Day 4127 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 7:16 NIV

cuts through a courageous confession

As, well, such is simply the one and only direction in which everything better still awaits. It’s in that place in which we’re not, both as of now and too what we are. And this is entirely a strange place for us to consider, this idea of everything better. And that’s because for our to become something better in what hope tells us is a place better too, we’ve to then lose our usual agreement as to the appeasement found both where and in who we are.

Which are both what and where we usually mind not imagining our staying put.

Because staying has always proven easier. And it will always prove easier. Staying who we are doing then what we’re doing wherever we’re doing it and for whyever it’s being done, this is to be consistently the easiest thing to do under the sun. Which is why there is nothing new under the sun but rather we walk still inside the replication of what’s now a longstanding rebellion. Indeed, that which has been done will be done again and that which then is done is something which someone else done did before.

Problem is that all of it is more often than not defined as sin. For all of us have sinned and fallen short then of the glory of God, usually thanks to our seeking the glory of us. And it’s in this that we’ve become whatever we are. But the issue is, and it’s the one which will prove perhaps the greatest struggle in faith, is that we don’t really seem to fully understand who we are.

And that from literally any of every possible direction.

And that’s because we’ve become quite clearly convinced that our lives are more about their contents than our continuance. So much so that anymore it’s a glaring obviousness noticed inside every moment of every day that nearly everything that nearly everyone is agreeing to do is, again, something that they’ve probably already done or have watched, heard, known thus of another doing.

That’s basically become our only reason for doing anything.

It’s that we see what we seem to assume as being the substance of something we want, would like, might then need perhaps in what are the lives and laps of those then considered as lapping us in what is the rat race we call life in this place, and, once noticed, we simply lose all prior focus and careen headlong into a heartfelt search for this substance to be seen inside our own lives.

Such is the entirety of the concept that is consumerism.

It’s something of a culture in which we all continue to peruse and then pursue that which another has prioritized, purchased, preferred until we all reach what seems an outcome that we don’t really think all that much about. For the best perceived end goal of such common comparison and competition would be for all to have the same thing(s). That’s the baser idea behind our world’s continually proving rather enamored by this theory of equality.

We all want for everyone to have an equally beneficial outcome. And in many ways that’s a truly upright thing to hope for. Wanting for everyone to have a good life filled with good things, good times, that’s an at least morally reasonable ideal.

Problem is that we’ve all clearly what are vastly different ideas as to how to get there and what it would even look like would we could.

Which, in practice, we can’t.

And that’s because the reality is that not everyone wants whatever everyone else does. Instead we’re all quite different, thus divergent, in regard to what we personally think matters most. All of us have different plans, varied priorities, even preferences that we ourselves feel shift and change from time to time. Indeed, the overall understanding of life itself is something that alters as we go as, well, we go through what are trials and triumphs that all accomplish their own little ways of changing us.

Obviously we all seek always for those which we feel will make us feel better, look better, live better.

But what then of all those which we don’t find ourselves quite so able to assume will accomplish near as much of whatever it is that we alone have chosen to imagine as being good?

Indeed, what of all the things that we did believe would be for our good that only turned against us as we got them? What of all the plans we’ve made that, despite having gone according to plan, didn’t prove of the prize or promise we assumed they would? What of all the mistakes we’ve made trying so hard to not make any mistakes?

What of all the lies, the secrets, the fakes?

See, what I find funny is that, in reality, we’re all basically just down here making it up as we go. Most days we do fairly well at least and manage to avoid most issues and plug all the leaks. Other days don’t seem to go quite so well. In fact, yesterday was one of those not quite so well days for me. It was one of those that, despite me doing what I usually do, I found myself in a fairly impressive amount of pain throughout most of the day without any time to really stop and seek for the lone remedy I know to help as, well, I’m just entirely too busy and haven’t then the time to lose.

And so I lost something else instead.

My mind.

My cool. My composure. I lost my humility for a moment, or a couple hours made up of them. And that’s because, at least some unfortunate part of what I’ve apparently become, is this person who, like I think most of us do, feel as if we’re owed this basic level of normality to our days and our ways that would then allow for us to have at least some measure of reliable assurance upon which to base whatever it is that is the rest of whatever we’re doing.

Such as health, feeling good, that kind of thing.

Indeed, I think we’d all like, and even that for everyone, to feel good pretty much all the time. After all, there are more than enough other problems we’re faced with in life. Think we could all agree that we could all benefit from not having to worry about not feeling well.

Oh well.

That’s not how this life works. And we all know that by now.

Problem is that it seems as though knowing something doesn’t always accomplish the wisdom that said knowledge is usually meant to form the foundation of.

Such as how knowing that sin brings shame doesn’t always guarantee that we’re not going to do something we thus know better than to do. A fact which we’ve all seen, felt, heard proved within more days than we probably care admit. And that’s because we don’t either wish to admit that, well, we’re not really all that good at this but are, again, pretty much just down here making it up as we go.

But you see my friends, that’s my question:

Where are we going?

Granted, on the surface it seems quite obvious that we’re all headed for something better. I mean we literally tell everyone exactly that all the time. We’re all always talking about all the cool ideas we have for what are plans we’ve made that we made literally only because we expect them to prove of some beneficial outcome. All of us have opted for a life in which we’re doing daily everything we do because, whatever it is that we’re doing, it’s something that we then feel is right, appropriate, perhaps even needed for us to do in order to either have whatever we hope to hold or simply hold whatever hope we’ve already found.

But the sad truth is that anymore it seems as if every single day we all only agree to lose what are an innumerable number of opportunities to actually improve. And that’s because, well, in truth all such improvement is only ever made possible by our at first admitting that whatever it is that already is isn’t what we want to settle for.

And unfortunately we just happen to see a growing number of people settling.

Perhaps they’ve managed to make it to the kind of life that they’ve always wanted to live and find inside every single day absolutely nothing that could be in any way any better. Again, I hope that’s the case as I do truly want for everyone to have the chance to experience the very best of life.

Issue is that such a gift cannot be had here.

Now that’s not to say that we can’t have, hold, feel, find what are some truly amazing things. We can. All of us have in fact. We’ve all a personal treasure trove of what are memories made of what were times so incredible that they’ve managed to become etched in our minds.

But what else is in those memories that we accidentally sometimes find?

It may just be me, kind of used to that kind of thing, but I personally find that I also have the ability to remember plenty of not so good things. I remember a whole bunch of mistakes I’ve made. I remember saying things I now wish I didn’t say, doing things I’ve since learned I shouldn’t have done. Some of them I even continued to do even after I learned that they were things I shouldn’t say, shouldn’t do.

Tell me again how we’re then the ones who are supposed to be able to do this well?

Truth is that we can’t. We can get better. We can learn from the mistakes we make. We can humble ourselves to seeing the humiliation we find as something worth fighting to never find or feel again going forward. We can embrace every opportunity we come across to take up our cross and nail upon it every fall, failure, fear we find and feel. We can pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off and try as hard as we possibly can to never again become so lost that we find ourselves crumbled again inside some pile of confusion and complacency.

But in the end the simple fact is that this life was given us for us to learn the reason we have one and how, in simple terms, is has so very little to do with us that we’d be always better off to, as the Bible puts it, not think more highly of ourselves than we ought.

And it asks that because whomever thinks they’re something whenever they’re not really said something only fools themselves unto what promises to one day prove quite the fall from however high we’ve come to become on ourselves.

Indeed, if any of you think you’re standing, take heed lest you fall.

Because, well, it’s just far easier to fall whenever you’re standing than, say, whenever you’re crawling.

It’s easier to get knocked off balance when you’re so bold as to stand up and proclaim that you know what you’re doing, that you’re doing it well even. It’s easier to be proven wrong whenever you’ve allowed yourself to become convinced that you’re doing something right. It’s easier to end up living a truly lost way of life whenever you feel as if you’re getting closer and closer to finally finding whatever it was that you set out to find and feel.

And that’s all because all of us rather enjoy this approach at life in which we feel almost justified in our belief that we got this, that we understand things, that we can manage, make do, make it through whatever comes our way as we’re rather so focused on whatever we want that nothing much has all that much of a chance to distract or disappoint.

Other than ourselves that is.

Truly, have you ever noticed how prone we really are to distracting ourselves? Ever felt yourself kind of drift in thought or theory, slowly making little changes that you can usually pretend you’re not making so as to not accidentally start thinking that you’re maybe kind of wrong and maybe need to perhaps shift things here and there so as to not seem quite the fool? Ever realized the sheer number of mistakes you make within any given day?

Unfortunately, no, I don’t really think we do. And that’s because we’ve all become quite willfully numb to anything and everything that could, maybe always should, rise up against us and convince us that we’re not really making it despite all of our faking it. Rather we’re most days and in most things most often just sort of standing still. Because, again, doing the same things we’ve always done, or repeating those that others have done, such will always be the easiest thing for us to do.

But friends, the purpose of the Law is to point out that what has been done is basically as far away as humanly possible from what God created us to do, to be.

It was breathed for the self-proclaimed benefit of “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

Why would we need Scripture to do such things if we could do them well without it?

Why would God have given Moses the Ten Commandments if the people either were or could elsewise prove able to uphold His holy expectations?

Why would all of us have felt such weights as guilt and regret and shame if we were so good at getting everything right as we’ve always loved imagining we were?

Why would the Bible continue to prove living and active as it cuts daily through our every plan, priority and pretense, seeking to separate from us that which is keeping us from growing closer to Him, and too separating us then from a world that clearly has increasingly little concern that He’s there?

It’s all because humility has clearly become something which has to be taught as, well, it sadly seems as though it’s something all of us have lost, sold, given away or simply given up on in our trying to find some way, any way to make this life we’re living seem as right as we want it to be despite all the wrongs we see both within the words and actions of those around us and, though few will admit it, even inside the things we ourselves are saying, doing, thinking, believing, becoming.

Indeed, it seems as if we almost just don’t know how to be honest anymore. Not with ourselves. Not with our friends. Not with our families. Definitely not with our Father.

No, rather we seek endlessly for such consolations as affirmations instead of humbling ourselves to the welcoming of the kind of corrections and changes that we honestly need if we’re to ever actually hope of our finding that home in which is held that life that is everything that this failing and fading version has so clearly come to become.

Thus He sent His Son.

It was because what we’d all become was all but mentally dumb and spiritually numb to the point, purpose and promise of His perfect plans for us. All because we’ve all chosen to focus instead on our plans, our priorities, our pursuits of what we alone plan to prove is the very best a life could ever be lived. Only problem is that we’ve managed to come across and even create a whole bunch of problems along the way.

Chief among them being pride which daily tells us this lie that has us convinced that our lives aren’t going all that bad. That we’re not doing all that bad. That we’re even in fact doing rather well.

News flash:

WE’RE NOT!

Not even close in fact. Instead what we are doing, and really well at that, is proving the validity, the veracity of the Law inside what are lives in which at least some measure of what we do is everything said Law commands us not to. Issue there is that the measure is decidedly higher than our arrogance would ever care to figure. In fact, we’re told that one day it just might be argued that even our good deeds meant nothing if we had neither love nor then He who is the same.

And that’s because we’ve managed to become so very lost that we’ve even proven to be a people who can accomplish the doing of something good for what are all the wrong reasons.

All of which then testify only that much further that we’re abject failures in regard to all things from faith to the morality upon which it treads.

A fact proven, again, in that all of us have known that feeling of shame, guilt, regret.

All things which testify that we did something we shouldn’t have done. A feeling that defines for us an unbeknownst agreement unto the very Law which we’ve grown rather impressive at denying, ignoring, breaking obviously.

Indeed, all of us have known plenty of those moments in which we looked up and realized that we’d messed up. That we said something that didn’t feel right being said. That we’d done something that left us lying awake on our beds as thoughts of embarrassment or humiliation there danced through our heads. That we’d done things so wrong that we’ve too felt things far worse than mere embarrassment!

Things again such as regret.

It’s that feeling felt in looking back on what we’ve done, said, even thought and seeing in it anything that just wasn’t right, wasn’t good, wasn’t then proof of our doing something as well as we could have, should have.

And we’ve all felt that.

Question is do we have yet the courage to do anything about it whenever we do?

Again, sadly it seems that most people know only to lose such opportunities as they come to us demanding change, asking then the humility that’s willing to admit that we need to.

But friends, I think the point is that if we can realize the wrong choices we’re making then do we not have the responsibility to try and make better ones? And if we do have that responsibility, that opportunity to make better choices and only choose not to, then are we not testifying to the truth that the Law is good?

All by our choosing to do that which we know isn’t?

Yes, it’s something that we’ve all done, and sadly something we’ll all undoubtedly do again.

Will it become a pattern we repeat or can it become seen as an enemy we strive to beat?

In the end God calls us all unto such things as humility and self-control. Can we say we’re practicing either whenever anything of all we do continues to be something obviously less the best we could do?

And, well, if we’re not practicing at something then how can we get any better at it?

And if we’re not getting better at such things as honesty, humility, morality, then what makes us think He would welcome us to spend eternity with Him? No, that gift is promised only unto those who find in this life the courage to admit that they don’t deserve such a gift.

So let’s spend this life trying to find that courage.

Even if we have to crawl.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold