Day 4128 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Revelation 3:19 NIV

cuts through correction

To be earnest is defined as doing something with what is “a sincere and intense conviction”. It’s the undertaking of something, anything really, in an obvious understanding as to the overall severity thereof. It’s a certain seriousness that accomplishes within us this willingness to actually give something everything we have, to hold nothing back. And, well, the sad truth is that within this life as we’ve all chosen, yes, chosen to live it, fact is that we seem to have little that means so much to us that to it we trust what is the fullness of us.

Which is why He corrects us.

It’s why He pushes us, challenges us, changes us in fact. It’s because He alone knows both who we were created to be and thus too the difference and distance now defined by whoever it is that we’ve chosen to choose instead. He knows the image in which we were created as, well, that image is His. We were meant to be like Him, to literally be His children, His offspring, His replicates that were taken from His heart, His mind and planted in what is a Garden from which we were all taken.

We are the subject, the outcome, the final achievement in His task of creation.

And yet we all live as if we’re nothing of the sort.

Rather we’ve all come to live as if we’re here only to love all that isn’t Him. As if we’re to bring glory, honor, praise and thus appreciation unto everything but Him. As if He isn’t needed, isn’t then necessary. Indeed, this life we live the way we so clearly live it leaves within it no room for Him, for His Word, so far as we care, His will. No, instead we’re all basically dead-set upon the seeking of our will which is always won within our wants of what are always worldly things and theories.

Truly, we’ve all become so much of this place having let so much of this place take His place in us that there’s anymore little if any resemblance to be found remaining between us and Him.

A problem easy enough to overlook I suppose in that, well, we’ve all become far enough convinced that we can’t see Him that nor then do we look.

We instead just plunge into our every single day as if all that matters is how we look, what we want, where we’ll go, what we’ll do, what all we don’t really want to have to. Indeed, life here has, for so long as we’ve lived it, it’s revolved around us. It’s all about how we feel, how comfortable we are, how successful we seem unto they then who are just like us and yet, oddly enough, not even looking at us. And that’s because so too have we all become so focused on ourselves and this pursuit of perfecting our best lives that we’ve not even the time to really even acknowledge one another.

No, every single day we blaze past our every sister and brother and consider them, at best, nothing but a stranger who brings with them this sense of danger, of potential disaster as they may well seek to steal from us the opportunity to have whatever it is that we want.

Life’s devolved into an endless sense of competition in which we exist to merely compete with everyone else for everything here.

As if this is our reward?

You know, I think about this kind of thing all the time, which I imagine is pretty obvious considering I write 3,000+ word book reports on the very same book every single day. But among the most common thoughts I’m thinking anymore is this one in which I just don’t get it anymore. I don’t understand the affinity society has with the world and all its temporality. I don’t understand our fascination with all that’s fading and prone to failure. I don’t understand friendship with all that demands enmity against another.

I don’t understand how we can hate one another so very much as we so clearly do.

But we do.

Daily we do. Daily we do all sorts of things that don’t even make any sense on the surface. Indeed, we can physically see the downfall, feel it inside the walls of our hearts. We can taste the waste and recognize that it’s of our lives. We are visibly falling apart.

And nobody seems to care.

Nobody seems at all even the least bit worried. In fact most folks seem as if they almost kind of like it this way.

Why?

Because we do have a good life. We do get to experience such gifts as excitement and appreciation. We do get to make memories and find then enjoyment along the way.

But what I fear we’ve forgotten is where it is that we’re going. And I have this fear because it seems that most are plenty content to continue believing that they’ll just stay here. Even when they die! Indeed, so many people are lost living this life in which they’re so convinced that everything that matters is only everything that’s here that now their greatest expectation is just some ornate wood box planted in the dirt.

That’s it.

That’s all that so many seem to be living toward. Just a six foot hole.

Why?

Because we’ve forgotten the point, purpose, promise of life and how it’s something we’re all meant to pursue. And we forgot it because we’ve instead fallen in line behind what is this pursuit for basically everything else in life. We chase after goals and dreams for cars and careers and things. We spend our days making our plans for what could well prove days we aren’t going to have in which to find them fulfilled. We give ourselves fully to finding fully the fullness we assume still within the fullness seemingly offered us in and by and from the world around us.

But my friends, what all can’t this world give us?

What doesn’t this place have to offer? What can’t be found here, felt near enough then to hope we might?

Well, how about hope? Truly, walking around these days and this place seems just about the most hopeless there is as everyone around us is just so down and out all the time. Or what about mercy? See, we’ve become so high on ourselves that we walk around seeking always justice, vengeance, retribution even. We want always only to get even. How about forgiveness then? We see forgiveness as a matter in which we’re left the victim, clearly a result of our having failed to ask such questions as that posed in 1 Corinthians 6:7:

“Why not rather be wronged?”

No, we’ve become of such ego and arrogance that we’ll accept not even our being challenged, much less then our being wronged. Won’t put up with it. Won’t tolerate it.

Indeed, we are the people He promised we’d be in that, well, no, we don’t tolerate sound doctrine but have instead poured so much of ourselves, our hopes, our dreams, our efforts and the time of which they’ve continued to need into the invention of such things as what are now artificial teachers and speakers who say for us only what we want to hear and do for us all that we don’t want to do.

We are in truth lazy and lustful to a fault.

And yet nothing on earth can cause us to see that the fault is ours alone.

Which is again why He corrects us. Why He challenges us. Why He tests us.

It’s not, as our arrogance so loves to imagine, because He wants to break us, beat us, destroy us and leave us to face the music as we’ve written it. Instead, within His Word as He’s breathed it, it says that He wants for none to perish but rather for all to come unto repentance. He wants us all to grow, to learn, to improve and thus to do better. To be better. To live better.

He wants us all to live forever!

And yet we’ve made a life of rejecting that offer. We’ve convinced ourselves that we can come up with something better. Not because there is anything possibly better than eternal life, much less that promised us in a place in which He is all that He’s always been, and thus too nothing bad or wicked or scary exists anymore. No, it’s simply because, thanks to whatever this is that we’ve come to become, we seem to only believe that easier is better.

It’s this whole adoration we have for this advent of our belief in some path of least resistance.

Seriously, we give our everyday anymore to doing only whatever is easy, simple, seemingly safe thus. And that’s because, yes, we understand the idea of safety. We appreciate the idea of our being safe, the importance of our feeling safe. And that from every sort of danger we can be convinced is dangerous. But friends, problem is that long gone are the days in which the dangerous things were those which posed a real risk of physical harm, up to and including potential death.

No, these days there are many who act as if they might die even should they have to try something they don’t want to do. Many act as if they might expire should they have to suffer through the hearing of something they don’t love the sound of. Many act as if anything bad that ever happens is only proof that everything and everyone in life is out to get them.

We have perfected the art of playing the victim!

Why?

Because so too have we perfected the assumption that we’re always meant to be the victor.

That life here is supposed to always go our way. That everything we ever undertake should be effortlessly successful. That our lives here should never be hard, never prove scary, never get stressful. Indeed, we’ve all come to apparently believe that life is meant to be easy!

Friends, it isn’t!

There’s a reason that He calls this a good fight. There’s a reason that such things as guilt and regret keep us up at night. There’s a reason that we’ve all felt upset, afraid, unsure in life.

It’s because this world isn’t our reward and nor have our lives been lived in anything even remotely close to resembling anything that deserves a reward anyway. Rather all have sinned. All have fallen short. All have failed at something. All have forsaken something. All of us have taken something for granted. All of us have granted something worthless entirely too much of our time, attention, intention. Indeed, all of us have understood plenty what it is to do something earnestly as we all have truly experienced that “sincere and intense conviction” in regard to a great number of things.

But did they matter?

Did they make us better?

Or, as is obviously the case, did they only teach us how to become more and more bitter?

That’s as easy a question to answer as any that’s ever been asked. Just look around at what’s become of us! We’re arguably the angriest a society has ever been. We’re definitely the most distracted a society’s ever been. Obviously the laziest a society has ever been. We are setting records for all sorts of wrongs!

And yet, again, the vast and growing majority seem entirely okay with that being the case.

Why?

Not because it’s actually good whatever this is that we’ve become. No, it’s simply because it’ll always prove far easier to keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing than to humble yourself unto realizing that all you’re really doing is wasting your life and, in that realization, determine to embrace the then glaring need for change and undertake, sincerely and perhaps even intensely, the task then of changing and doing things differently.

Perhaps even unto our becoming someone different!

Which is just about the last thing that anyone here seems to want to do. Now sure, there are some who do want to change, who do in fact undertake certain efforts to change. But even then it’s sometimes such a flimsy resolve that still it involves the seeking for worldly guidance or assistance through such mediums or avenues as self-help gurus and drugs offered us by pharmaceutical companies.

Indeed, even losing weight is something we’ve chosen to find the easiest way to do, these days so simple as injecting some foreign chemical into your body and watching the fat just disappear apparently.

I personally went the old school way that involved changing everything I’d ever known and refusing to ever consider the ease of going back.

But that’s just me.

And no, I’m not at all boasting as I’m perfectly aware of all sorts of things that I do that I shouldn’t, or even those which I feel I should do but don’t do well, or even those that I do feel as if I do well but somehow only still fall short or fail.

All because the simple fact is that we all suck at this whole living a life thing!

But yet rather than trying to get better, to learn, to grow, no, instead we just settle. We make compromises. We even resort, and this to an ever-increasing degree, to complain. Indeed, we spend so much of our time upset, angry, frustrated, disappointed because something didn’t work out or go just right. We get all bent out of shape whenever life doesn’t agree to go our way. We lose our minds whenever we find in life something that we don’t want to be there.

We sometimes even get angry whenever we have to just pretend we care!

All because we’ve all become so focused on ourselves and trying to ensure that our lives are going however we want them to go that we don’t care to know anything else, anyone else.

God included!

No, we’re anymore so spiritually diluted and mentally deluded that we feel as if we don’t need Him to be there. Definitely make it clear that we could do without all of His rules and laws and expectations and stuff. We don’t need all these weights placed on us like that! We have enough to worry about, again, ourselves mostly.

But friends, where exactly can that path take us? Where goes that much-loved path of least resistance? Who can we ever hope to become upon it? Can we be bettered if we’re not challenged? Can we grow if never we’re pushed? Have we any right to even pretend we can imagine Heaven if we never do anything in response to the simple suggestions He left with us?

He who?

He who is the Way. He who is the Life.

He who is the Truth which says that we’ve all lost our way and will lose our lives because of it.

Is that a fun truth to sit with? No. Does it make us feel all warm and fuzzy? No. Do we really need to have nothing but fun and feel never anything but warm and fuzzy?

No.

And yet those have basically become the main goal. Anymore it seems that nearly everything we do is only done to ensure that we feel good, that we have fun, that we find friends who are more than willing to come alongside the way we’re wasting our lives and cheer us on as we do.

And we do.

Because, well, many here are indeed plenty willing to.

And God isn’t.

And, well, that’s the problem isn’t it?

That He doesn’t just wink and nod at our many glaring failures and follies? That He doesn’t turn a blind eye to our continued falling, and that short of His glory thanks to our glorifying nearly everything else? That He tells us that He’s not okay with how we’re living our lives? That He actually tells us that how we’re living our lives deserves eternal suffering in a place called hell?

Indeed, we loathe the idea of hell! How could such a place exist if God were truly good?

IT’S BECAUSE HE’S GOOD!

And too because we’re not.

In fact there are none who are good, no, not even one. Nobody does the right thing all the time. Nobody does the right thing even half the time. None of us have lived a perfect life. None of us have nothing we’re hiding from the light. None of us even speak the truth all the time. Instead we all lie, we all cheat, we all steal.

Don’t believe me?

What then do you call today?

Is it not more time that we’ve stolen from He who’s willing to relent upon His more dire promises as He holds out a little more hope that we would all in fact become earnest in regard to His call for all to repent?

Is it not considered stealing whenever we eventually choose only to do anything else with or within it?

Friends, we’re all criminals. We’re thieves and beggars. We are failures.

All because we’ve willfully forgotten our Father.

And yet what father doesn’t discipline their child? What father doesn’t do whatever they can to inspire their kids to do better, to try harder? What father wouldn’t lay down his life for his kids if it meant that they would have a life better?

He did!

God literally came to us in Christ Jesus to take up a cross and pay our debt with His death.

And we’re going to argue and complain when all He asks is that we change and stop doing the things that cause us to feel such things as guilt and regret and shame?

Oh the humanity!

No friends, oh the insanity. I mean honestly, you have got to be kidding me! I understand that we want for everything in life to always be easy. We want it all to make sense and go smoothly. I get that. But what I don’t understand is how we still can’t see that all He’s asking of you and me is to stop doing the things that bring our suffering. And that He only asks us to do so because He does know the path home.

And yeah, He told us Himself that it’s narrow and hard and harrowing thus. Told us that in this world we’d have trouble, we’d be hated, we might even be handed over to friends and family who become our enemies simply because they can’t see why we continue to follow Christ.

But He also told us that they who persevered to the end would be saved. That they’d be the ones welcomed through those gates. That they would be the ones not turned away from the gift of eternal life.

Isn’t that hope, that promise, isn’t that worth humbling ourselves in this one?

Look, I know that humility isn’t ever going to be easy to a people of such pride and vanity. To us it just looks like everything we stand to lose as it asks that we leave our way of life behind. And yeah, add on top of that the fact that He does rebuke and correct us and challenge us with a Word that cuts us to the bone seeking to help us know just how far we’ve fallen.

There’s nothing about this that’s the kind of fun we so clearly prefer or the sort of ease that we’ve all come to seek.

But friends, the simple point is that all we’re going to find in these lives in which we do seek fun and ease and safety even, it’s just a tomb that’s waiting from which we cannot leave.

No, there is only one way out of that grave.

And it’s just not found in living this life our way.

It’s living it His way. And that’s what He’s trying to help us change.

Does it hurt? Yeah. Is it hard? Yeah.

Does it work?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold