Day 4125 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 5:17 NIV

heads left for lessons learned

And rather harrowingly those learned most often through what is humility doing its intended task of leading us back to seeing where we went wrong in what’s long been a fight that we knew not we were meant to fight nor then how. For the common approach unto a life is to live it seeking within it only matters of comfort, not competition. Granted, we’ve ended up arriving well within the latter as anymore all that seems to matter is whether we look like, sound like, seem like another, comparing ourselves daily unto those who simply aren’t us.

But I guess that kind of only adds to the point.

It’s that we’ve all so confused life that anymore all of our time is given unto doing all these things that do nothing for us in return. Indeed, it seems as if nearly our every waking moment is spent lost within this mental debasement in which we seek incessantly our placement in what we then apparently consider a race of sorts, and sadly one in which we still assume we’re then supposed to win. After all, that is the point of all such rivalry as that which we’ve all really grown entirely too fond of, isn’t it?

To win?

To look then at everyone else as but an opponent whose opposed to our having or holding whatever it is that we’ve thus come to believe that at least some measure of our hope must be? To assume inside everyone we see nothing but a contest as they contest our right to that life we want to live? To assume then that we’re the ones who know how we ought to live this life? To lean then upon our wants, wishes, often only the lack of worry found within?

I mean that’s our common goal is it not?

To live a life in which all of life accomplishes only what all we want? To achieve our getting to see all we’d once set our sights on hoping to find? Feeling only however we may ever want to feel, and that about the sum of everything which is itself something that we determine ourselves?

When did we manage to acquire such a vast understanding as to where we’re standing that it’s left us standing for nothing?

I suppose that might not seem fair and indeed may hurt a bit.

Truth does that I’m afraid.

And that’s because the truth was never this thing that we’ve all tried so hard to make it seem. The truth doesn’t bend and cower when met with our power. It doesn’t come meekly unto our plans made weekly for the idols sought weakly that we don’t seem to see we’re seeking in such a way. No, the truth rather comes as if a fire burning through both doubt and desire so as to ignite this pyre upon which we’re supposed to dispose of what we should be coming daily to know is a sinful flesh that’s thus riddled with death.

For such is what a pyre does!

It’s this “heap of combustible material, especially one for burning a corpse as part of a funeral ceremony.” A ceremony to which we’ve oddly enough been so lovingly invited to attended whilst alive and living and that even though it’s a ceremony marking what’s actually our own demise. And why? Because, well, for entirely too long we’ve all lived unto the flesh and therefore, therefrom, reaped what is a heap of combustible material which is suited perfectly for burning what’s become a way of life lived in which we exist as merely a corpse without a care as to the air we breathe nor how we’re only worried about breathing it here.

How’s that for a truth you never really hear?

Issue is that, well, it’s kind of the only one we need to hear, which I guess is why most folks don’t listen to the sound of it calling our names and asking that we wrestle our souls back from whomever, whatever, wherever it was to which we’ve so given them as we all so clearly have. That’s the part of this path that we discussed yesterday in regard to how this descent into the madness that our faith seems runs right through our realizing of all the mistakes we’ve made.

For our making said mistakes was only ever accomplished thanks to our having freely given any of us to any of what either has already proven or will soon prove to have little if any interest in what’s actually an outcome unto our best. Rather for most of our time we’ve all seemingly been of the mind that we were here only to find as much fun and fame and fortune and friendship as we possibly could.

Why?

Because those things feel good. Those things look good. Those things sound good and thus seem good, and, well, to those who can’t see good, they are good then. Because all of them are indeed so close enough to all we’ve all come to want that we find within having them or wanting them nothing at all to worry about. Why would we? After all, we’re all told, and that all day every day, that the only things that matter within this life are whatever it is that make us feel good in life.

The very same lie told us back in the Garden that inspired us to steal fruit from a tree that stole the innocence away from you and me as indeed it’s rather opened our eyes to the knowledge of good and evil, and the vast and almost daily growing distance defined in the difference there between. It was that we could, maybe even should be as if gods ourselves.

Which, granted, Bible says we were created in God’s image.

So yeah, maybe we should seek to exist as if gods who then define for themselves, ourselves, that which is good. Maybe we are here to be pleased. Maybe pleasure is the treasure we’re here to seek. Maybe how we feel should define how we think our lives are going. Maybe it doesn’t matter what we do so long as our enjoyment of life here is growing as endlessly as we all clearly want it to.

Yes, maybe He wants us to enjoy ourselves.

Then again perhaps such things as enjoyment and pleasure and even feeling good all the time are themselves only lies that we’ve come to so idolize that we realize not that we’re the ones giving them their lives rather than their giving theirs for ours.

Which is the issue with all idolatry.

It’s that it’s made in matters of wood and metal, worry and thus mental confusion that’s accepted as it only feeds the delusion that we’ve both designed inside of our lives and that because we’ve always needed it to remain so convinced that we were here only to find all that’s here with us. Problem is that most of the things we’ve come to want haven’t any life of their own to give us. And so if they’re to come to life, even if by simply seeming to matter unto a life, then life then has to be given them.

And we do this via such gifts as time, attention, intention. We give lifeless things our lives in such losses as focus and devotion and even the determination to find them and, once we have, tout them as these triumphs and trophies that we want for them to be. Yes, this is something all of us have done more times than we can count. And why? Because, again, we just can’t seem to see all that well anymore.

Rather we’ve gone all but blind in this version of life spent trying to find all we want. Life itself has devolved into nothing more than our wanting always more. We seem to have absolutely nailed the part about our bodies being basically empty vessels meant then to be filled with something.

Problem is the something with which we seem to insist them filled.

Because it sadly ain’t the Spirit.

That’s what we were meant to house, to protect, to prize even. Bible tells us that we are temples of the Holy Spirit, a gift given unto the following of the guidance therein. For Jesus tells us that He was leaving, via the cross and grave, so as to send forth the Helper who would then live inside of us, therein guiding us unto all remembrance of all He’d said and done who was the Son who came from the Father to seek and save we the lost.

And yet somehow we’re all still vastly lost seeking after all this other stuff with which to satisfy and satiate our many ongoing wants.

How is that?

Not how do we still want all this stuff that we’re still trading away our lives to have and hold. No, that much is clear. Rather how do we still not then seem to hear the honesty of humility calling us unto a higher reward that is the promise He’s given unto all of us? If not because we know what the road home looks like, and, well, we’re still just kind of rather pleased with our lives. And thus too ourselves for having determined how to live them in what is a way that’s going so well that, well, we most days manage to feel far more pleasure than pain.

For again, that’s goal isn’t it?

To have fun? To feel good? To look good unto those others all around who too spend their lives looking to the surface of all things? To assume good is to be found in all things, in all folks? To believe in some best life that we can both actually live and that by our being the only ones who dare define it? To give all our time not to refinement but rather to refusal in regard to the reality that we need it?

Indeed, aren’t we here to have so perfected our own existence that we can find this finish line of our laziness’s insistence that we do nothing, change nothing, risk nothing then?

Sure seems as if that’s what most folks are looking for.

And, as heartbreaking as it may be to say it, does seem most days as if most folks have found it.

Because most seem to have stopped. People have quit. So many seem to have all but entirely retired from all manner of trying in life. We’ve even come societally to make sport of it in that it seems anymore as if our national pastime isn’t baseball but rather video games, virtual reality, artificial intelligence achieving for us an ability to do even more nothing than we’ve all always sought to do before.

Truly, anymore we’ve got cars which drive themselves, robots that mow our lawns, their cousins which we keep inside as they exist to sweep our floors, a whole host of imaginary friends who do everything from tell us what to wear for the day to how to bake a cake and even take care of doing our homework for us.

We’ve arrived at a time in which we don’t have to lie about having a dog who then didn’t really eat our book report.

We just hop online and let some computer system write for us something that we seem entirely willing to agree is probably better than anything we could have written anyway. And, thanks to all the time we’ve saved not reading or learning or cooking or even sweeping our own floors, we have all the more time to spend with our ai friends and romances.

Both of which we’ve chosen as they bring not the same risk of failure or humiliation, sense of competition, or even that now apparently antiquated necessity of putting another before ourselves as should be done in all friendships we have.

No, nowadays we can hide away inside our homes or apartments and exist within this existence that exists only to cater to us.

We have perfected the art of pleasing the flesh, right to the pinnacle we have in technology taking care of everything we just don’t feel like being bothered with.

Yeah, seems like life’s gone left.

Only we’ve left the lessons behind along the way.

What lessons you ask?

Well, only those which were always meant to help us grow and improve and that by coming to lose all that’s long kept us from doing just that. Such as that lie that we continue to believe that we’re here only to see the sum of everything we want and feel the effects of all that makes us feel the same. Yeah, we’ve succumbed to the general desire of our adversary for us to live dumb unto the better we were created to be. Indeed, the devil doesn’t want for us to see who we are as, if we did, we might then understand what that means.

And if that were ever to happen then we might just realize that living unto the flesh is only losing a life.

And, well, death is still the one thing that most folks have the least interest in doing so that might accidentally inspire some, maybe even most, to get up off their rears and get back to living.

Unfortunately he roams still seeking those whom he may devour as his hour is to be one spent upon stealing, KILLING and thus destroying whomever he might.

And, well, the way we’ve come to live this life putting the flesh always first leaves us all upon the frontlines in what is then a war that we can’t see as being much of a fight as it comes unto us in wave upon wave of personal pleasure and human delight. And we just can’t see no harm nor foul in our feeling good, having all that we want, hearing only what we want, living then only however we want.

No, for if it feels so good as it does to seek to experience, to enjoy all the above, then how could they be wrong?

Oh, the lessons we’ve all left unlearned!

All because they were all only taught in humility helping us to see the kind of humiliating help we need. And that because, well, when pride has so become the common way of life, anything that points to any mistakes we make is going to thus feel as if it seeks only our humiliation. And, yeah, I guess it does. Because, yeah, it does kind of suck to look up and realize just how much you’ve gotten wrong. It does sting a bit to learn of all the mistakes you’ve made. It is in fact fairly brutal to be shown unto the reality that you’ve been living a fairy tale that thus could never be true.

All because we seem to have all skipped that lesson held inside that whole “too good to be true” idea.

No, that’s one that’s sadly been left for dead by all of us as rather all of us have sought for only those things which seem too good to not be true. Simply because those just so happen to be the ones that leave us always feeling the best. And, again, if it causes us to feel good then of what harm could it cause? If it feels good then how could it be bad? If it looks good, sounds good, seems good then, why then would we ever expect it to go wrong?

Because the flesh lies my friends.

Because the flesh worries only about its own pleasure and enjoyment. The flesh seeks for only those things that satisfy and satiate. The flesh craves those things that accomplish nothing other than our feeling however we want to feel. And thus our feelings, our enjoyments, our satisfaction, these things have become our gods.

Thus they compete with He who is God for all of our time and attention and effort and devotion.

And since we’ve all of us only so much of all the above to go around, who you think we’re going to give them to? The gods who offer us daily everything we want? The gods who offer to always help us feel good? The gods who promise us a life filled with everything that allows us to enjoy ourselves? The gods who allow us to do as we please without ever having to think about such things as consequences?

Or the God who came in Christ and gave His life upon that cross to prove once and for all that our all having lived this life only to please ourselves came with the consequence of dying and spending eternity in hell?

Yeah, we’re going with the first!

Because those are all easier. Because all of those just work out better. All of those leave us feeling the best we can feel.

We don’t need some God who’s up there telling us how to live our lives, and that in a way that asks that we deny ourselves daily and take up our crosses the same. No, we all know we have but so much time left and so why then should we spend any of it in the misery that is our not enjoying ourselves?

For the flesh has become our god and we’ve learned to serve it in such a depth of devotion that everything else just seems a commotion, a confusion, a delusion that we don’t need.

Faith is foolishness to those who are perishing.

And none of us want to admit that we’re perishing.

And that because we’ve put ourselves before Him, seeking incessantly then our own glory and gain, and that of and in everything we want as that seems all that matters in life.

And yet that is why His path leads us into madness. It’s in that it shows us all the stupid mistakes we’ve made and helps us to finally learn the lessons we should have learned long before, lessons that could have helped us to not mess up quite much. Lessons that can at least now hopefully prevent us from missing so much going forward.

For the truth is that we’ve missed and mistaken more than we could ever possibly imagine.

Problem is that’s a truth that’s only learned whenever we get the flesh out of the way.

Thankfully that’s why He came with such lessons as this one He gave which tells us that the flesh and Spirit are at war with one another. A lesson meant to inspire us to take up this good fight and thereby put our sinful flesh to death however we might.

Will doing such ever be easy? No. But friends, easy was never actually the goal. Nor was feeling good. Nor was looking good. Nor then was our thinking that we are good. Rather the goal has always been eternal life in that place in which all this world’s problems and pains no longer exist.

The goal is Heaven.

And, well, we’re told the flesh can’t fit.

Because the flesh desires that which is contrary to the Spirit. And yet we’ve spent an entire lifetime doing only whatever we want.

One day we’ll learn the death found in doing so. I just pray we learn that lesson while we’ve still got the promise of eternal life given us in forgiveness.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold