Day 4133 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Mark 2:21 NIV

recognizes the reckoning

Because there comes a point, and it does come for each of us, in which we’ll look up and realize both the sheer gravity of our guilt as gained thanks to the sum of all the wrong things we’ve done and there too the necessity then of our changing. And that, well, everything. For when you’re made aware of all the years spent living as if you didn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t care, it becomes perfectly clear that continuing along within the same mindset sat atop the same course, it would only serve to make everything worse.

Even if the outcome were to be our highly prized ideal of staying mostly the same.

For what is there to gain inside the choice made to remain so unchanged when what we come to see ourselves as having sadly come to be is indeed something that makes us sad or angry or guilty or ashamed? Why seek to remain any of those things? Granted, the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot seem to anymore see that they were made in the image of God and called by the same to come and change at the foot of the cross, an undertaking undertaken in our taking up our own and following Jesus.

But still, even if there are those many upon the wide still widely aimed at jumping off the proverbial bridge, does that make it any better of an idea for our to follow their lead?

I mean, this is something that our parents used to use in order to help get through to our better judgements in regard to doing or not doing whatever it was that everyone else was doing and had invited us to start doing too. If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you? Well, turns that that, yeah, most folks would. In fact it seems anymore that most of society is stuck inside this God-forsaking hurry to be the very first to do so.

People all around us are everyday doing things that have absolutely no business being done.

God himself testifies that many of the things that mankind has come to do are things that never even entered His mind as things to ask us to. Specifically such things as offering their children in the fire as burnt sacrifices to what were and remain false gods who apparently inspired them to do such things as murder their kids.

And no, there aren’t too many people doing such things as this these days.

But the fact remains that we are all still doing things that we simply shouldn’t be doing. We all say things that shouldn’t be said. Think things that shouldn’t be thought. Buy things that shouldn’t be bought. Believe things that shouldn’t be believed. Even perceive things that literally aren’t there!

Pretty sure all of us do that thing in which we have those little fake arguments between ourselves and another, kind of a rehearsing for situations and circumstances which will probably never happen.

We’re just weird like that.

Which is pretty much the problem that’s left us swallowed by what is such a dire situation. It’s that, well, our minds are gone. We’ve so shrunken away from such things as reality and truth and the responsibility to uphold the both and their like to the very best of our likewise feeble and faulty ability that we, as a society, seem to have just surrendered all such efforts. Rather these days we just resort to again doing mostly things that only lead us further into ourselves and the many varied interests and swelling measure of indifference hidden now within us.

For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Problem is that we’ve come up with all these ways to make doing so seem the thing we’re supposed to do that doing so is now seen as so fun, so normal, so marketable that it’s basically all we know to do.

In short, we are the old garment that’s now riddled with holes thanks to what’s become a life in which we’ve so many sharp, pointy objects that we use on what’s basically at best an hourly basis to keep on poking holes in what is this vessel that He created to help us through this life.

And by vessel I mean body, soul, mind, all of it.

We’re so very corrupted at this point that most here think they’re the only ones who aren’t.

Not sure how that’s supposed to be the case, but hey, that’s the thing about delusion I guess.

It always leaves us ever able to assume we’re the best.

Even though we’re again but a shrunken garment that’s no longer fit to wear in public. A point basically proven by a quick trip to walmart and there getting to see the kinds of things that folks do wear in public.

Yeah, don’t really need much else in terms of evidence to prove the point that Jesus is making here.

Which is that, well, everything needs to change.

Everything.

Because, as He so famously told us, He came to do a new thing. He came to bring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, life to the dead. And, well, wouldn’t you know it but that has managed to work out perfect because, well, all of us are all of those. Or at least hopefully have been which means then that we were once as, well, the whole point is for our to become something new thanks to His having done, and doing still, the same:

A new thing.

All because being deaf, dumb, blind, crippled and nothing short of crazy is just a really bad way to go through life. Especially if you’re one of those who hope to find even more life waiting for you upon the leaving of this world in which we’ve all lived one.

The hope is that here we’ll live two.

Because that’s the new thing He came to do. It was to inspire so much change inside our hearts, our minds, the living thus of our lives that we indeed become, in Him, a new creation. That we put off the former way of life as was so clearly lived unto the flesh and, in our share of His surrender which led unto the grave wherein all flesh is left, put on the new life as should be lived unto the Spirit. A change made needed because the flesh and the Spirit desire that which is inseparably opposed to one another.

Again, just go to walmart and you’ll see a pretty fair snapshot of what He means.

It’s that nothing of what we’ve come to know of life has really anything at all to do with what He created life to be. In fact it could be argued, and I believe one day it will, that the further advanced we get, the further behind we fall in that regard. Because the glaring reality is that in our reality today we’re all so stuck in our ways of doing our things that we don’t seem to have any recollection or understanding that there might be other things we should be doing.

Other things which might be better for us to do.

Better things that would thus make us better too.

No. Instead we all wake up every single day, put on the same clothes, grab the same phone, eat the same junk, drive to the same job, tell the same jokes, take the same route to the same home where we watch the same things until we go to sleep with every intention of tomorrow doing the same thing all over again.

We’re like those little hamsters in those tiny wheels. Sure, to the world around us it sure seems like we’re running our hearts out in this hustle and bustle kind of culture we’ve created. But the real truth is that we’re getting nowhere, and that no matter how fast we run.

Why?

Because we just keep running back to the same things.

We just keep listening to the same lies as they continue to convince us that we’re living good lives. We keep committing the same sins with the same friends because their laughter helps us lose our worry about whatever it is that we’re doing. We watch the same shows which show who knows what kind of garbage and gore, all because we’re terrified of being bored as, if we ever were, we might accidentally have a thought or two.

And we can’t risk that.

Because those thoughts just might happen to help us see that things aren’t going all that wonderfully. We might accidentally come to realize the vast emptiness in our lives. We may even come to see some of the mistakes we make, the foolishness found in the choices we’ve chosen. May even start to wonder what all we might could, should be doing better.

And that might lead us into the consideration of change.

Which remains, to most here, the stupidest thing anyone could ever consider considering how this place is roundly convinced that living our truth, whatever nonsense that is, is something that proves our bravery and boldness.

No friends, it proves only our foolishness and that it’s so shrunken us that we’re basically raisins.

Like the kind that people think are chocolate chips and get all excited because those are considered the best and then they take a bite and are filled with fright because they accidently ingested a little bit of fruit instead of what’s basically candy.

No, can’t have that!

Which is pretty much our culture’s stance on such things as faith, truth, modesty, morality, the Christ who is thus the Cornerstone of Christianity. We have no room for any of them as all of them have no room for us and however this is that we’ve chosen to live our lives. Indeed, that’s why so many hate Scripture and He who breathed it so vehemently, even violently sometimes.

It’s because, in simpler terms, the entirety of both tell us plain that we’re idiots.

That we suck really bad at doing this. That we pretty much couldn’t have messed this whole life thing up any worse if we tried. That, thanks to what we have tried, we all deserve now to die!

Kind of seems about as different a story as you could get from all these lies we’ve bought that have instead lived us to get whatever this is in our heads that has us convinced that the best thing for us is to always do nothing any differently than everything we’ve ever done.

Again, just hamsters on a wheel.

Running our hearts out trying to stay always ahead of the truth of reality which proves effortlessly that, yeah, we have made nothing but a huge, steaming pile of mistakes and confusions and problems and delusions inside this way of life that we’ve lived to design seeking to inside the same come to find what is that life in which all we are is happy and comfy and cozy and crazy enough to believe in all this stuff.

We don’t need to be comfortable. We don’t need to be happy. We don’t even need to feel safe.

We need to be changed!

Why?

Because we’re all sinners who have thus lived in blatant and brazen opposition to God, treating Him as if our enemy! We’ve spent a lifetime setting basic fire to our One and only lifeline! We’ve literally taken every single opportunity that we’ve ever been given to keep on living as if He isn’t!

Where will that leave us when all of the sudden we’ve left here to find out that He is there?

Well, according to Calvary, it’s no place we want to be!

Because, as Clint Eastwood said in that one movie, “dyin’ ain’t much of a living boy.” Or girl. Or whatever it is that you may have literally become personally convinced you may actually have the power and thus authority and thus apparent responsibility to define for yourself.

That’s how far gone we are into what is a life so wrong that He felt there was no other choice but to come along and try to open our eyes to seeing our sins so that He could, having finished that work, take them from us and, more importantly, us from them. Even that remains one of the longest-running misconceptions in all of human history. That Jesus died to forgive us, not to change us.

Friends, where is it that we draw the line that apparently defines the difference?

Why would He do so much to achieve our forgiveness, our salvation, only to not care if we continue doing the very same things that cost Him all He had to do, had to endure, in order to forgive us for them and save us from them?

That literally makes no sense at all!

That we would be those defined as those who fell, that He would come to lift us up via His being lifted the same, only to then, having literally died to open our eyes and change our lives, look down from Heaven and see us falling all over again?

Come on my friends!!

No, everything has to change. The things we do, the things we don’t. The words we say and those we won’t. The thoughts we think cannot remain the thoughts we thought before our freedom He bought. No! He came to make us new, literally told us that very thing. What then makes us think that anything can be left unchanged?

I honestly don’t have any idea how He could have made it any clearer that His dying on a cross, being chucked in a grave and leaving the death contained within behind when He walked out unto eternal life.

He calls us to follow my friends.

Death.

Burial.

Resurrection.

What aren’t we getting?

It’s actually pretty simple. It’s that we’re not ready. We’re not willing. And, because of those two always teaming up together, we think we’re not able. We don’t know how to change. We don’t want to change! We like our lives. We love the things that we do as if we’ve the right, the freedom to. We absolutely adore this idea that has the world convinced that God is just up there to wink and nod and get a good chuckle at the rocks we continue to throw as His Son.

Something all of us have done every single time we’ve ever said something we had no business saying or done something that regret has since helped us see we shouldn’t have done.

Yet there remains nothing new under the sun.

Just a bunch of shrunken hamsters thinking we’re getting somewhere.

And make no mistake, we are.

But I hate the fact that many here will only wake up to find one day that nowhere is nowhere they wanted to end up.

And yet, even nowhere would be lightyears better than where it’s said many are heading.

Why?

Because they just keep on living the same life they’ve always lived. Same desires, same distractions. Same cravings, same concessions. Same lies, same losses, same confusions, and yeah, same crosses.

The vast majority of which are still sitting right where it’s heartbreakingly obvious most folks are more than content to leave them lay.

Yet still comes for all that day of reckoning upon which, as His Word says, all will be changed.

Hope is that we’ve taken Him up on His gift of the opportunity that is this time that we have left in this life to practice a little. Why? Because when this life is found as the countdown to liftoff that it’s always been, if we’ve not run through the takeoff at least a time or two, odds are we’ll be left off the list of those lifted up and welcomed home.

Because Heaven isn’t the reward of those who think they can show up still living their lives lost in sin and somehow entirely unashamed of the same. No. Heaven is rather the promise given unto those who heed this here warning that trying to merely graft Christ into what is a way of life lived lost and unaware of it, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Why?

Because all it can do is convince us that we know Him and He knows us, all while there is no evidence to be seen in us of Him, His work, His will, His Word.

Because if we don’t know enough about Him and the gravity of what He did in that grave in which was poured every ounce of mercy and grace He had to give to inspire us to give up doing the very things that cost Him such a price, then we don’t know Him at all. Indeed, if we’ll not do as He’s done then He’s told us that He won’t confess us. He will say He never knew us.

He will turn us away from Heaven’s peace unto that place in which there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

Why gnashing?

Because there forever will be spent realizing what you missed having chosen to refuse the reckoning while you had the time to be saved.

We have that time today my friends! So let us not waste today doing the same things we’ve always done. No, let us join with the Son in doing something new as that’s what He calls us to do.

For nobody sews a piece of new, unshrunk cloth into an old, torn up garment because when the new inevitably shrinks, it’ll just tear up the old even worse. No, rather what He gives us is a new garment, a new flesh, a new Spirit, a new life.

Let’s live it then in a new way that shows Him that we appreciate what all He did for us to have it. And changing nothing shows nothing of any appreciation for the Gospel which calls us to change.

For the truth is that repentance is the request.

What then do our lives say our answer is?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold