Day 4042 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 1:4 NIV

The rescue

From what remains a place in which most still seek their refuge inside of what is veritable refuse because many here refuse to admit they’ve lived to lose what was the life they’ve now never known thanks to our all having known what isn’t a life at all. Indeed, the normality of what’s now commonality amongst all of humanity is so contrary to that for which we were created that the Creator himself had to come down among us in order to, from within us, die just to lift us up and out of what we’ve become.

Meaning then that what we remain is nothing but a people who curse the rain for making our food grow, who detest pain for making us grow, who loathe that which is plain because we think we’ve better ideas toward which to go all while we go exceedingly nowhere but rather seem to deepen daily in our delight to deprive ourselves of life here inside what remains a place in which that which was present then has never changed.

For the evil remains.

Yes, there is still nothing new under the sun despite our all having been offered the opportunity to ourselves be made new under the Son who came to give Himself for our sins in order to rescue us from an evil that most of us still don’t want to be rescued from.

And my question is why?

Not why did He die as we honestly can’t misunderstand that as we so often try to anyway. No, why do we still not wish to be rescued? Why do we still often refuse His redemption of our lives? Why do we still cling so tight to this delight that we seem to assume still hidden inside of this idea that’s remained for some reason our ideal of this idol that is our way?

Indeed, what does our way have left to offer on this side of all that it’s already accomplished? And, having experienced all the best that our way could accomplish, why keep going back to it? Is better a matter only measured behind us? Did the past already prove of such perfection that neither the present nor the promise can best it? Truly, what of all there was and of it remains that we’re so strained to hold so tight that we’ve left still no room for His light?

Do we really like this life the way we’ve come to live it?

Can we honestly not see that the way we’ve come to live it is basically summed up in our continuing to lose it?

How much more of this life and the time we’ve left to live it can we afford to risk on this thinking only about our best ideas for it, which have all been always nothing more than the sum of everything we’ve seen, done, heard and been before?

And, well, if it wasn’t good enough then, proven in both how little of our best we’ve held onto and too how little we tried to, again, what then makes us think that the story will change?

If our best led still to His death then what do we think it can accomplish for us?

I guess though that the problem is that we don’t think. At all really. I reckon we did for a while, but alas that while was but for each of us found within a past in which we were kids who were learning of life and all the then-perceived limitlessness that only the youngest of us still dare to believe in. Indeed, this itself is something of a proof that proves we need to be saved! We’ve lost our ability to believe in anything from ourselves bettered to the world the same.

Rather we anymore just complain about how bad things are as if we’re not doing anything to add to the collapse in our many complaints.

News flash folks, we most certainly are!

In fact this reality hit me like a freight train just this morning. It’s the realization that I’ve been all but shattering my family’s hope and happiness. Not that such is by any means anything that I want to do but that sadly such is simply all it seems I know to do. For every single day finds me facing them as nothing but this grump who lives as if in a perpetual slump from which there’s nothing seen but the stump of something I once hoped would have grown into something far different than it’s become.

And I think we all know what I’m talking about.

It’s that this life as we live it sure ain’t what we’d hoped for it to be back when we too were those kids who believed for a better that simply hasn’t come. And now that’s not to say that certain things haven’t improved along the way. I’m sure there are some. But what I am saying is that, for the most part, the world’s falling apart. Long gone are the days of even simple ignorance as rather now we have this ability to know always everything that everyone is doing.

We are more connected to one another than ever before and yet there’s undeniably more hatred, more anger, more arrogance and sadly then less common sense than ever before.

How can that be?

How can we have managed to become so dumb as to prove, despite our “progress” as is apparently proven in our many “progressions” made along the way to wherever and whatever it is that we are this day, that we know plausibly less about what matters most than any generation ever has?

And again, I’m not saying that everything is nothing but bad. But friends, it’s sure a fight to find or feel anything that’s good!

We literally live in what’s become a world in which happiness is either sold in stores and bought there by those many who can afford it or it’s simply the rarely found byproduct of what’s become a life so strange that only an increasing few ever live it. And in truth, speaking for me alone, I don’t really remember the last time I was truly happy. And granted, that’s not really even anywhere close to ultimate goal of this life as rather the call of this life is for our to be holy.

But the truth is that it seems that we’ve all become so afraid of being holy that we’re even now unable to be happy.

Because the point of being holy is to be set apart for special use by He who created us to be something far more special than whatever this is that we’ve all collectively been. It’s for our to be different from that which is unholy and thus unusable for anything special, anything important, anything worthwhile. To be holy is to be found as being worthy of being useful for something that matters.

And, well, that’s kind of the question that it seems so many of these here posts come to anymore:

What of all that folks are worried about here really matters at all?

Because the simple truth is that so much of what is here is only a cog in the fall. Everything that we worry about anymore is nothing more than a beautiful distraction from what’s actually beautiful. We’ve indeed fallen for a false beauty, a false joy, a false hope, a false happy. Because, in honesty, everything here is fake. It’s all made up. It’s nothing but make believe made for those who are scared to believe.

And honestly, when did that happen?

When did we set aside our daring to imagine something better? Sure, we eventually learned that we really can’t fly and that bicycles can only go so fast and that we’re not all cut out to be astronauts. But still, did we have to lose our love for hope? Did we have to set aside our dreams for better lives? Did we truly have to give up our excitement in growing beyond whatever it was that we were?

Because we did.

And that as in we both did grow beyond what we were but only to also seemingly lose our excitement to grow even further. Rather anymore we all just sit around and grumble about how bad things are and how unfair it feels and how nothing feels right anymore.

Again, another news flash for you:

It’s not supposed to!

Because this world isn’t our home as it’s rather the home to those who don’t seem to mind the promise of hell being the outcome to be found by the many who are clearly living out there upon the wide road which not only leads to destruction but has already started to prove it!

And if you don’t believe me then just look around!

This world is nothing like even what it was when I was a kid. And, granted, I’m increasingly far from those days in which I was. But what seems to make it worse, at least for me, is that I’ve been given this memory that allows me to remember things as they were. In fact I remember things from so long ago that I don’t even know how I’ve remembered them or why. But the point is that I remember a time in which the world wasn’t what the world is.

Not to say that it was perfect then as it most definitely wasn’t.

But it’s simply to say that things haven’t gotten better despite all of our apparent “advancement”. Because the simple fact is that all we’re advancing is only away from such things as peace and purpose and the very promise of hope that was given us even long before we started giving our lives away to whatever it is that we’re doing with them these days.

That’s something else that smacked me in the face just the other day. That I’d literally sat for an entire evening staring at a screen watching stupid videos never once even looking up to ever acknowledge my family who was with me in the room for the 2-3 hours that I ignored them.

We’ve become consumed by the world around us.

Hence then the need of rescue!

And yet again, we just continue to refuse. It’s not that we don’t hear Him knocking but just that we’re busy at the moment. It’s not that we don’t like the idea of what He promises us just that we’re not really interested in what little He asks of us. And true, the little He asks of us is the very laying down of the way of life we’ve been living. But still, looking at what all we’re doing here within our way of living a life, well, what do we honestly have to lose?

To be brutally honest, I hate my way of living life. I hate the things that I’ve done within my life. I hate the choices I’ve made, the changes I haven’t. I despise the lies I’ve believed and feel then nothing but shame over all the times that I’ve run away from the truth that could have set me free from what I instead chose to embrace in captivity.

Indeed, I’ve been a prisoner most of my life, held captive by this mind that dares to continue imagining both all these things that I can do and yet so too all these reasons to still refuse His coming to my rescue.

Because I, like you, we don’t know how to see that we need rescued from what are lives that we’ve somehow managed to grow proud of having lived despite there being only death found within them. Truly, we’ve each become so blind that to us belief is something only fools mess with. Because, well, to believe is usually aimed at something better, and, well, pride cannot imagine anything better than whatever we are.

But friends, just what are we?

What I mean is that we’re all here, right? We are all alive in this time, right? All of us then have a part that we’re playing in the overall goings on that are going on, right?

Okay.

Why then does everything suck?

Why then is everything hard?

Why then is there so much hatred and anger and sadness and sorrow and this glaring lack of shame being seen inside of our all continuing to do the very things that make us angry or cause us to hate?

Again, is this the way we wanted to live back when we believed we were knights in shining armor meant to save the day and win the battle and rise victorious over whatever came against us?

Because anymore the only victory we seem excited about, and that probably because it’s the only one we can win anymore, is that won in some video game that we play while we’re then locked away inside a virtual world that we use to escape from the reality of the real deal that we all but stopped trying to win a long time ago.

Indeed, one of the things I talk to God about all the time anymore is this reality of all I’ve missed along the way to what is a life in which not much seems to go right. Rather most days find me barely treading water as I all but willfully drown inside a world so down and out that our collective reflex is to just give up whenever the going gets so tough as to dare ask us to try and believe or to hold out hope just a little longer.

No, we’ve got an xbox and so we don’t need hope.

We can just escape into virtual reality with the help of artificial intelligence pouring from screens we’ve literally strapped to our faces all so that we don’t have to see the realness of the world we’ve created at the hands of the kind of life we chosen to live.

All because we can’t bear to witness what all our choices have accomplished.

Because the truth of it is absolutely brutal!

So brutal in fact that all we seem to have is this ongoing fascination with violence and silence and screaming at one another over matters so miserable that all they know to accomplish is division. We’ve built a world in which lust is all we trust and the truth thus isn’t. We came upon a way of life in which we refuse to believe that we’re going to die, much less that we deserve to.

But friends, looking around at what all we’ve done to life and this world in which we live it, how is it that we still can’t see it?

Honestly, the only thing that surprises me anymore is that God continues to give us more days in which most of us do the same things that we did the day before. I truly cannot comprehend His patience with us, His kindness toward us, His love for us because, well, we’ve gotten good only at hating Him and destroying His creation and fighting with those who look and live just like us over which of us has it wrong.

Friends, we all have it wrong. We’ve so confused and overcomplicated the point and purpose of life and love and everything in between them that we couldn’t find our way out of this mess if we tried.

And most days we don’t.

That’s why Jesus came. It was both to do what we couldn’t and that because He knew that without some undeniable reason, well, we wouldn’t even if we could. He came to open our eyes to what we’ve become so that He could then help us see that He’d come to save us too.

And yeah, it’s a pretty heartbreaking way to do it, showing us our sinfulness first, but friends, that’s the only way it can work. Because the reality is that we have to first see the trouble we’re in if we’re to ever reach for the hand that’s reaching down to pull us up and out of it.

And sadly, that’s the obvious problem. It’s that entirely too few are willing to see it. Most here refuse to believe it. In fact, there remain a majority here that continue ahead toward this idea of their finding their best life.

Here!

Friends, the truth is that here is what we need to be rescued from not rewarded with. This world and what it’s become is nothing that honors the Son nor glorifies the Father. Which is actually the point of this verse as is proven in the next which says, “to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” Indeed, all that He does is done unto His glory, His honor, His praise.

You know, all the things that are increasingly uncommon in this place!

Indeed, that’s my point! It’s that this world continues to run away from God and we’re seeing the results of it all the time. The evil in this place isn’t even hiding anymore.

Why then are we?

Why are we continuing to hide from God? Why are we still denying God? Why can’t we see that that’s exactly what we’re doing every single time that we do anything in which He’s at best an afterthought?

That’s what He came to rescue us from. It’s that common way of life in which all that’s said and done is only done as if He didn’t do anything. It’s that common mindset in which each and every thought is only about anything other than Him. It’s that life in which all we seem to care about is success and satisfaction and thus us succumbing still to assuming such things matter as much as the world believes they do. Indeed, it’s our doing as the world continues to in our trying to have whatever they too seek to have.

But friends, what is there here that we have to have so stinking bad that we continue to slap His hand away?

One day we’re all going to look up and realize how wrong we were to live this life as we had. The problem for most is that that day is going to go bad because the only glory they ever sought to gain was that of their own. And it’s because of that that the many will miss their one opportunity to find not only life but a better life at that waiting for them.

All because they didn’t wait for the better but rather tried to prove better was only found inside their version of good enough.

Friends, it’s our good enough that He died to rescue us from because the same only keeps us limited in terms of love, of hope, of joy, of life. Because this world is rapidly running out of all the above. Only problem is that either nobody sees it or they’re just not interested in doing anything about it.

But then problem becomes that Jesus did do something about it.

So who then is wrong? The One who died to make us right or those who think they’re already there?

No, it’s pretty clear where we are as this world shows less and less of all that Jesus is all but every day. And sadly that will remain the normal way that most here continue to take.

Hence again the need for rescue!

It’s in that we’ve all learned how to do whatever everyone else here will continue choosing to. He died so that we too could do something new and that in the hope of finding something better. And looking around, well, it’s becoming easier to believe in better.

Easier every day.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold