a mile, not a hundred, but an entire lifetime in our shoes, or sandals as it were. But the point I’m making is that He came here to put our way, our flesh, our failures upon Himself.

He came to pay the price for all the things we’d done in our thinking that our freedom gave us the right to do them.

He died because we thought we had the freedom to do wrong.

And again, we do. God allows us to choose what we do, where we go, why we go wherever we do and do whatever it is that we determine to once we get there.

But friends, His letting us make some choices again doesn’t eliminate the cost charged in every single choice ever made. No, every single choice has a consequence built in. And that consequence is the thing(s) not chosen. It’s the paths we don’t take because we took another. It’s the changes we haven’t made because we were afraid to lose whatever it was that we already had. It’s the sum of the life we don’t live thinking that the life we do live is better than the other ever could be.

But often the problem comes in that what we think is best is often allowed to override or overrule what He says is better.

And well, one of us is going to be proven wrong.

I just don’t see how it could be the One who wrote the rules but rather the many who have lived only breaking them, ignoring them, forsaking them and forgetting them.

Friends, I understand that the version of freedom sold us by this world seems to offer us everything we could ever want. But surely you’ve heard of things being too good to be true. And this is arguably one of the best examples of that. And that’s because, well, maybe the sum of everything we could ever want is only to forever be hindered by our amazing inability to think bigger, dream bigger, believe bigger.

Maybe our wildest imaginations can’t come anywhere close to what His plans have promised.

Then again, maybe they can.

But I think the surest way to tell the difference in terms of who’s most likely to be right is found in their willingness to lay down a life to prove it.

And well, we’re not willing to lay down or let go of anything, much less our lives, and that for, well, anything. We won’t even risk being hated for saying what we know is the truth. What then makes us so sure that our version of freedom is to find for us something better than His seeing as how He died for us to find out whereas we never would?

My prayer is that we all do find out that His freedom is better because, while it might not be hardly anything like the freedom this world sells and we’ve all known, maybe freedom means more than just doing whatever we want and denying any mistakes made along the way.

No, maybe freedom is more a path to something more than just more of whatever already is.

But there’s only one way to find out.

And that’s leaving behind everything we’ve ever known and taking that path that seeks not its reward now but rather stores that treasure in the assurance of where we’re going, who we’re going to be as opposed to the displeasure of where and who we’ve already been.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold