Day 4123 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 8:6 NIV

begins at misconception

For this is where our every next step is to be always taken in faith as faith remains the substance of things unseen, a trust in their being there though we cannot see them, a hope that said confidence will confide in us an inevitable validation unto the humble courage to consider the veracity of that which we cannot see, and a belief that sometimes said courage is all we really need. And that especially in those moments in which it feels the last thing we have to give.

Such as those many moments when the truth of our fallen reality asks that we confess that we ourselves have made this mess that is our life that we have lived by and for and in and behind so very many lies that, to be honest, there comes a time in which all we can find is that we know not where we are, how we got here, why it was that we were always so eager to stay nor where to find that courage needed to walk away.

Why?

Because when you begin to see that nearly every step you’ve ever taken was only taken in the wrong direction, well, you kind of begin to lose your courage to take any more.

And indeed, thus finds the madness in us.

It’s this truth which, whilst seeking to set captives free from what said captives cannot see as either being their own captivity nor that it was chosen, and by themselves alone no less, it can only accomplish this by helping us toward an understanding as to the misconceptions that have led us to where we’re standing as those who, whilst thinking that we’re standing, are really only a people entirely willing to fall for anything. And that’s become the case because we’ve become convinced that basically nothing much matters much.

Simply because in our chosen way of life, it can’t afford to. Rather we’re always so scattered seeking for more piles of prizes and preferences to sift through that all we seem to know to do is just that. To see everything within arm’s reach or a heart’s want as whatever it is that we then need. And indeed, we’ve kind of glanced off that idea at least once or twice within our last couple of posts. That misconception we’ve made a living by that exists between what all we want and what little we need is the very seed that’s been sown into every heart where’s grown this tree of the apparent understanding of the perceived knowledge of point and purpose.

A tree whose fruit we’ve all eaten as, well, we’re too the ones who planted it and thus we feel at the very least obligated to partake of the produce thereof if not absolutely drink ourselves drunk upon such an obligation.

Because that’s just what we do.

We’re a people who refuse to cop to time misspent. We will not tolerate this idea that we’ve proven of a tolerance for anything that doesn’t bring us trophy and triumph. We’re instead all perfectly adamant that everything we do in life is all we’re meant to in life. That our every word, deed, thought and theory is the very substance of all that we should hope for, all that we should work for, all we should never have to work for, and everything else as is found hopefully in between.

Basically we’re a people who want the sum of everything this life now given unto endless envy can possibly have to offer.

And so to imagine that we’ve gotten any of it wrong or may have even given any of our time, effort, intention into something that was never to prove able to uphold our incredibly lofty inspirations, aspirations, perspirations and perspectives, no, that’s a non-starter. Don’t go there. Not going with you if you do.

Why?

Because, again, we’ve bought wholesale into this perception of life that’s all but daily defined by our silent realization that everything we’re doing is in all likelihood nothing more than another mistake we’re making. Now we’d obviously never tell that to anybody as, well, in truth we’ve spent our lives trying to find all the ways to even convince ourselves otherwise. And so we’ve definitely no interest nor then intent upon divulging the content of what is such the confusion that we’re, at this point, all but willfully lost inside the very delusions that we ourselves designed.

All because all of them were designed because we were, at least once, of the mind that we needed whatever it was that we wanted that we assumed would be found, given, rewarded either by us or unto the same should we play the game and stay the same and never once dare walk away from whoever, whatever, wherever it was that we wanted to be thinking the same always a need.

Indeed, we’ve become a people of convictions, granted nearly all of them entirely misplaced, that define all we do as in fact being done in a knowledge and understanding of faith.

It’s just that the truth dares come along and help us find that all our faith has only been poured into that which is promised to be left to waste in what is a place that is, well, promised the same.

Doing so only because only He knows what the final outcome will be and how, well, it won’t be good for you and me who continue to do all that we’ve allowed both wayward hearts and minds weakened because of the same to inspire us to do, to want, to hope for or, and more commonly, discount. Yes, the truth is that our hearts, being as we discussed yesterday, are deceptive beyond all things and therefore beyond our understanding, they’ve then left us standing in places and for things that we have no business of even knowing about.

Problem then to inevitably be proven in that we’ve all willingly chosen those very places as the ones in which we wanted to stand as we thought then, perhaps still do, that our standing so still in them still helped us to prove that we knew both then and now what we’re doing.

Never once realizing that all we’re any of us really doing is but losing a life to every manner of lie that either our hearts or their now longstanding and thus long-followed nihilistic “leader” wanted us to buy.

Because, well, our adversary, the devil, prowls still about every corner and crevice and cranny and courthouse and outhouse and bathhouse and birdhouse and bighouse and whitehouse and church mouse and common louse and every loser then too seeking amongst the lot of all we the lost those whom he might still devour through the stealing therefrom all manner of anything good or decent that may be left that we’ve not yet left to the mystery of every better yesterday that we never lived thanks to the mistakes and misconceptions we lived them in.

There’s where this descent into madness begins!

That’s what we talked about yesterday. It’s this mental, spiritual, emotion reality in which we one day look up to find that we’ve found nothing we want in life. And that despite our having found nearly everything we ever wanted in life. It’s the smashing head on and full speed into the truth of all things and it having to say only that we’ve only made a complete mockery of everything. It’s this most brutal of all honesties that tells us that we’ve all honestly made so very many mistakes that we should have been dead years ago.

For we’d have all prospered far more had we had been.

For at least then we’d not have made all the mistakes that we’ve all come to make since then.

Since when?

Pick literally any time inside your life in which you know that you messed up. Any of them will do and that’s because all of them were mistakes that we ourselves chose to choose. They’re all idols that we chose to chase. They’re all ideals that we chose to make. They’re, every single one of our every single mistake, they’re all ideas that were born inside what is a mind that listens to a heart that knows now only to start any journey by asking what’s in it for us.

Why?

Because the mind is governed by the flesh and the flesh, being given over to the death that all sin is, knows then only to desire the same.

We’re down here literally enjoying ourselves to death because we’ve apparently come to believe that such things as enjoyment are the point and purpose of all this.

They’re not.

But we’ve unfortunately all become so convinced as to the otherwise that now all our lives are being lived so stuck in place that, again, we simply refuse to take any step in any direction. No, once we’ve found a place in which our chosen prize of such things as either comfort or success or pleasure or other such worldly, carnal, fleshly treasure is/are finally found, well we grow to feel it nothing but a misery to even imagine walking away.

After all, we’ve again poured years and tears into our trying to find whatever satisfaction it is that we have all in fact found.

Who in their right mind would walk away?

Well, guess that depends entirely upon whatever it is that you may personally consider to be a right mind.

Is it the version of right that this world thinks is right? Is that right that’s paved in personal delight? Is it the right to do whatever you want to do, never once thinking you ever once have to ask whether or not the right makes it right? Is it that right that we all seem to think we have to avoid the light for fear that our darkness will there be put on display for all the other darkness-dwellers to see that, well, we’re not quite so different as we’ve all tried so hard to make it seem?

Or is it that version of right that’s not defined by such a perversion of mind? Is it that kind of right that screams toward the light hoping for once to find what is that life that we have not lived in what was, is a life we have lived in sin? Indeed, is our understanding of right able to help us see all those times in which we were not right to have said, done, wanted, won whatever it was that we did?

Does our understanding of right define us as deserving of being only dead?

It should.

Alas, no, for most I dare say that their knowledge of right is only still that which still delights inside this idea that in this life we’re here to do only whatever it is that we alone want to.

Because that’s what most people continue to do.

Problem is that nothing can matter when both everything seems to matter and yet then never enough to mean enough to matter enough to inspire in us a willingness to pour ourselves into those few things which matter most.

A truth that most folks are promised to miss as rather that shoe just never fits what remains a life lived unto the flesh, which seeing as how all of us have forgotten this at least a time or two hundred thousand, desires that which is contrary to the Spirit, thereby meaning that our lives, as have all been lived seeking to please the flesh, are then truly to be proven subject to death as the Spirit desires too then what all is contrary to the flesh.

Proving once and for all that we are not to do whatever our flesh, or that of another mere mortal, wants us to but that rather we’re to take the weapon that is the Sword of His Word and seek to fend off for once all the flaming falsities and fabrications and fornications that our adversary shoots unto us.

Indeed, we’re not here to just give way to whatever way anyone may want for us to walk.

We’re here to follow along behind He who is the Way to the Life that is only to be found via the Truth that says He came to this world to die a sinner’s death so as to be therefrom raised again upon the third day to thereby take away all sin from all sinners who, having seen His suffering and been helped unto a humble understanding as to the sheer brutality of it all, have turned away from their preference for death unto a life forever therefrom spent seeking only to honor Him rather than continuing to please ourselves.

Problem is that that’s clearly not anything of even any accidental commonality.

Rather all of us still fall short of His glory. All of us still do things that bring Him no glory. All of us still say things, do things, think things that bring Him only more misery.

And why?

Because He’s up there watching us kill ourselves.

And, well, what Father ever wanted to watch their son or daughter willfully chose to waste away within what is so clearly a way that invites only death?

Friends, this is why faith is considered so foolish unto those who are perishing. It’s because it’s built upon the audacity to tell us both that we are, which we really don’t want to hear having really come to really love the lives we’re living down here, and, obviously more egregiously, why. Yes, His Word tells us why we all deserve to die and that it’s because of those things that we have come to love.

Even going so very far as to tell us plain that whosoever shall not take up his/her cross and follow Him unto that place, the grave, in which every known life is to be lost, well, the same are not worthy of Him. And, well, if we’re not worthy of Him then we’ve no business ever thinking we’d be welcomed by Him who we’ve, having clearly never worried that we’ve so worried and wearied, has then no reason to worry about what happens to us who’ve so clearly left our crosses on the ground and continued to do the things that all but ground Him to dust.

Indeed, why should He want anything to do with us?

Truth is He shouldn’t.

Problem is that’s a truth we both can’t see and that because it’s the one we don’t want to see.

We can’t see it because of all these common misconceptions that we continue falling for such as how we’re here to live our best lives, to look out for number one, to live our truth and never then do anything that doesn’t perfectly align with whatever it is that we’ve cooked up inside our minds that now defines whatever the heck our truth is for the day.

And so we don’t want to see it because to see it would be to see that we’re the ones well outside anything that could in any way be considered a right mind.

Because there’s just no rationality to all we now find reasonable.

After all, what is there to be gained by our common letting go the hem of Him who came to save us from what we, if even behind closed doors and that only but once or twice every now and then, would honestly confess we don’t actually enjoy, feel good about, understand even?

Indeed, such things as shame and guilt and regret, all things that we’ve all felt, they exist to inspire in us a willingness to be humbled by the truth that works through such measures to secure our freedom from rusted treasures and ruined pleasures and all these friends that are always so fair-weathered that, when found like Job in the midst of a struggle, run away and stand far off as they mock and worry that maybe our misery might prove contagious.

Perhaps that’s even the why behind how most of us still treat Jesus.

Problem there being that we’re the ones who actually sinned thanks to our having chosen to serve the flesh in what’s then a blanket rejection of His having called us to put the same to death, and therefore deserve what He endured without the hope of a stone rolling away nor us then rolling out.

No, we rather deserve to stay inside that place and there meet with every form of death, decay, darkness and danger that our having played a willing enemy of God deserves to find.

Blessed are those who’ve had opened their eyes to see that now whilst we’ve still some time left to do something about it.

Not that we can do anything about it but, well, His Word does call us unto repentance and so that seems then to be something that we can do.

And, well, if you’ve not yet had your eyes opened to the fact that it’s something we not only can do but is the one thing we must do, the only thing we can do as it’s all that will help to remove these scales from our eyes and these lies from our minds and this death from our lives leaving then finally room for us to believe in the finished work of Christ on the cross, then please pray. Ask Him to help you see the many mistakes you’ve made, the ones you still make. Ask Him to help you understand the things you’ve clearly misunderstood.

Ask Him to take you by the hand and guide you brokenly to every moment in your life’s entirety in which you did, said, thought, bought, believed something that was never there, never good, never helpful, never holy.

Not because it’s easy and definitely not because it’ll ever then be common.

It won’t.

And that’s because one of the very last things that we've been taught to seek by this failed and still falling society is the sheer degree of all the decay, the deception, the dishonesty, the depravity, the indecency, the immodesty, the immorality and our ongoing indifference toward all the above that we've all ourselves agreed to believe were plenty okay, if not just fine, if not in fact the very outcomes we should seek for in life!

But friends, question is however can we be better if we see not first how far we are away?

Sure, our coming to see it will leave us seeming unto most as those most to be pitied as it will cause for us a violent willingness to walk away from anything at any time that He may help us find that we need to leave behind. We will lose the way of life that we’ve come to love, doing then what nearly nobody else knows anything of doing. Indeed, it will appear to those around us that we’ve gone out of our minds, lost all control, rounded the bend and are only going back again.

Because this world will never understand what it is to deny the flesh.

But friends, we better hope and pray that we do because if we don’t then nor will we have learned to reject the death that our flesh has learned to crave.

Let us not then continue to do that which is common, normal, considered then all that’s reasonable, rational in this place.

Rather let us lose our minds, rend our hearts, tear our garments, sell all we have, walk away from who we’ve been, trust our lives, our souls to Him who died to prove He knows a better way to spend them.

Not one seeking only such temporary treasures as the flesh’s pleasure but rather pouring them out so as to ensure that nothing is left of all we’ve been.

Yes, it’s a descent into madness to see all we’ve mistaken, every misconception we’ve come to believe.

But the reality is that until we’re fools unto the world, well, we’re left then as nothing but enemies of He who created it and yet now calls us out of it.

And what sense does that make?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold