Day 4063 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:5 NIV

Almost home

And yet so far away or so it seems here most days as most days here find us still lost within the horrors of what is a horde so hopeless that it often feels as if God can’t see us through all the nonsense and disbelief both swirling around us and too inside even our own words and actions and the lack of life often lived or loved within them. Indeed, so many days it seems as if we’re still just drifting atop this endless sea of a world that seems only to see no real need to seek for He who came to save us from what most here can’t see coming.

A question which should begin by asking will we make it as ought to be answered by even the shakiest of we will make it’s ever known amongst a stumbling men.

But alas a question impossible to ask and thus an assurance equally unattainable so long as we look unto any of we the stumbling for something, anything of any help, inspiration, confidence or consequence. Which, in all honesty does indeed pose quite the problem for all of us because all we all have ever learned to do is to look unto man to lead us into how we should live. And their help has often held so much glory and gain that so too have we gleaned this fear of failing to remain whatever this is that they’ve helped us become.

Which is a people so utterly numb to every chance at everything new that most days find us either not knowing what to do or simply not doing anything at all.

Why?

Because the surest way to fall from a pedestal is to take a step in literally any direction as they’re typical circular in form and exist solely to only show off that which is placed atop them.

And so having all of us learned to live our lives as if doing so from thrones, well, this has left us quite unable to see the predicament we’ve perfected for ourselves. Because the thrones themselves are pedestals from which we all will fall thanks to His Word having said that every knee will bow and that to join in this chorus of those all of us who are then finally found in agreement with the fact that He is God and we are not, all to the glory of the Father who sent the Son to send the Spirit that’s meant to be something of a down payment upon the salvation as said Ghost is supposed to lead us into an ever-growing remembrance of all said Son had said as was given Him by the Father.

Problem then being that the three are one in the same meaning then that should we deny the One then we’ll neither receive the other nor then be welcomed by the Father thanks to our having rejected two thirds of who He is, which is basically akin to denying the third as well as, well, how much easier is it for us to deny He who we’ve neither seen nor heard nor felt?

Granted, we’ve not seen Christ but we’ve at least hopefully felt the Spirit as such was sent forth unto the world to lead some of us onto what remains a narrowing path spent in this odd excitement to experience our pain and strain within this plain as opposed to seeking further our share of the many rewards still being sought by the most who exist without the hope that is the Ghost as they’re rather preoccupied with this occupation of a place in which the commonest of all occupations is again the utter denial of basically everything that God is.

All refused because we’ve simply learned this fear of our coming to lose what we’ve long held was a life as it was a time in which we lived alongside a lot of what we loved and even a few who claimed they loved us back.

But as time goes on I’m not so sure of that because, well, love neither lies nor then allows another to lie inside what are still so clearly lives being lived in sin, the wage of which remains what it always was.

Which is death.

Indeed, we are all of us walking through a veritable graveyard, a bone field, a battle ground upon which most of those we see, and even much of what we continue to be, it’s all destined to die thanks to the sin still alive in life thanks to our ongoing refusal as to the perusal of any and all possible reasons as to why He’d ask that we go ahead and die now so that we might live later.

It’s just that we’re a people who seek our best now, saving then not said best for later but rather for then whatever happens to be left of anything that we can only hope is at least halfway decent.

But you see, that’s not really all that hopeful a hope, now is it?

I mean shouldn’t our every hope be something that only continues to grow? Shouldn’t joy remain something that we expect only to swell? Doesn’t excitement deserve a devotion that only deepens as we stumble near it?

Shouldn’t the stumble slowly be turning into something of a sashay as we make our way along the Way that came to save from what we can already see and hopefully feel is a way of life that we’ve come to not live anymore?

See, this is the curiosity that makes our humanity so amazing. It’s that we’ve all claimed we can’t see God despite the evidence of changes made for the better in such growths as the overcoming of addictions by those who were once so addicted that they didn’t even know what they were doing anymore. We all claim we can’t hear God despite these little slivers of truth managing to sometimes make it through what is a world that is so filled with lies that we’ve even resorted to Ai to write sermons so we needn’t strain ourselves.

And we claim we can’t feel His presence despite this odd sense of disappointment we sometimes feel whenever we oddly enough do once again something we didn’t like that we’d done all the times we’d done it before.

Yes, we are seemingly immune to the truth of who God is, what that means, and what what it means ought to mean as is made manifest inside of us to the point in which we sort of just eventually stop really caring as to whatever everyone else is doing as we’re increasingly interested in this audacity that is defined inside our trying to see what we can’t as is held in a place we’re not which is said to be found finally at a time we’ll none of us know which itself is something that’s hard for us to hold in what’s become a world in which we carry the very sum of all human knowledge and understanding in the palm of our hand or the pocket of our pants.

We know everything, or at least that google is more than ready and able to help with whatever we don’t.

It’s just the getting us to admit to anything other than a search bar the things we don’t understand.

Which is why He sent the Spirit to take us by the hand and lead us into at first the remembrance of all He’s said, then a realization as to why He’d said it, then a resolve to insist our lives begin to revolve around what He said as we come to understand the why is because He intended to save our lives, meaning then that anything from which we need saved still should become the sum of everything we cease doing as quickly and completely as possible.

Problem then being that we’re not really a people known for stopping.

Granted, we’re pretty clearly not really getting anywhere.

But we’re getting stuff.

And we like stuff.

So it works.

Except it doesn’t.

No, I think what we’re starting to see, or at least hopefully should be, is that there’s very little in life that’s working right anymore. Rather most everything is reaching this place of a rather dire decay in which even we humans have just sort of decided to dissolve into this “existence?” in which we do literally as little as physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally possible.

Why?

Because again, the surest way to fall off these towers we built for ourselves is to take a step in any direction.

Which is the problem because pretty much all of what He asks of us has some sort of movement involved. Take up your cross. Follow me. Go into all the world. Give away all you have. Store up treasures in Heaven. Don’t partake of the Pharisee’s leaven.

Hopefully you see the point.

The leaven by the way is arrogance as is found inside all of us to some degree as still it seems we seem to see all these ways in which we’re already right, which is what causes the fright of our standing to lose our precious way of life should we risk taking a step off this high opinion of ourselves we’ve found thanks to the world always being there to tell us how awesome we are.

A lie we enjoy because it oddly enough always matches what we’ve long been trying to tell everyone!

Because we do think we’re awesome. We do think we’re special. We love this idea that has our minds completely convinced that we are it, it being these days literally whatever we ourselves want it to be. Indeed, we’ve seriously devolved to the point in which we’re all just making it up as we go along, even to the point of having come upon some widely agreed upon fluidity in terms of gender allowing us to just switch it up and play around with differing identities until we find the one that feels right.

For that day at least.

Which kind of testifies to the need for salvation, and that from ourselves more than anything.

But then that too has become something of an issue in that we’ve all seemingly assumed at one time or another that His gift of salvation was supposed to save us from all that could harm us. That His having sent the Spirit unto us was something akin to some suit of armor or chainmail that was meant to ensure that we’re never hurt or even unhappy. Indeed, there are some who continue to assume that He exists only to do our bidding as is always having something to do with whatever it is that we want done so as to ensure that it’s always our ideas that come to fruition.

See the problem now?

Fruition, fruit?

It’s that we’re bearing pre-rotted fruit because we continue planting, or having planted in us, this idea that it’s all about us. That salvation is meant to save us from all the hard things we don’t want to have to experience nor endure. That mercy is something of this meritless, meaningless theory that exists only to continue covering our unwillingness to change for as long as we refuse to admit we need to. That grace gives us the right to do whatever we want to do simply because the cross contends that God wants to forgive us.

So we should help then, shouldn’t we?

Indeed, weeks ago I saw someone post this little heresy in which a cartoon drawing of He who is our Savior, you know, the One we just this past weekend celebrated the fact that He suffered and died for us, all tatted up and holding a bottle of booze in one hand and a joint in the other with shades on to cover the probably red and quite sullen eyes known of such consumptives with a caption that said “if we don’t sin then Jesus died for nothing.”

Yeah, we’ve become a people who continue to assume that the best mercy is meant for is nothing more than covering as many of our willful transgressions as we can imagine some need to continue making.

Because such is the world we live in.

It is as sinful today as it’s ever been before, perhaps even worse considering all our precious technological advancements that allow us to do things now that literally were not possible ever before. We are indeed granting this world and its entirety admission unto our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts for what are hours a day as we scroll endlessly through the sum of everything that this place apparently thinks matters enough that it needs to be shared for all the world to see.

Thus proving the sea atop which we drift in what is one of only two possible directions.

Question then is which?

Sadly the answer is still entirely too often that spent away from God. And that for what seem to remain all sorts of reasons. His path is too hard. We have too much to lose. He just asks too much. The world’s too fun. Pleasure feels really good. Denying ourselves doesn’t make any sense. We’ve not done anything that bad. He loves us plenty enough to just wink and nod as we continue enjoying ourselves however said enjoyment comes. It takes too long to change. There’s too much work involved in repenting. Heaven’s a ways away still.

Yeah, we’ve got all sorts of excuses for our continuing to refuse His call to come home.

Most of them combined into this idea that has us all at least fairly convinced that this world is our home.

Mostly because we’re all already here and too here holds pretty much all the stuff that still we want or just really don’t want to lose in what still sounds the craziest of all ideas ever uttered:

A camel fitting through the eye of a needle?

Preposterous!

Yes indeedy, the message of the Gospel is still foolishness to those who are perishing.

Because, well, for the time being we can still see plenty of people continually sinning and not much is happening to them. We’ve an entire justice system that’s become something of a burgeoning joke seeing as how it continues to release those who’ve been arrested 15, 20, 30 times before. All of us in fact have done plenty of things that we knew to be wrong only to have at worst felt bad about them for just as long as however long it took us to find something that freely offered to distract us from how bad we felt.

There is no justice, no consequence, no cost or punishment in this place.

And we all see this every single day.

So what then is sin? What still matters of right and wrong? Why be bothered by trying to be bettered whenever we can could just as easily, and far more easily, just continue doing whatever we’re doing all whilst remaining increasingly numb to it all?

Yes, why not join with the rest of humanity and just turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the swelling insanity knocking on the doors of our hearts asking if our souls can come out and play?

Why?

Because there comes a day upon which there will be justice, there will be consequence, we will all face the cost of our punishment for every foul word and empty thought and godless action we’ve ever undertaken in this place.

And that day comes soon.

For God is not slow in keeping His promises as many of us count slowness. Rather He, for today at least, has chosen to remain patient with us as He wants none of us to come unto the condemnation we so fully deserve but rather unto the repentance that none of us should have the opportunity to strive for.

Indeed, God wants to save us from what’s coming for us, a fact evidenced in what we just celebrated Jesus having done for us.

And He did it all with the perfectly stated promise that He had to leave this world through the grave so as to save both us from our sins and then a place for us should we determine to do as He’s called us to in the taking up of our crosses and killing daily upon them all these lives we’ve lived of all these losses of morality, humility, modesty, honesty that we’ve all honestly chosen.

He calls us to share in our measure of what He’s done for what it means so that so too might we share in where He went to make ready our place with Him.

A place we’ll only be given had we given everything we had to this opportunity to stay always awake and ever ready to leave this world just as soon as we possibly can.

But that’s not something many here can say, is it?

That they’re ready to leave? That there’s some strange sense of despair every single morning whenever they once again open their eyes to see that we’re all still here? That our hearts are broken because we’re still not home?

No, most here are home.

And that’s why God shields us who aren’t yet.

It’s because this place remains the one in which we’re all at risk of being pleased to death, entertained to death, fed to death on this constant course of both food and fun and fame and fortune and all the f words that we don’t consider bad, unlike that that even our “leaders” apparently don’t mind tossing around as if that’s in any way acceptable for someone who’s supposed to be in such a high position.

Friends, this world is collapsing. From the top down and the bottom up, this place is crumbling, imploding upon itself. So much here just doesn’t make any sense anymore. And yet I contend that the fact that some can see that is just one more testimony to God being there to open our eyes and break our hearts for all that He sees that breaks His.

It’s proof that He’s healing us, helping us, leading us, guiding us, giving us the ability to see that very little here is as it should be.

Why?

So that we start getting ready to leave thanks to our coming to see that we’ve truly nothing left to lose as there’s barely even any life left here. No, most rather all but stopped living years ago and now just exist to drift through these oceans of motions and emotions that allow them to pretend they care while their lack of change says otherwise.

What says our lives?

That we’re ready to go? Excited to leave? Overjoyed at the opportunity we have here inside this one more today in which to crucify one more thing that was in our lives that was from this world that we no longer feel a part of? Or that we’re still a willing part in whatever this world has become?

Friends, there should be evidence in our lives that we’re getting closer to Christ because if there isn’t then odds are we’re not.

And yeah, most here clearly don’t care to.

Is that a chance you too are willing to take?

The fact is that we’re all having to wait. It’s either to find out just how right we were or how wrong we are.

And the difference is measured in the distance between a life lived looking forward to the last time upon which our salvation will arrive and that in a life spent as if we need no such help as we’re not interested in having to wait for anything, much less everything we can’t see.

Every eye will be opened one day. But friends, the only Way home is one so very narrow that we should beg God to open our eyes now so that we don’t miss it.

Something that most here won’t do.

But thankfully He offers to protect us from what those most will eventually devolve to do in what will sadly remain a life they choose to live as if life is only lived here.

What a sad way to go!

Because it will reach the same place but to a far different outcome.

Don’t find out the hard way, not when He’s done so much to make it so easy.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold