Day 4106 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Philippians 1:29 NIV

What is clemency?

Is it a tendency towards showing mercy that thus all but demands they who are thus show it then to all of us? Is it something then of an all but foregone conclusion even if it can then be diluted as something we can, and will, take for granted? Is it a line of lenity given unto the lost who themselves, being lost, haven’t any idea what lenity even is nor then how to use it as they cannot possibly understand its purpose? Is it something done on purpose as all mercy must be or rather a gift given with a decidedly more measured expectation than mere praise and appreciation?

Is it the sufferance of someone else agreeing to suffer either with us or perhaps for us, or, in our case, to suffer through us doing as we all so clearly know we shouldn’t?

Is it lenience which allows us to do what we shouldn’t whilst then enduring what we don’t agree we should knowing that the combining of both is the only true hope of our both finding and becoming something better?

I’ll be the first to admit that this verse has always managed to sit among the stranger of Scripture as it speaks to an understanding that none of us know how to even pretend we can understand. And that’s because within this life we’ve all, and I do mean all, we’ve all become of this mind in which we find that such feelings as pain, regret and other such sufferings are all always things that we feel entirely undeserving of having to endure.

We hate them.

And that’s because, well, they sure seem to hate us! After all, we’ve become a people, or perhaps indeed always been, who seem to see that a life only wins the sum of all we want when all the things that we have and see and believe and endure and go through and go to are all promised and ever proven to be only endlessly good, simple, comfortable and easy. Indeed, we’re all anymore so averse to any matter or measure of hardship that it’s now incredibly hard for us to even begin to understand a statement such as this.

That it’s been granted us to suffer for Him?

Hold up. Wait a minute! You telling me that we are supposed to suffer for Jesus?

Thought that was the other way around considering the cross and Calvary and that whole empty grave we celebrate every Easter Sunday!

He’s the One who hurts. He’s the One who bleeds. He’s the One tasked with seeing things we don’t want to see, feeling things we don’t want to feel, dying the death that we don’t want to die to what sadly then remains a life which continues daily to prove that we still think we’ve entirely too much to lose to lay anything down and take anything up that doesn’t accomplish for us the success we want and in us then the satisfaction we crave.

Indeed, He’s the One who came to this place and walked that line that led into that grave, doing all He did and enduring all that He could so as to both show us that He is good and thus prove too that so too are His promises.

And there is simply, as far as we can measure, nothing good about suffering.

Nothing.

Which proves the problem.

It’s that we’ve become a people so vastly tied to comfort that it’s all we know to want. It’s all we can understand. Our being comfortable, successful, blessed with lives then unstressful, that is what we know to be good as, well, the sum of everything else is hard or hurts or proves always heavy and so it’s all everything we don’t want. Because nobody wants to hurt or face something hard or carry inside them these heavy emotions of such things as guilt and regret and even simple confusion.

Not when we’ve become such this people who always pretend that we know what we’re doing and that we’re always doing it so very well that nothing could ever then go wrong.

Yes, we’ve managed to somehow either convince ourselves or to allow ourselves convinced that we’ve got this whole living of life thing under control. Not sure how we can possibly continue to buy that nonsense when there’s so very much, well, nonsense always swirling around us.

But here we are.

Which is I guess as good a question as any for the day:

Where are we?

And now our tendency toward all which is always again only easy and basted then in the simplest of simplicity would probably find us rather quick on the draw to offer up such answers as America or Earth or, as some smart aleck would offer, here. And indeed, here is where we are and thus wherever we are is always here because, well, we can’t physically be anywhere other than wherever we are. And so yeah, we are here, and depending upon where you’re here happens to be, America may be a worthy response and Earth is undeniably obvious.

But that’s not what I mean.

What I mean is where are we in regard to life, to faith, to hope, to belief? Where are we in terms of growth, of morality, of modesty and honesty and honestly agreeing that we know decidedly less of all the above than we probably should and even perhaps once did? Indeed, where are we in regard to where we once were? Is there any sign of spiritual, mental, emotional progress to be proven between who we are now and what we were doing five years ago?

Or, as is sadly far more likely the case, are we more or less basically the same?

Because you see, such is a danger of mercy. It’s that it can be taken so for granted by those to whom it’s given that they then do next to nothing with it as they always expect that they’ll always have it. And indeed, it’s easy to see that such is our measure of it, something proven in how little new we’re ever doing. Rather most of us are quite proud of our ruts. We love our lives and all the little lies that allow us to think we’re living them as we should.

We love thinking that we’re good and everyone else basically the same.

But as great as that might make us feel, it doesn’t do anything to inspire anyone to do any better.

And, perhaps even worse, it also inspires everyone to lean toward becoming bitter whenever the weather rolls in and rains again upon these endless parades we’ve planned of a life so filled with pride that all for which we care to abide is only behind the curtain waiting always to step into the spotlight to show off all of our life and how amazingly well it’s going and that thanks to how awesome we are at living it.

But are we though?

Are we really all that good at living a life when it continues to prove that it’s our minds we’ll lose whenever faced with anything we don’t want to deal with? Are we good at living life when we’ve so clearly come to hate that which makes up at least half of our time spent doing so? Can we even ever possibly expect to actually prove of the ability to really measure that when we’re elsewise so often entirely distracted seeking for those things which divert our attention from reality and how bad it’s gotten?

And that plausibly because of us?

Granted, we’d never know to see it that way as, well, we’re again the ones who are always doing everything right and we’ve got all the fans and fortunes to prove it. But can we really prove anything with anything that we can lose in an instant?

It’s like Job. Dude had everything anyone could ever hope to have. A huge family, plenty of land, a bunch of money thanks to his experiencing a great deal of success.

Lost it. Like literally lost all the above within one afternoon!

And, as something like that would inspire anyone to do, the whole ordeal basically inspired this rather instant downward spiral into what became such a sense of dejection that it became one of the most different and honestly confusing books of the Bible. And that’s because the book is this recount of the conversation had between Job and his friends in which there’s all this back and forth found between him trying to prove that he was righteous and thus didn’t deserve to endure all he’d just gone through and then his friends all trying to help him see that none of us are righteous and that life basically sucks for everyone every now and then.

And as they bicker and debate in this lengthy back and forth what you find is that both sides make some good points. And so you just kind of get lost bouncing back and forth in what becomes something of case meant for a court docket only you feel as if you’re a member of the jury and having then to decide who’s guilty but one side basically says it’s the guy who’s literally had his entire life flipped upside down whereas the guy himself, at times at least, all but points the finger at God.

And well, that can’t be the case.

Expect that the very opening of the book finds yet another conversation, this one had between God and satan, in which God points out Job as this shining example of a good and decent man literally saying in Job 1:8 that “there is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

Pretty stellar review to be given from God!!

Yet then the devil goes on to point out that perhaps his goodness is only there to be so witnessed because God, in His goodness, has blessed Job with all the success and accomplishment he’s accomplished in light of his being “a man who fears God and shuns evil”, which happens to be exactly what He’s always called all of us to do unto the promise of His giving us the desires of our hearts would we should.

And so in this little exchange between these two sides, the devil suggests that should God remove His kindness from Job then Job would perhaps prove a decidedly different person, one who, should God “stretch out (His) hand and strike everything he has”, “will surely curse (God) to (His) face.”

To which God basically says, “Let’s see.”

And then the mayhem begins. A couple groups of thieves came along and stole away all his flocks and herds. Fire rained down from the heavens and burned up a bunch of his sheep and servants. A freak storm blew in out of nowhere and demolished this house that all of his kids were in, killing then all of them at once.

Dude had the worst of all possible bad days.

And indeed, as it would do to anyone, it sent him spiraling into a sort of sadness and anger and confusion that did indeed do as the devil at least kind of hinted in that Job did in fact, and a few times at that, all but demand that he be stood before God where he could make his case or at least find out why it had all gone so wrong so fast.

And his friends do their best to point out that that might not go quite so well as Job assumed it would because, well, as even the Bible tells us, there are none who are good. And so him being found basically arguing with God face to face might not reach the outcome that Job thought he might.

Because none of us can prove or disprove anything to God.

None of us can change His mind or accuse Him of basically committing a crime because He does as He wants as, well, He’s the One who’s created everything and can thus do with it whatever He wishes.

Which makes clemency a choice seemingly made in oddness.

Because, well, again there are none who are good. There are none who do always what’s right. There are none who never mess up or make a mistake or even simply say something they know better than to say. Even David, another man defined as one after God’s own heart, even he did some seriously questionable stuff.

Namely that whole Uriah and Bathsheba debacle. Literally got a man killed just to take his wife from him.

That’s messed up!

And yet leaving the books of Samuel and continuing ahead into Kings and Chronicles you’ll see that every king after him was measured against him in regard to whether or not they did the good that he’d done.

Because of mercy.

It’s always been God’s willingness to overlook our failures and flaws that has allowed us to do, to see, to feel anything good at all. It’s always been His will working in us to move us, to inspire us, to encourage us to do the good we ought to do and to then stop doing the bad that we shouldn’t be doing.

But the point is that we’re all guilty of doing the bad things that none of us should have ever done.

And yet then comes this Jesus fellow.

And He speaks in words that sound both riddle and royal. He walks in ways that bring both healing and warning. He eats with sinners and thieves and yet argues with the religious leaders of the time. He literally turns everything on its head!

Even unto calling the first to be last and all of us then into that last place we’d any of us ever want to go, arriving there well before we’d ever wish to arrive in what becomes a way of life lived so contrary to everything we’ve ever known that to live becomes Christ and to die the greatest of all gain because, if having accomplished the first, we get to go and spend forever with He for whom we’d lived.

Again, all because of mercy.

But still, it all remains entirely murky as to why we’re told here that we’ve been granted the opportunity to not only live for Him, to not only believe in Him, but to suffer for Him?

As if that’s an opportunity? As if that’s a gift? As if our suffering is then something we should be thankful for, excited about, perhaps even proud of?

What sense does that make?

Didn’t make any to Job or his friends who found themselves in this losing battle between two sides who could neither prove the other wrong nor themselves right. Didn’t seem to make any sense to Jonah who was called to do something arduous that he saw no point in having to do because he knew that God is good and would do the right thing by those in Nineveh whether or not he went to what he assumed would be a place that probably wouldn’t like much if any of what he had to say.

Ended up going anyway, by way of whale, and doing as God had asked him to and, yeah, the people there repented and were saved from the impending destruction God had planned because of their sin.

But that’s the thing about this faith!

If it always made sense then it would then fit inside of our minds that have also been the factories in which we’ve bought into all these fantasies and fallacies, which themselves have become our every failure and fear. If it was always easy then we wouldn’t realize how badly we need Jesus. If it all went how we expected it to go then it’d be something that we could say we know and did have figured out.

But how would that benefit us in terms of belief?

How would that accomplish in us any measure of growth?

What could we ever come to know of any semblance of hope if our lives here were always only easy and safe and comfy?

We’d learn nothing!

And, well, that’s simply not good enough. Because if we never learn anything new then we can never become anything different. And if we never become anything different then nor will be ever anything better. And if we’re never anything better than the sum of everything we’ve been, then all we’ll ever be are a bunch of sinners and thieves who do far more wrong willingly than we’ve any of us ever done right even accidentally.

Thus it’s granted to us to not only believe in Jesus but to experience our share of His fullness.

It’s to make it all so real, so harrowing, so hard and heartbreaking that we, left in piles and puddles of what becomes a broken people, find ourselves finally with no recourse left but to correct course, admit mistakes, confess our sins, cry out to Him and ask Him to do what only He can do:

Make us whole again. Make us right again.

Make us alive again!

Because the fact is that we are all dead in our sins and trespasses. We are all fallen short of the glory of God. We are all heartless beggars and wretched losers who’ve lost so many chances to have been or become something better. We’re all bitter and angry and so filled with hate and darkness that we have no business complaining whenever should bad things happen to us.

Because the fact is that we’re not good and so nor then should we have ever had all these expectations that our lives should be.

Friends, we deserve nothing!

Except death. Except suffering. Except misery and fear and pain and a life spent endlessly struggling.

And yet God gives us good days?

Indeed, so often we hear the world ask why bad things happen to good people, a question Job himself was quite curious to find the answer to.

But in truth the question we should be asking is why do good things happen to bad people?

And why can we still not see that we are the bad people to whom good things happen?

Because yes, suffering for Christ is a gift. Sharing in His misery is a measure of mercy. Being called to carry our crosses is a true form of clemency in that we should not have that opportunity to show Him that we trust Him, that we believe in Him, that we love Him more than we’ve loved ourselves.

That shouldn’t be possible because loving ourselves is all we’ve ever known.

And so for us to find the hope that only suffering can bring and seek the healing that only hurt can offer only proves that He’s doing something in our lives that’s ridding them of ourselves and our vast tendency toward self-protection and personal success and societal expectations of good lives, easy lives, lives free from suffering and hardship.

Yes, let us stop seeking our reward here and seek rather the suffering, the shame, the hatred and blame that comes from those who cannot bring themselves to admit they too have played a part in everything going up in smoke.

Let us confess that we are sinners who then deserve to suffer yes, but who do not deserve the beauty of knowing that we are suffering not for our sins but rather in a share of the Son!

Because the miseries of this life are entirely too good for a people like us.

And to get to experience them knowing of Christ, believing in Christ, living for Christ through our sharing of them, in them, this is a gift we should not have been given.

I only pray that we can all come to see it as one because if we don’t, well then it would seem we don’t know Him after all. Because He too was described as a Man no stranger to suffering and undeservingly familiar with pain. Underserving because He didn’t deserve to suffer the way He did.

Not for us who do deserve that kind of suffering He endured.

And that we get to experience so much less is where we realize the gift that it is to suffer for Him however we might.

For whoever suffers in this life is done with sin.

Let us be done with it then!

Suffer for Him. Be miserable for Him. Lay down your life for Him!

Because only in Him can we ever hope that we might take it back up again. And that promise is most certainly a gift!

Does it matter then when it comes or where it’s found or how we feel about how we’re called to find it?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold