Day 4001 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 John 4:5 NIV

To be heard

It’s one of the most obvious goals should someone ever find they’ve something to say. For after all, what else are we to do with our thoughts, our beliefs, our ideals and the hopes they seek? Are we just supposed to keep them all unto ourselves and bask there in the joy of them all all alone? If we do truly believe in the redemptive, constructive, productive and elsewise beneficial backdrop that is our every highly held hope, would it not be something of a letdown to know that nobody else might ever know the hope we do?

For aren’t such things as hope, joy, peace, purpose, reason even those things that all of us are here searching to find or feel?

And should we truly contend that we’ve finally stumbled upon them, in the presence of any sense or semblance of humility and compassion, should we not then seek to help others come to know what we think we’ve found? This seems the entire premise of all public pursuit anymore in what is this age of our spending our days posting our ways and wares for all the others to see.

It’s indeed the entire usefulness for which we’ve mostly determined to use our having become more interconnected than ever before. And in truth we do have more ways in which and by which to share about whatever it is that we care about than any other generation has ever gotten to use so easily, so widely, so miserably, unfortunately.

Why do I say that?

Because we sit here as what is a society that is so widely glued to what is a veritable goldmine of our ability, our opportunity to do as called to and go into all the world taking with us the Gospel of Christ Jesus without ever even needing to leave the house! And yet instead we use these tools and technologies we have for such things as posting photos of what we ate for dinner and going to battle in the comment sections of some politically-charged rabble seeking to prove our point at the all but annihilation of another.

Linguistically at least.

And indeed, such is pretty much where we’ve both always sought to collectively end up and yet seemingly only sadly chosen to settle for after all. I’m reminded of the Tower of Babel and how back then the people, blessed with a single language and thus an amazing ease of conversation, chose to band together to build toward the Father in what then became, thanks to our inherent ego and vanity, this idea that we could perhaps even rival His divinity.

And, well, God rightly saw through to the heart of this growing pride issue and nipped that nonsense in the bud by causing all of us to become separated by languages varied that forces us unto a worry as to what another might be saying since we couldn’t anymore understand the words they were using. It all became foreign, strange, confusing even. And indeed, even still today there’s this general sense of unease whenever we hear a foreigner speak in what is their native tongue.

All because it isn’t ours.

And yet thanks to all of our continued progress in technological advancement we’ve arrived here to a time in which we carry about these communication devices in our pockets or purses that allow us to better pursue that purpose we’d tried to in what’s once again a society that seems quite convinced, and in that content, to again contend that we can join together and become something that rivals God. Using our newfound ability to translate any language that another speaks into messages, posts, ideas we can hear, read, comprehend and thus understand.

We can literally sit down with someone from the other side of the globe and have a face-to-face conversation with them even though we speak different languages.

But again, we’ve settled for using such an amazing interconnectedness to talk about what we’re eating and how much we’re starting to hate a certain half of whatever divide the world has convinced us is somehow better to exist than to not.

Yes, we’ve become a people who could, in theory, be as united and thus able to work together with one another toward that goal of Ephesians 4:29 as any other group or generation ever has been.

And yet we’re as divided as ever and, once in our own lanes as likely chosen for us by those who happened to beat the others into the game of their getting their claws into us, their thoughts into us, have what seems an increasing disinterest in listening to anyone who doesn’t say whatever it is that we want to hear in what’s theoretically become a way of life in which each of us have come to construct what is our own Tower of Babel of sorts.

Except that we each stand alone at the top of our towers the same, each of us seemingly assured that we’re the ones who are always right and thus that anyone else who says, thinks, believes anything else is just wrong about perhaps everything. Indeed, we’ve each become the gods in our lives, seeking daily to live utterly deaf, dumb, blind unto the easily witnessed and beautiful existence of He who is our God who stills calls us to think not so highly of ourselves as we seemingly really, really want to anyway.

And why do we want so badly to think of ourselves so highly?

Because it just makes life easy when you’ve come to this place in which you’re perfectly convinced that everything you say, do, think and believe is ultimately right, righteous, rewarding and thus resolved unto the promises of such things as power, glory, hope, honor, peace and purpose that, again, all of us are seeking for. And yet we never seem to stop to wonder why they’re anymore so easy to find as to be found by everyone who’s doing something entirely different from everyone around them.

Can such things as glory, hope, peace, the purpose of life itself have such varied uses or definitions or duties as are seen in the many, countless in fact, pursuits and priorities of we the people?

Or might such things have but one meaning, one definition, one direction that thus finds for us an overwhelming ability to be proven quite wrong in our again varied understandings thereof?

Seems to me that such is one of the foundational points of Scripture itself. It’s that there is but one way, literally called the Way who is the Christ who is too the Life and, yes, the Truth. As in there’s literally only One and they’re all combined into Him who, if we’re to be honest, isn’t often really high on our lists of priorities. At least not on the wide scale. Rather that again seems to be what remains the issue we’re facing, blindly of course.

It’s that we’re, instead of abiding by the call away from the wide unto His narrow, we rather seem quite content to continue using our every ability and opportunity to seek for what is again our glory, our gain, our gloating of a life we’ve planned to go our way which is something that we love because, to us, it just seems as good as it can be. For our way is one paved in such plans as our avoiding pain, having fame, enjoying fortune and, thanks to those being things sought after by everyone, likely loved, adored, followed if not basically worshipped by the same.

Everyone.

All because we’ve again become what are these little gods sat atop these little towers poured of all this power we love to think we have in life. Power seemingly proven as easily as our doing whatever it takes to please the itching ears of those around us, which is done as easily as our saying whatever it is that most of us here make blatantly clear we want to hear. Indeed, it’s by no means a challenge to read someone else and figure out whatever it is that they’re searching for.

And, well, once we find that answer, it’s pretty easy to even anticipate the rest of their questions and cravings.

Because we’re a dramatically simple creation, not in terms of creation, but rather in terms of what we’ve sought to create of our having been created to be far more than we’ve since become.

No, while God made us in His image and endowed us then with at least a part or portion of all the goodness and glory that He is, we’ve only settled for so unashamedly skewing the whole painting that we anymore seem to assume we’re better off trying to become something so entirely different that now a different eternity is not only demanded but in fact promised unto all those who continue to live as if they don’t know, nor care to, the One who created them be something undeniably better than whatever this is that we’ve all become.

And, well, one of those promised eternities isn’t quite so lovely as our arrogance so loves to assume it might be. And that’s because there’s nothing funny about hell’s misery nor the fact that, once there, there’s no leaving.

Which is the message that some of us are here believing in such a horrific depth that we’re doing all we can to use whatever measure we might to make sure that everyone else knows of the severity of our collective need for personal salvation as is offered only by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony to all said blood is able to make so brand new that, once free again, they too would feel this swelling need to start yelling about all He’s done for them as well.

Because, well, once you know both the hope of Heaven and the horror of hell, you just can’t help but hope and pray and eventually seek to give all of every single day that you have left here in this place to doing whatever you can do, saying whatever you can possibly say to try and help others be found in He who is the Way before that chance is gone for good.

Because once that chance is gone for good, nothing good is going to be left!

Rather good will have left and gone where He said He had, taking with Him all of them who lived their lives as if this land was but the battlefield that cross proved it’s going to be.

Indeed, He told us plain that within this place we would have trouble, trial, torment, perhaps even torture. Told us so all so that we’d be ready should there come those times in this life in which our tries to do what matters most is only mocked, ignored, denied, debated, ridiculed and rejected by those who we’re only trying to help understand are loved so much that Jesus, who is God himself in flesh like ours, chose to come in such a way so as to pay the debt that all men owe so that all men could grow to know the kind of freedom that He’s now proven is literally worth dying for.

A freedom that we see being daily misused upon such misunderstandings as the worth of public praise and the need for human applause and the hope of holding hope so hostage as to continue insisting that it be found only in the things of this place that we’re all leaving, probably sooner than our arrogance and ego (and all their wonderful plans) imagine we might.

That’s the part that keeps some of us up at night seeking to find some other way, some better way by which to tell whomever we can about this gift we’ve all been given of what is a promise of life unending in a place of love, joy, peace the same.

It’s that we know time is running out as folks are leaving here right and left. In fact, just doing a bit of quick google math, it’s estimated that approximately 172,975 people die every day worldwide, which equates to about 7,207 deaths per hour which boils down to roughly 2 deaths per second.

That means that almost 7,000 people may have left this world since I started working on writing this post. That means that, since I’m still writing it and haven’t yet then posted it, those 7,000 or so can never read it. That means it can’t help them. That means that I can’t help them.

Not that I ever could.

But friends, we can try. And, well, that’s exactly what we’re called to do. And it’s in fact such a great commission that it grows to consume your every waking thought until you find yourself driving around with a pen in your pocket just in case you happen to think of something you consider novel, new, elsewise needed that you could say to whomever might happen to hear whatever it is that you hold so dear as to do whatever you can, say whatever you might so as to hopefully better the life of those who took the time to read, hear, care about whatever you cared about enough to try and share for all to see.

But instead we use our opportunities for posting pictures about our dinners.

All while thousands if not hundreds of thousands will have found their last tomorrow in this world and have instead left for whatever comes next, likely unready and ill-prepared seeing as how all of the world is so vastly lost listening only to what makes us feel good, which is then likely not the Gospel because the Gospel offends, the Gospel confronts, the Gospel even promises that we’ll be condemned lest we by then be found in Him who left Heaven behind to come and find we who’d wandered away from the 99 seeking to hear something different than our Shepherd had to say.

That’s why we have so many varied messages, interests, ideas and ideals these days. It’s because we all went off looking for something different and managed to find so much that’s so different that anymore we can each spend all our lives trying all the ways, wants, worries and weirdness of this world and never sample it all. Indeed, there are over 17,000 restaurants in New York City alone, meaning that someone could eat at a different restaurant every single day for roughly 50 years.

And that’s just in one city.

We are surrounded by a kind of endlessness that we cannot comprehend. And yet the problem is that our curiosity and cravings continue to be all that lead the way. We each follow religiously our own understandings, our own assumptions, our own desires and demands for all of life to make sense, to feel good, to look good unto those who probably aren’t even aware we’re here seeing as they’re stuck atop their own ivory tower as idols their own.

But that’s the ultimate problem. It’s that, having come to see ourselves as gods, we’ve become almost unshakably convinced that we deserve only to hear whatever we like the sound of, that we should only have to look at whatever our eyes tell us is good, that we need only worry ourselves over whatever would help us win the more that our gluttony will always find room to crave.

And yet none of it then has anything to do with He who came to save us from our having become so dumb as to think that living to be served is somehow the best way to spend this life.

No, instead the vast majority here still consider the message of the cross foolishness as it points to both our way of life being lost and thus it needing to be lost if we’re ever to even hope of finding something better, which is itself a self-perceived impossibility seeing as we’re again convinced that our way is as good as it gets and can always manage to find more than plenty of those kind of people who are none too willing to tell us just that so that we agree to be friends so that we’ll tell them the same right back.

Yes, all of us just want to hear that everything we're doing in this life down here is exactly what we should be as that message seems to say that we need as much change and thus our reconsidering as we’re willing and interested in enduring:

None.

This is the entire concept of itching ears. They, as the Bible reads, gather around themselves only those who only say only whatever they want to hear. And with so many messages spinning around this place, it’s surpassingly easy to find someone, or probably many someones, who are willing to say exactly whatever it is that you make clear you want to hear.

All these algorithms we hear talk about, that’s literally the entire point of their existence. It’s to flood us with an endless stream of all the things that we tell the program we like to see, love to hear.

We’re bombarded with an endless confirmation that everything we like is all that we should.

But what if it isn’t?

That’s the message of the Son of Heaven, and yeah, it’s incredibly offensive as it cuts right to the heart and asks that we start there in our looking for ways that our lives have only gone way wrong, a fact that none of us really want to even admit, let alone start working on.

But that’s also the only message that comes to matter once you’ve come to see all the ways that you have failed, fallen short, forsaken every single better that you could have always been in exchange for whatever it is that you’ve become instead. Indeed, there comes a time in which all that means anything anymore, all that even makes sense anymore is the Gospel of Christ.

And once that day you find, all you’ll find from there is this overwhelming urgency to tell everyone you can all about the freedom and forgiveness found in Him, only to realize that most here still have no interest in hearing it.

And it’s crushing because you see so many others gain such a following for doing, saying, sharing so many things that mean nothing at all and can thus offer the same unto those hundreds, thousands, millions who might be spending their very last few minutes scrolling through that stream of only those things that some computer learned they liked.

All because what we’ve become is a people who, though we all wish to be heard, what it seems we want even more is to be served, and well, that really cuts down on what we’re willing to listen to as we know full well that we just might hear something that just so happens to dare and remind us that maybe we don’t have everything quite so figured out. And most here just aren’t willing to risk that.

Because they’re just convinced they’ve too much to lose.

Friends, we all have everything to lose. Now that can either be seen as the problem, the warning, the worry that most here seem to assume it is, or it can become a challenge, a change, a chance that we’re, in Him, excited to undertake. But don’t be surprised when His kind of excitement finds you heartbroken and exhausted as it entails the telling the world a message that they’ve proven time and again they’re just not interested in.

And it’s a message that, knowing it’s power in terms of hope and joy already being proven in what are but down payments upon the fullness of both and all their like, it’s a message that we just can’t help but share and pray is heard.

Because again, what else are we supposed to do with all that He’s doing in, for, with us in however much time we have left?

No, this message needs to be heard.

Even when it continues to prove that most will come never come near it nor allow it near them.

All we can do is just pray that some are willing to listen anyway.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold