Day 4107 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 4:1 NIV

What is unanimity?

Is it some mere matter of a mass of people agreeing to agree? Is it this shared ability, for however short and in whatever way, to see the same thing in the same degree? Is it the degree in which we do agree being for once seen as of plausibly more importance than our tendency to not? Is it finding within us the audacity to agree with something that we know we’d usually not? Is it not a measure of humility as such must exist for us to so come alongside anyone else in what is a share of that for which they care, a joining together of considerations aimed at the same outcome for a time?

Is it a time to set aside our many internal differences and debates and simply let both courage and curiosity have their way?

Is it not today, the day in which we do still have said time to seek for our share of His mind who came to where we live this life so as to live one too but only to do as we’d not done so that we could see inside of how He’d lived His something different that we might should at least consider taking the opportunity to agree with, the day in which we should do so?

What if we did agree with Christ? What if we did agree to give this life for what He gave His? What if we did as He did, or at the very least calls us to? For true, now that He’s suffered the way He did in what is the sacrifice to literally end all sacrifice, at least those kinds in which blood was legitimately shed, we needn’t ourselves truly do as He has done as, well, what would our blood as poured upon a cross prove able to add to what He Himself said was finished?

That’s not our place in this.

Rather our place is now to not necessarily hang upon a tree but to in fact agree to take up our tree and follow He who died to prove that He is the Way to what is a better way in which to live these lives, proven so in that He died to all that’s brought about our death, suffering Himself in the body thanks to sin done both in and with and mostly only for the bodies of those for whom He endured it all. All to show us that suffering isn’t this monster we’re meant always to avoid and nor then is pleasure this treasure we’re here always to seek.

Instead there does exist this strange place in which they both meet and, in some weird way find themselves both friends and enemies.

Because perhaps there could be pleasure in suffering and also suffering met because of pleasure’s lying.

Alas this strange place is one it seems as if increasingly few are intent on or even interested in finding. Rather most here, all of us indeed, we still awake within most days at least somewhat willing to continue chasing after all our personal goals and their personal proclivities as are easily assumed needed because, well, our goals can’t matter to us unless they mean something the same. And indeed, our goals do mean something to us.

Question is what?

The short and simple to that is glory and that as apparently proven in gain and that even as that seen in our achieving of a day spent avoiding both rain and pain as both are apparently entirely unsuited unto the life we’ve lived designing inside minds so mangled that we ourselves find ourselves confused more often than not.

Or maybe that’s just me.

For indeed, I find there’s often this entirely literal and in fact almost physical experiencing of one of Paul’s more familiar writings being written inside my own life. And that’s that part in Romans 7 in which he recounts his ongoing confusion considered inside his doing of things he doesn’t wish to do whilst then the not doing of those better things that he did wish were done.

“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”

A self-aware struggle itself culminating in his saying that such has become in him so constant, so continuing that it exists as if indeed something of a law upon which he can all but count on, as exists within him next to what is it’s own counter which exists upon the other side of life contrasting everything he knows and understands and both wishes he could be and yet realizes that he’s not.

“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”

Indeed, this same war is one both won and lost inside the hearts and minds and thus the lives of everyone who ever has, presently is or hopefully will come to consider themselves a follower of Christ.

Why?

Because the humility it begs for us to even considering approaching Him is the same which begins a curiosity as to the brutal honesty of everything He’s said, of which we’re promised to be reminded by His saying that His leaving was coming, has came, in order for His to send a Helper our way, the Holy Spirit, which will help us in that it will allow us to grow in both an understanding of all He said through hearts regenerate with His writings written within them and yet also then a corresponding realization as to the depth of our own depravity and thus need for the most violent of all change.

And it’s all so strange because we’ve always been a people who seek, as if our life depends upon it, the avoidance of such things.

Even the humility part which proves the start of what becomes entire lives falling apart with the faith that trusts He can and will put them back together inside the good work that He’s begun here under the sun wherein we ourselves are welcomed under the Son who exists now to intercede for us who, though for once trying to do better, are still just as feeble and prone then to falling as ever before.

The hope is that we’re at least now cognizant of it as, well, we can’t confess the sins we can’t see and yet neither then can we be forgiven or set free from those sins of which we don’t confess.

Which is why the Helper exists to help us remember all He said.

It’s because without such divine help we’re all just dead.

Because sin is death and, well, I think such things as our feeling of guilt and regret ought to prove enough to help us understand that.

But I guess the question becomes whether or not they do. And too, if they do, why we don’t then seem to better understand this life’s ongoing tendency toward struggling, suffering, our stumbling proving often the only reason why. Indeed, if any of us have ever in this life felt guilt or ran for a time alongside regret then we should know that our suffering is simply inevitable. It’s going to happen one way or another.

Shall that be His way or ours?

Sad truth is that I think we’re so used to our version and understanding of suffering that we’ve almost made friends with it. And granted, there is a syndrome whose symptoms are seen inside those who’ve, having been held captive for an extended period of time, found themselves almost finding friends and thus forming friendships with they who are their captors. It’s like a guy who’s been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole:

May as well make friends with both the other inmates and even better some of the guards because, well, they’re the only ones you’re going to be spending the rest of your life with.

Difference is that it’s for freedom that Christ has set us free, thus with the obvious stipulation that we not surrender ourselves again to any such yoke of slavery as those from which He’s literally died to free us.

Just makes sense doesn’t it?

That He who died to set us free from sin and the death it wins, literally dying said death on our behalf, would then find Himself both justified in His daring to ask and indeed validated in expecting that we would answer appropriately that we, in answering appropriately, do as He’s asked and indeed stop doing still the things that caused Him His suffering?

I mean He was crucified! And that for our sins!

Yeah, think that makes it only right that He ask we not do them again!

And yet, referring back to the captor/captive confusion mentioned above, problem seems to be that we all seem to see sin as our friend and thus our turning away from it and leaving it all forever behind something of a true suffering in life. And indeed, in many ways it is because, indeed, our sins have been our friends. With them we’ve had fun and felt good and in all honesty probably made other friends thanks to sin being still so prevalent that forming relationships is still often done in regard to similar interests or even addictions.

And so, yeah, His asking that we all but literally lay down our life, which is what He does ask, as is done in our no longer doing what we’ve done for so long now, and thus perhaps so well that we may have well found a measureable amount of success and satisfaction, and perhaps even acquaintanceship in so doing, it’s all something we’ve really no interest in doing.

Because, well, we happen to quite like our lives.

Sure, they’re not perfect. But on most days they seem close enough that we don’t really even care to consider the shortcomings all that much. Rather we just sort of go with the flow as they say. We agree to our enduring of bad days and hard times and those both seldom and frequent things in life that don’t really go our way but too don’t go so badly that we can’t manage to deal with them.

Gotta take the good with the bad, am I right?

Again, no I’m not. And nor is anyone else who buys into that nonsense. Why? Because what fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement can there be between good and evil? What mutually beneficial relationship can ever possibly exist between righteousness and wickedness? What blend of the both is able to allow us still to hope in something better whilst continuing to live for anything lesser?

Where exactly is halfway to Heaven?

See what I’m saying?

It’s that there can’t actually be this apparently perceived blending of the life we want to live with the life that we are in fact living. For we either want to do better, be better and thus should obviously agree unto taking the steps which would lead us toward said outcome of better or, well, we don’t. There is no other option. We’re either growing or we’re wilting. We’re either trying or we’re failing. We’re literally either living or we are in fact dying.

Which one is it?

And honestly, does suffering reserve any room in the deciding?

Again, we’re all going to experience suffering either way! It’s either going to be that which we’ve all already met as is proven inside our doing of those deeds in which all we’re really doing is making more mistakes which bring about more of the guilt and shame and regret that we’ve all already met or we’re going to suffer the humility, the humiliation maybe of realizing what we’re doing and why it’s bring us so much suffering as is seen inside such things as guilt, as regret and, not really enjoying it nor then finding any reason to so continue welcoming it, embrace the suffering of sacrificing that way of life in which we, as Paul posits, do as we don’t want to do.

A choice we can now choose because He has saved us from the way of life that’s led us all to become these wretched freaks we’ve been.

Question then is whether or not we’ll do as suggested here and arm ourselves with the same attitude toward holy suffering as Christ had or if we’ll just chalk it still up as not all that bad and do so only because we already know the way of life we’ve come to live and, though not perfect by any means, definitely isn’t so horrible that we need to change anything?

And indeed, what we see around us remains a world in which some are wrestling with that question whilst the vast majority still pretend it’s not being asked of them.

Because it’s clear that around here satisfaction isn’t seen as anything of a struggle. Pleasure remains the prize that most of those alive continue to seek. Enjoyment, entertainment, the very ecstasy that keeps nearly everyone ecstatic and frenzied and all but freaking out all the time, these are the things that continue to define the joys in many lives.

All because most here still assume suffering always only a bad thing. Surrendering a shame we can’t bear to hold. Humility some enemy that we’re always better to ward off than welcome in.

Why?

What is so amazing about this way life in which we all feel guilt and know plenty of which we regret, and that in a place that’s filled and in fact over flooded with such things as hatred and division and animosity and hostility?

Are those the outcomes we wish to find in life?

Granted, they’re all far easier to find than the humble courage to come apart from them, from here where they all are, and be in fact separate. And, yeah, we are a people vastly preferential of such ease.

But maybe that’s just a really good example of why that which is easier isn’t always better.

And too why suffering may be a good thing in that, well, enduring the suffering that is to be found and felt in our laying down of a way of life that we have come to love and that’s well loved us in return, it helps us to turn from that which does cause shame and does bring guilt and does leave regret.

And honestly, shame and guilt and regret suck plenty themselves!

What then have we to lose in trying to lose those things which cause them?

And furthermore, what all might we stand to gain if we did arm ourselves with the same frame of mind that Christ had in regard to sin? What if we did see it as He so clearly sees it? What if we did know it as the death it is that has in fact led to the death He died?

Might we finally start to understand why He did and why we can’t, shouldn’t avoid doing the same anymore?

Indeed, what if the violent humility of Christ were the ubiquitous mindset in life? What if we laid aside our understanding of things and tried only to consider them from the perspective of Him who had to hang in agony just to give us the undue opportunity to turn away from them? What if we could come to see all sin as death? What if we could understand that we do know shame and have felt regret because we have agreed that we have done some things that we in fact should not have done?

Might this help us to stop doing that which causes both our shame and His suffering?

Or are we so lost inside this mindset of life being all about us that we still can’t care about Him and what He did and why He did it?

Because the sad reality is that this society continues only to show that they know next to nothing of Christ inside what are lives in which sin and shame are both still so prevalent that it’s heartbreakingly obvious that most here have no interest nor then intention of ever turning away from all that’s literally killing them.

Can we say the same?

That we too are all but violently unwilling to change? That we haven’t the slightest understanding of the suffering Christ endured? That, even if we do, we’ve not any interest nor intent of ever coming anywhere close to having any part in it, allowing it any part in us?

Friends, as I said and as Paul points out, we’re all of us locked inside this war inside this life inside ourselves in which there exist two diametrically opposed sides seeking endlessly to control our lives. And as the Native Americans described it, the wolf who wins is the wolf we feed. And yeah, it makes far more sense to us, a people so sensuous that we’re all but patently senseless, to feed the side that offers us pleasure and success and satisfaction in this life.

Because that’s what we’ve done for as long as we’ve been here.

But friends, so too have we all felt guilty over many of the things we’ve done whilst here too.

So again, what have we really to lose? And, again, what more might we have to gain in agreeing to do away with that way of life in which, no, life hasn’t always gone right and that at least partly because we ourselves haven’t always done right?

Either way reality is that we’re all going to lose a life. Will it be that lived in sin and thus entirely familiar with shame? Or will it continue to be that lived in freedom and that found only in His forgiveness?

There’s only one loss that leads to eternal life found. And it’s the one chosen by the One who came to this world to suffer for sin, not make friends with it.

So indeed, let us seek always to arm ourselves with the same mindset as Christ because He’s shown us that suffering is inevitable in life, but that the reasons we suffer and what we suffer for are both things that we do actually have a say in. And so what side of suffering are you willing to endure, and why’ve you picked that one?

Because it’s easy? Because it’s normal? Because it lets you keep doing as you’ve always done?

Or rather have you picked the one shared by the One who chose to get the hard part out of the way so that the rest of forever could prove the part better?

Again, promise is we’re all going to experience suffering in this life. To what end is what we have to decide.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold