Day 3989 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 4:2 NIV

Do not because you cannot

Because as it turns out, once you begin down this path of a life being changed, being lost, you’ll come to find that you truly cannot return to that from which, whom, what, where you came to begin this chance to become who we can only ever hope to be once we are finally in Christ as fully as our faith and His faithfulness may allow. Truly, there comes with this belief a breaking that becomes a barricade to all you have been because you’ll see within the lot of what you’ll come to leave only everything that was never a life anyway.

And, well, who in their right mind would return to death having tasted what it’s actually like to be alive?

Indeed, it is such a strange shifting of seas that it seems that everything that ever has been becomes, in Him, only everything that you want to never be again. And this itself is a weird scene to see here inside what is a society so sewn to this assumption that it’s the gift of their gluttonous gumption given almost exclusively unto nostalgias of lives truly already over that will prove for them the best for them. But friends, how is that to be the case? Are we to truly believe that our very best is already so over and done? Sure, the “good old days” were good back in the day but were they really good enough to never want anything more?

Trust me, I’m not coming out of the gate this way because of some hypocritical high-horse that I’ve determined to saddle this snowy Saturday morn.

No, it’s rather that this weather has made me wonder as to what else besides the green grass has been long since as buried beneath our willingness to let the past continue to get this pass to prevent our present from preferring a future filled with bigger and better promises than those already visited in days gone by.

Indeed, is that not the very definition of death itself? That time spent in what was a life that is no more? And truly, is this not what every bit of the past really is? It’s gone. It’s over. It’s something we experienced, and yes, there may be some memories we’d been given the chance to make that were indeed written in moments and experiences so beautiful that we are further blessed to carry them forward with us, holding fast to that which has been good, but alas, straining always still for the still better.

Why?

Because the point is proven in that we’re called to come further in faith by following behind He who came to move us forward from what had become a way of life so sullen and soiled that there was nothing left of even our soul!

And yet we spend our every today thinking as much of yesterday as we do tomorrow?

How can that be?

How can we determine to so sternly peruse the past, all but insisting it stay always with us that it all but causes us to sever every opportunity that is our personal growth, solemn improvement, the very planting of every hope itself? Or is it that we still just can’t see it? That rather than noticing the opportunity for such growth and improvement as His gift of sanctification truly is and will forever be, rather we’re anymore all so fettered to the forgotten that we fear only moving on and maybe forgetting more?

Friends, what of the past need we remember if the life we lived then was the same as that which led us to the breaking point in which we finally told our arrogance to kick rocks because we were so sick and tired of being so sick and tired in what was a life so welded to rock bottom that we knew nothing of hope anymore?

Is that the best that life can be?

A life of shame and misery melded into this misunderstanding as to why we need to move from what we’d become?

Are we that dumb that we truly still fail to understand why He came to take that stand upon that hill to where He’d carried that cross to call out to all those who were lost and finally only able to see it because He came to pay the price of the punishment due for our having done all that stuff that had only left us so numb as to look upon Him and consider Him forsaken, the only One afflicted?

No, the only reason Christ became the victim is because He had seen all we had done, knowing then the fullness of the failure that we’d each collectively become, and yet He still held out this hope that some of us would one wake us and say, “Nope, this ain’t happening this way anymore. I want more out of this life than whatever this is that I’ve been living.”

Why?

Because, again, who tastes of the Living Water and cares remember the water which leaves you thirsty still?

Indeed, why are we so often so tied to what has been that we seem to actually believe that we can’t be anything but whatever we were back then whenever what has been was what was? Is it anymore? For some it might be, but again, is this the best we can hope for? A life so stalled and stagnant that our greatest imagination is for nothing more but more of whatever already was before?

Was it truly that amazing?

Granted, compared to the world in which we’re today walking, yeah, the past was better in just about every way imaginable. And what makes this matter so much harder is that we needn’t imagine it at all. We lived it. Depending upon your age you might even remember the age before cell phones and ipads. Going back, you might remember times when tv was only in black and white. Though it be a true rarity, there may even be some who were alive before there was tv.

How did they survive?

Don’t know, but they did.

Could we?

Could we go on without such things as streaming services serving us a constant stream of the things we want to see, an endless portrait painted so perfectly as it’s catered to us in whatever way these algorithms we trust in find fit to so fit what we want? Is that truly the ideal of life itself, for us to be always so pleased by such things as screens and songs with which we sing along to what is a story of our being the only ones ever glorified?

Does it make some of us strange that because of such things we’re instead horrified?

How could we not be?

Again, I’ll grant that there be a vast majority who’ve not anything of the awareness of or thus hope found within He who I contend has found me, not only where I was but to where I am now. There are sadly so very many who know nothing of Christ, see the cross as nothing more than a couple pieces of wood raised to delineate a church building from a regular one, assume Scripture nothing but this noting of everything everyone’s doing that they shouldn’t be, and that no matter how much fun it might be.

For indeed, that is our god these days. It’s fun. It’s enjoyment of whatever it is that we enjoy. And indeed, I personally believe that our ability to enjoy and appreciate anything is itself a gift entirely God-given. How else would we be able to measure that which is beautiful from the more that’s only become uglier by the day? How better could we believe in the gravity of truth making it worth surrendering our selfishness in a world so filled with lies telling us all that selfishness is all that makes a life worth living for?

And indeed, why is this the story being bought by so much of society?

Because it’s fun. It allows us to not only put ourselves first, an obvious field day unto pride and vanity, but to keep ourselves there perpetually. And finding all of this enjoyment, this pleasure, this success and satisfaction, it achieves in us an assurance that the only way to keep that traction is to allow for whatever fracture in regard to faith in something better that might prove needed to keep the enjoyment coming.

But does it?

Does the enjoyment ever prove as perfectly endless as our pride insists it can?

Or do we not all rather find ourselves on the wrong side of that always avoided fall wherein, once finally on our knees, we’re then and there able to see that the fun has faded to find for us only a fear felt in our worrying to find it again before the enjoyment too wears then and leaves only another regret in its wake?

Is that not why there exists such things as alcoholism and other such addiction?

Because we can’t risk the numb fading and finding us feeling that we’re the ones afflicted and forsaken, and that at only these hands of our own?

For we’re the ones who make the choices we do. Sure, might have some help from who knows who. But even then, do we honestly not know? If God is truly the Light of Life itself, then doesn’t anything we do which designs inside a dire desire to hide it in the dark only come obviously from whomever is His opposite?

Should we honestly be at best so torn between the light and dark, life and death?

Friends, that’s exactly where the vast majority of all of society seem to hope to wind up. In the middle. Right there stuck in between whoever they have been and whatever little of everything better they think they can still become. And why do we think there’s so little better that we can be if not because we think the past was as good as it gets?

Was it?

Mine both was and wasn’t.

And I say that because, like you, I too have those memories of what was a journey so amazingly beautiful that I truly hope I can hold onto some of them forever. But at the same time, I also have even more memories of things I’ve done, said or seen that I ask God all but daily to help me forget. Why?

Because it wasn’t as good as it can get!

For what is good about addiction? What is good about being a victim of someone else’s desire to hurt another? What’s so amazing about those days in which we didn’t know as much about hope, joy, life, truth, love, peace, purpose as we do today?

Or do we even know anything more of any of those things?

Again, how can we whenever we seek only to hold tight to whatever we already are?

Friends, such is the breaking that begins in Him. It’s a breaking down within of all these barricades and barriers to our every better that we could have in fact already been by now. Why? So that we don’t get another 10, 20, 50 years down this road called life only to there still find that we’re not quite sure that we’ve found ourselves any better than we were before.

But again, how can even begin to believe in such a thing when the only thing that seems to matter is only whatever, wherever, whoever we already are?

Can’t you see that there is no room for growth inside a soul that assumes that it’s already found the very best of life itself?

For why try for anything else when everything good has already been found?

That would be just a waste of time and effort.

Time and effort we could give to enjoying more of whatever already is.

That’s why so many are the same today as they were those 10, 20, 50 years ago. It’s because they allowed themselves to become convinced that whatever they were back then was all the best they could ever be. Can you imagine how much knowledge, wisdom, growth in hope and hope in improvement we miss in 10 year’s time?

Looking back at the last 10, I can’t even begin to count all the ways that my life has changed for the better. And yet I say with every ounce of certainty that I can muster that I’d not be able to notice any of them if I had stayed, back then, as sure that I was good enough as I had been even long before.

That’s the story of my life!

I have spent so much of my time opting for such stagnancy simply because that will always be what’s easy. There can be nothing easier than changing nothing. Nothing easier than our staying the same. And, well, when our pride, which always tells us this lie that we’re as perfect as we can be, when that lie hears that idea that we can opt for an easy life too, the only thing we’ll become convinced that we have to lose is nothing short of a perfect person living a perfect life.

But friends, the fact is that if we ever want to live a life at all, that is exactly what we do have to lose!

We have to be willing to let go this idea that tells us that we’re already as good as it gets. Why? Because we ain’t anywhere close! Every single day we all say or do something that, odds are, we already know we shouldn’t. We repeat habits that have proven countless times already to only ever lead to guilt or shame or regret. We allow ourselves to run back to doing those things that we know so well how to do, a choice chosen simply because it’s both easy and probably nostalgic.

And well, we just sometimes need that warmth of a familiar feeling as, well, often times life feels only foreign.

Because life is hard. It’s scary. It’s confusing and confining, this finding our failing to understand what’s going on as it seems all but every day that nothing that’s going on makes much sense anymore. And yes, as the world continues to crumble around us, it will cause us to long even deeper for those times behind that we got the joy of getting to experience before it all started falling apart.

But friends, there is no such thing as going back. Life moves only forward. And so all we’re doing by doing all this insisting that the past come along with us is preventing us from us moving forward too. And no, that’s not to say that there aren’t again those amazing memories that God’s given the ability to have. It’s just saying that a few things that went well weren’t ever able to disprove the existence of the many more that went so bad that we didn’t want to remember them.

And why didn’t we want to remember them?

Because again, who, having tasted the life found in Christ, one won in forgiveness and freedom, who would ever want to remember those things that said cost Him that suffering in order to achieve for us the freedom that is His forgiveness?

And even if you’re among the majority who don’t know much about Jesus or Scripture or the very hope of Heaven and why it’s so very hopeful, I doubt you make it much of a priority to remember all the things that you’ve said or done that you highly regret. And that’s because regret sucks. Shame is a misery unlike any other.

And yet why is that?

Because we know we can’t go back and do it differently! No, the shame we feel stings so bad because it’s stuck there inside those memories of what we said or did that left us feeling ashamed.

But you know where those things finally start to fade?

In Jesus.

How?

He nailed them to the cross.

And that right there is where some of us, the ones probably considered to be the freaks and losers among society, it’s where we begin to learn to delight within our chance to not only lay down a life but elate to all but run away from one. Our own in fact! And why is that? Because, despite our pasts being too filled with plenty of fun and our memories thereof, all the guilt and regret we’ve met along the way only prove that no, the past wasn’t as good as it gets.

Because the only thing good about guilt and regret is that they inspire us to move on.

They teach us lessons written in pain so that we learn, the hard way, to never do or say those things again. And no, those aren’t fun lessons to learn. But friends, is there any doubt that they do indeed make us better? Is it not an obvious improvement whenever someone puts down the bottle or throws their cigarettes in the trash or logs off that filthy website and finally actually doesn’t go back, unlike all the times they said would?

When?

In the past.

That’s the thing about growth. It is only ever proven in the future, and that only by choices made in the present to not let the past prevent our moving on.

I cannot count how many times I’ve told God that that was the last time I’d do whatever I felt guilty or ashamed of having done only to, in as little as a single day’s time, go right back to doing it again.

And friends, though easy because such is every pattern repeating, I can tell you with every once of all the honesty I have that that isn’t a life worth living. In fact, it’s not a life at all. And that’s because there is no life in sin. And yet what is sin? Bible says that it’s our knowing the right thing to do and doing anything else. And yeah, that’s the gravity of life itself, that we do know what’s right to do.

And too, that’s now the gravity of faith because the cross contends that our having failed to do the right things we knew to do ended up costing an innocent Man His life. And that sucks to carry!

But friends, as much as it sucks, it’s moving. It inspires you to welcome so much change that you eventually even become almost addicted to it. You become enslaved to it. You come to crave it as much as the drink and drug that dug those holes to that rock bottom that you know you’ve reached when they just don’t feel fun anymore.

Because that’s the work of the Holy Spirit seeking to set you free from what any shred of shame or guilt prove effortlessly were not actually lives nearly as good as we used to could imagine them to be.

Because guilt and shame are nothing that anyone would set out to find.

Why then settle for ever staying put inside a way of life that finds you feeling any of either?

That’s the whole point of the Gospel. Sure, it offends us as it seeks to disprove our arrogance. But just beyond that it frees us from being slaves to ego. And from there, once those chains are gone, He helps us to seek out any others that may still exist so that we can shed them too.

How?

Moving on. Walking away. All but literally setting fire to everything we’ve ever been and trusting Him to make us both new and then better again.

Indeed, the call of the cross is at first to come and lay down all we’ve done that’s left us carrying such heavy burdens as doubt and despair and, once there, to leave them, turn away from them and never turn back around.

Truly, remember Lot’s wife!

Friends, there is nothing of life being lived as a pillar of salt stuck forever looking back on what you’ve left behind.

Leave it.

Change everything and never go back. For that is the only way to ever grow.

And well, when it comes to a gift such as hope, peace, the promise of life unending in a place where hope and peace too have no end, yeah, it’s worth whatever we can possibly give.

Especially when all that He asks is our laying down a past that regret proves wasn’t all that wonderful after all.

So no, we do not live out the rest of these lives for those desires we once had and see still so many still have. Why?

Because you’ll find no sense in leaving life to go back to living death.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold