Day 4036 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Jeremiah 17:10 NIV

The response

And alas it’s one of those proverbial “uh-oh” realizations in that we somewhat start to realize the need for our to be ever careful as to all we ask for. Especially from a God known for responding in what are ways that seem, at times, quite well outside our version of what we like to call ‘logic’. Indeed, there’s this now longstanding misunderstanding between God and man, one defined by man thanks to the desires of man, that has been vastly proven to come at the very undoing of not only all the man has done, planned to do, has become, but indeed everything also in between.

Yes, when we ask God to have His way in our lives and thus for His will to be done, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when His will both proves us wrong, leaves us feeling horrible about it, and yet somehow seems to plant this light that becomes this hope that just might inspire us to seek out the other ways we’re walking and the other things that we’re doing that aren’t quite leading us anywhere or helping us to accomplish anything along the way.

Because when He responds to our request for help, well, He’s gonna help.

Struggle becomes that His help comes in what are ways that feel like waves of both happiness and hope but those perfectly blended with horror and hardship.

The former those we all hope to find and wish to feel, and that because we’ve already found and felt plenty of the latter. Which also then proves the matter which makes most jump off the boat because, well, life’s often times hard enough and we don’t then feel as if we need to make things any harder via our asking for God to all but take our hand and help us see all that we’re saying, doing, thinking, believing, becoming that we simply shouldn’t be.

No, not when the vast majority of this world lives as if we both needn’t any help as we can apparently do no wrong and thus will never face any consequences which thus begets a glaring lack of changes being made toward anything that anyone could ever consider anything or anyone any bettered.

We’re just not worried about things like that. And that’s because, well, life as has been lived in the past both didn’t worry all that much about them and, well, things seemed to have turned out okay. In fact, I was just talking about this with my family the other day and indeed it really does seem as if the best of this world is now behind us.

At least in terms of morality and modesty and honesty and general human decency.

And indeed, I’ve grappled with this reality quite violently over the recent weeks and months as I know the call to remember Lot’s wife and all and so I understand the danger looming in our looking back upon a past that Ecclesiastes reminds us of it not being wise to ask why the former days were better than these we’re living presently. And that’s probably because we’re not going back to the past but are rather promised to press on toward wherever the future might find us.

So yeah, it’s not a wise use of time to spend our lives looking back upon a life that is, and increasingly so, already gone, dead, cold.

But still, I just can’t help but often find that inside my mind is this ongoing understanding of the now common collapsing of what’s become nothing like the world I knew growing up. And it’s hard to watch and harder to hear and harder still to feel as it comes in what feels a cold that goes deeper than bone as man delights to continue all of this deceiving and being deceived.

And yet, such is pretty much the problem we’re promised to see whenever should we turn unto God and ask Him as David did in the verse we discussed just yesterday from the Psalms.

It’s that when we do ask God to test our hearts, to know our thoughts, to seek out any offensive way within them, and thus within us, well, He will. And this then all but instantly implodes into His helping us see them too. And, once we do, we’re then met face-to-face with a life we’ve lived to waste upon what are things, thoughts, theories that we may have become such devoted fans and followers of that we’ve not the ability to even begin to comprehend how we’re supposed to survive without them in our lives.

After all, how can we live without all that we’ve made a life both living for and perhaps then making a living from?

But you see, such is the inevitability of our asking God to both be who He always was, but that at the unraveling of all the lies and ways of life that we’ve lived to believe that had us living as if He wasn’t.

A lot of us is going to come undone whenever we turn unto the Son and ask Him to help us become the better that all we’ve done never helped us to be. Because He will. In fact, that’s why Christ came. It was to help us see a perfect example of the kind of life we’d at first been created to live, one lived in such power and prestige and provenance that it wasted no time worrying about such things anymore.

Can you imagine that?

That we could live a way of life in which we didn’t have to worry about our feeling in this illogical hurry to find all the hope, honor and happy that we’ve come to find in such things as all those that Christ is, all found not by us all throughout our lives as we’ve rather lived trying to find them in things that aren’t Him? That we could have saved ourselves so much time, so much effort, all this trouble that’s bound to come from the truth of this verse had we just worked in such a way as to aim for only His example?

Yeah, it’s alarming just how much simpler this all could have been, and how much better the world could have been too.

Alas, this is why it’s not wise to ask why the past was better than now. It’s both because we’re not going back to the past and so there’s really no reason in worrying about it anymore. That, and well, many if not most of the answers are pretty darn obvious too.

Indeed, this world’s long been promised to lose and we’re just inching closer and closer inside every single day to that promise being fulfilled by a mankind continuing to fall away.

Question then becomes are we still falling with them or have we instead done as He asked us?

“Then I heard another voice from heaven say: ’Come out of her, my people,’ so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.” Revelation 18:4-5

It’s a passage discussing the coming destruction of Babylon as has been both a place and thus a promise repeated plenty of times throughout humanity’s history. For there have been numerous civilizations rise only to fall and be all but lost to the sands of time. And this too is why it’s not wise to worry ourselves over much of anything at all that happens here as rather all that is here is but everything lost.

And we’re seeing people lose their minds all the time.

But again, the real question is not really whether or not we’ve lost ours but rather whether or not we’ve asked Him yet to help us get them back.

Because we should have by now considering how it’s plain to see that this world is continuing to drown itself in sin and depravity. And, sadly, so too have we. In fact this is one of those cornerstone type truths found within His Word as was breathed for our benefit of not remaining who we’d become. It’s that all have sinned and fallen then short of the glory of God having lived to give most if not all of our glory and honor and praise to only things in and of this place in which all is promised to be passing away.

And this is that uh-oh moment.

It comes in our understanding that we’ve lived for things that are passing away. That we’ve given our lives unto that way in which most here walk in which all they look for is only all that’s here. That we’ve become so much like this world, which remains perpetually lost in its chosen enmity against God, living thus as God’s enemies, that, well, so too have we.

Indeed, all of us have lived doing things that define(d) us easily as God’s enemies who thus deserve to be destroyed just like all the others that He always has.

The (d) added to defined to denote a hopefulness as would be found in our having done things that we shouldn’t have as opposed to being found doing them still.

But you see, that’s a stark rarity in this world where most folks think the best thing for them to do is nothing new, nothing different and thus nothing better. And, having each of us become partners with and partakers of this world’s unbridled dumb, well, such has been a rarity in our lives too. Indeed, all of us have lived as if doing nothing different and doing nothing new and doing nothing better was all that we should do, maybe even all that we could do.

Yes, this world has convinced all of us that change is at best a theoretical idea only ever to be considered by those weak enough to welcome the shame that we’ve come to believe of all change.

For after all, if we’re as perfect as we’ve long pretended, then yeah, doing anything any different would only be a step in the wrong direction.

Problem is that it’s to be proven that walking, if not in fact running, in the wrong direction is pretty much all we know to do.

Which again leaves the question to become whether or not we’re of the humbled audacity to realize that or if we’re rather just still convinced, as most here are, that we’re doing okay. So much so that so many seem to actually believe that were Christ to show back up a bit later on this afternoon, He’d do so only to hand out a whole bunch of trophies given in honor of how well we’ve been upholding His call.

His call to what?

To stay ready. And that by embracing such things as acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with the God that this world most certainly isn’t walking with.

And therein lies the problem!

It’s that, having become like the world, neither then have we been walking with Him. Instead, most of us have long struggled to embrace the necessity of a faith that asks that we all but walk away from the sum of pretty much everything that everyone else seems to be enjoying in this place. All of us have danced with doubt and dabbled in denial of His divine reckoning in which we’re called to see the kind of life that we’ve been living that is being lived unto our eternal undoing.

Indeed, it is a hard thing for us to see all the things that we’ve said, done, been, become that should have never had any place in the life of someone hoping to go on living a life.

But friends, if all we’ve been living for is only all that’s lived for a by world living as if He never did and thus still does not, why should He agree that we should continue on doing so in the perpetuity that is eternity?

No, this is a logical fallacy if ever there was one!

Because for God to be loving and kind and fair and just He thus has to be jealous and righteous and thus justified in His punishing those who aren’t.

And that’s the problem!

It’s that we aren’t. In fact, righteous is just about the last thing any of us have been! And that’s because, again, we’ve been living against Him! And so when we finally start to realize that some of the things we’re thinking or doing or believing have us thus becoming something we don’t want to be anymore, we find ourselves both desperate to ask for His help but also increasingly aware of how badly we need first His forgiveness.

For who helps those who won’t ask to be forgiven for their having all but destroyed their lives trying to find any possible way to keep from asking for it?

No, there has to be change but for that there has to also come the humility that allows us to see that we both need to but really don’t know how to. This is something read so many times of folks in Scripture just asking God to basically take over.

It’s in David asking God to test his heart and know his anxious thoughts so as to find out all the offensive ways in which he’d been living so that he can repent from them and seek instead for the way everlasting. It’s in the man who claimed he did believe but still had the audacity to ask Jesus to help him with his unbelief. It’s even seen in Moses struggling with God asking him to go back to Egypt and talk to Pharaoh and get him to let the people go.

“But Moses said to the LORD, ‘If the Israelites will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh listen to me, since I speak with faltering lips?’” Exodus 6:12

Indeed, so many times we see that people like you and me were aware of their limitations, of their imperfections, of their inabilities. And so many of those times we see those folks both struggle with this narrow way and yet also refuse to walk away because they believed that God could do what we can only prove unable to.

Such as helping us change, so much so that He ends up all but making us new right down to new hearts of flesh given where hearts of stone once stopped beating in lives that had stopped living as if life were worth more than whatever it is that all of us have lived for.

But the fear comes in our knowing what we have lived for and an ease of seeing that it’s nothing that in any way honors God.

No, so much of what we know God will find should He search our hearts and test our lives is only a bunch of lies that we never should have believed, a collection of idols we never should have bought, a religious devotion unto doing as the world thinks we ought and thus an ongoing assumption that the very best sum of life is our living for all that both isn’t alive and thus hasn’t life to give in exchange for the life we’ve given away to the having or hoping to have all of the things that have only ever taken God’s place.

Yes, we know that the outcome of this promise is that He’s going to find within us so much that both isn’t Him and thus doesn’t honor Him that we’ve ourselves never then known to even try to honor Him.

And, well, that’s a perfectly terrifying reality to reach the end of your rope at what is the end of yourself only to find that you both need help but also have to ask it of the One you know you’ve lived all but blatantly if not in fact brazenly rejecting.

But friends, there comes this shred of hope in that any who do turn to Him must at first believe in Him and too that He will do whatever it is that we need Him to.

And our deciding to believe in Him, even if out of sheer necessity at first, it’s at least a start that He can do something with. It’s at least a sliver of our showing Him that we’re both aware of what we’ve become and thus what He’s going to find inside of our hearts, our minds, our lives, but that despite the fear of facing down He who has the power, the ability, the authority and thus the justification to simply destroy us, we’re willing to risk is upon a wager on His kindness offering still to help us rather than do as we then agree He should.

Which is to condemn us.

Thankfully we’re not to that part of the program quite yet. Rather we’re still here in what is the in between in which Christ has said that He came not to condemn the world but rather to save the world through Himself. All because, for at least today, God remains patient with us not wanting any of us to perish but rather for all of us to come unto repentance.

Yes, He wants for us to come to Him with all that wearies us, all that worries us, all that we’ve been working for that’s only built up within us a worldliness so egregious that He has no reason to receive us.

Not because we expect Him to like what He sees but rather simply because we don’t like what we see anymore and are therefore finally desperate for something more.

That we’re finally desperate for Him to be God even though it means our retiring from trying to either take His place or find something in this place to do the same.

That’s what we all know He’s going to find at the fulfillment of a promise such as this. We know that He who searches the heart and knows the mind is only going to find a way of life that has been lived as if He never did. We know He’s going to find a person that never cared about pleasing Him. We know He’s going to find a people who have never focused on praising Him.

We know that all of us have settled for a way of life in which there was at first no room for Him and then only increasingly less.

Indeed, He came as a baby to find no room at the inn in which His mother sought the opportunity to give Him birth only to then walk this earth doing nothing but good unto all only for all to insist upon His leaving this earth in one of the most gruesome ways possible.

And so no, we know He’s not going to like what He finds in us.

But friends, the point has never been what’s now found in us but rather our being found in Him. And well, we can only do that if we turn unto Him and embrace the coming of whatever may in light of the way we’ve been living that has had us living as if His enemies.

And yeah, we know how that should go and that well isn’t quite the word.

But at this point I think it’s fair to say we don’t have much left to lose.

At least not that’s not promised to be lost anyway. After all, such promises as restoration and redemption and mercy and grace and salvation aren’t offered to those who don’t need them. Seems then that He already knows we do.

Guess the question then is whether or not we see it too.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold