Day 4141 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Corinthians 4:16 NIV

seeks beyond the surface

Inside what is a life in which we slowly begin to realize that not merely are looks often deceiving, sometimes they’re just plain imaginary. And this is a hard thing for us to consider considering how we’ve all walked for years in what is this fear of relying upon anything other than our sense of sight. For so long it’s been but our eyes which have led our lives and that always in accordance with the coordinates given us by the things we’ve seen or sought not to. Indeed, life, as far as we know to live it, it’s been lived in love with our eyes keeping our heads above the surface seeking ways in which to avoid the suffering and find the successes.

Yet anymore all I for one seem to see are but the messes from which we shall not walk away.

At least not without some sort of price being paid.

Thankfully said price was paid by He who came with the express intent to pay it in a kind of permanent that rendered pointless the entirety of all that was what had defined the old way of doing things, as was in fact done for centuries and thus throughout generations. Yes, Christ came to offer up the sacrifice to literally end all sacrifice as He laid down His life, giving God one final spotless, blameless, sinless Lamb whose blood continues to atone for every heart and soul and life lived sadly still prone to going it all alone without any viable reason why.

For nothing we’ve ever done has ever come anywhere close to accomplishing what He achieved inside that show of what remains the ultimate humility.

And there is nothing we can do that can match it.

No, all we might offer is a rent heart willing to refuse our now longstanding insistence to continue missing it.

A choice called sin which is what we’ve all walked in, talked in, thought in, buying in then to what have been countless different lives all lived demanding the same exact price be paid. And that’s that we be laid inside a grave and there spend forever apart from He who both gave us our start, literally created our heart, only to from then watch on as we all joined forces and forced this life to come apart. Yes, God’s seen and heard and always known every wayward thought, every misplaced want, every worthless word and every vain pursuit as have been the reasons and results of our every choice ever made.

And yet rather than doing as we’ve done more times than we can count and choosing to make it even, no, rather He made it even easier.

He sent us a Savior who at first led the way for our to be then saved from all the sin in which we’ve lived but too, from there, walked out of that grave and continues still now to give every leading and lesson that we continue to prove we’re needing in what remain lives, at best, being lived only cautiously curious as to the call of the cross.

Curious because Heaven sounds incredible.

Cautious because dying still does not.

And yet, such has become the only way home. Such is the only place in which we’ve any hope. Such is the one Name given under Heaven by which we must be saved, through whom we must be changed, in whom we will be killed.

Only difference that remains is the outcome we find once dying we have.

And again, even this He’s made entirely simple as the dilemma He’s boiled to what are two clear choices. Yes, choices. And that is Heaven or hell. It’s literally the very epitome of life or death as one holds each and it holds it so well that, once we’re held there, we’ll experience it forever. And while you’d think that this would have proven vastly enough to inspire in us a far better willingness to seek deeper daily a too deeper ability to uphold His will as is understood better in the reading of His Word, no. No rather most continue to live upon what remains the surface of all that’s superficial and honestly already shifting.

For here the dark daily becomes darker whilst the light grows lighter.

I reckon the challenge remains because of the confusion in place in that so too does the light here grow heavier.

And indeed, it’s this truth that’s come to prove the impasse beyond which most here won’t pass.

It’s the fact that a life spent behind the Christ is one in which we don’t win, at least not what the world tends to think of a prize we should want to. No, His path isn’t here paved in gold or glory. His road isn’t wide open and carefree. In fact, if anything, His road is ever-narrowing and reaches for this point in which it’s proven that even our very best cannot walk it.

No, at some point we come to find that in this life we really do have to die as pride has no place within the steps paved by He who walked that mile or so in our shoes.

Or sandals as it were as that was the fashion back then when He came and did what He’d determined to do.

Which, in case you’re new around here and too to this whole hearing of Gospel truth thing, was to die. Yes, Christ came to carry a cross and upon it hold all that was lived inside of every life lived lost. He came to pay the cost of our having crossed the line and lived the life that loved the death that sin remains. And yet, why then does it remain? If Jesus truly came to prove the propitiation for our every past spiritual retardation and every rebellion which sprang from the same, then why then does sin remain?

Well, it’s because, while He may be done with it having suffered in the body, suffering is still kind of the main something that most of us seek mostly to avoid.

Indeed, again in a right clarity He wrote within His Word that those who suffer in the body are done with sin, something shown within the suffering of His Son for sin as He who knew no sin became sin so that those who knew only sin, and thus no righteousness, might, in Him, become the righteousness that they’d never known.

It’s called substitutionary atonement and, in general terms, it means that one takes the place of another as they offer to be substituted unto the atonement needed for the one for whom they’ve chosen to stand in their stead.

In even easier words, it means that Jesus took our place upon our cross to pay for the lives that we’ve lost thanks to living so lost that we thought we’d found our best life in doing only everything wrong.

Yes, He died in our place, thus died our death, entered our grave, gave up His life so that we’d not have to knowing that the same we could not do as, in us, there is no such ability to be resurrected once, let’s say, decommissioned.

No, He knew that if we died then there we’d stay as we’d lived doing so much so wrong that God had no reason to give us another go.

And so He came to go where He didn’t deserve, getting there through also enduring what He didn’t deserve, all to both help us to avoid what we do deserve, but also to, in suffering for us, show us the way by which to survive it.

Not to avoid it.

Survive it.

And yet, again, what seems to so often trip us up is this idea that His having died means now that we needn’t suffer. That His having chosen that sort of surrender means that we never need to do the same. That His having came to carry our cross means now that we haven’t crosses left to carry.

But we do.

In fact, though He died in our place, it was for our sins. We all still have to live our lives and die our deaths because of the lives we’ve lived. For there has to be a punishment. There has to come a humbling moment. There simply must be a time in which we are finally able to fully see the depths to which we’d sunk in what had only become lives we lived on the surface seeking always to see only all we wanted to be there.

And, well, there’s just no place better to accomplish that than the grave.

And that’s why we all still enter one. It’s to there shed finally the last gasp of this flesh that, honestly, it just needs death as it continues to prove only interested in still getting in our way of walking humbly behind He who is the Way. Yes, this life we live, having been lived to please the flesh for so long as all of us have, it’s now become a war in which we have no recourse but to reconsider the entirety of everything we’ve ever done and, in doing so, put to death all that’s kept us from living better lives.

Hence the crosses still sat beside our sides.

They’re there to help us learn what to leave before we do. To help us begin to lose what His love says we don’t need to keep. To grow in the humility that eventually begins to realize that it’s, again, been always our eyes that have led our lives to believing all the lies that have left us so lost as we probably still don’t know we’ve been.

Indeed, I can’t even imagine some of the things I’ve done for I’ve done things that I would never in a million years wish to do again.

And those are just the ones that I can remember.

What of all the more that I don’t? What of all the mistakes that I don’t know I made? What of the idols I didn’t see I was idolizing or the foul words that I once didn’t hear myself saying or the hurt that I’ve caused in others because of the things I did not knowing how much they’d hurt because of it?

We don’t know half of it!

For sadly our lives have always seen mostly only this outcome of our lives going fairly well. Up here on the surface we’ve striven to ensure that everything went as well as we could want. Hasn’t always agreed to our version of going well. But we’ve mostly gotten close enough to not whine too awful much.

And to yet worry even sadly less.

Proving then that we know nothing of His death nor the fact which says that we’ve still our own coming.

Indeed, our society’s lack of worrying, lack of learning, lack then of growing and improving, they all point to the fact that we’ve still no idea what we’re doing as most folks are still doing daily the very things which demanded His demise. People all around are still saying the lazy words because they’re too childish to appreciate the power of speech to uplift and encourage. People are still chasing after victories proven in comfort and victimhood found whenever we’re asked to go without it. People are still proving all the time that they prefer that kind of life in which all that happens is what they alone deem to be right.

Never really caring at all about what God has said is good.

No, we’re more than fine with good enough for we know inside our hearts that were we to ever venture deeper into life and seek beyond the seen for the meaning thereof, we’d find that we have truly no reason to ever even imagine that we’d be welcomed above by He who came down below in order to carry our cross, to know our sin, to die our death.

Yes, Jesus went to a place that His pains prove He wants for none of us to be. Saw things that none of us should want to see. Felt things that we simply cannot fathom.

All because so too is the Savior the Father. And while every Father wants only the best for their every son and every daughter, so too does the same endure the process of helping said children learn such things as right from wrong, correcting them when needed then so as to save them from the suffering that comes in making mistakes and thus living a life mistaken.

Yes, God will still challenge us, correct us, rebuke us when necessary.

Problem we continue to run gleefully into is that we’re utterly slow to learn the lessons He’s been trying so long to teach us as we’ve confined Him into this idea of a God who coddles rather than corrects, who comforts instead of challenging, who agrees to our complacencies as opposed to standing firm on His call for all to be holy.

We’ve tried to change God into something of one of those 8-balls that you ask a question and then flip it over to get the answer. Flipping it over constantly until we see the answer we’re looking for.

But God doesn’t work like that. He’s not up there to cater to our desires. He’s not in Heaven always redecorating as He learns of the new things we like looking at.

No, rather He’s in Heaven still stood firmly upon every word He’s ever spoken, demanding that we live in accordance with them!

In fact, it was His one and only Son who told us plain that if we’d not take up our crosses daily and follow Him, then we’re simply not worthy of Him. Told us too that if we’d not do as He’s called us to, that when found outside Heaven’s gates where we’ll all stand there in wait of where we’ll spend our forever, again in either unending death or everlasting life, He’s every plan to fulfill that promise of turning most away because the same never knew Him.

Because, well, if we don’t want to know Him then why would we expect that He would claim to know us?

No, just doesn’t work like that.

Thus we’ve been given this life we live here in which we have full and complete access to His Word, to His church, to the opportunity that is prayer in which, through which we all have every chance to humble ourselves unto upholding His will at the often necessary blatant expense of laying down our own.

Yes, not our will but rather His be done.

But is that a sentence that we can say with any hint of personal honesty?

That we want only for His will to be done? That we wish for only His wants to be won? That our lives care only as to the glory of the Son?

No. No, I don’t know that any of us can as, again, the flesh still gets in the way. Our eyes still look for the path of least resistance. Our feet still lean away from the struggles we see. Our hearts want still entirely too often that version of life in which everything is safe and easy and never then hard to carry. Yes, our hands and heads want nothing to do with crosses we’re called to carry because the entire idea of what’s done with them, on them, it’s just plain scary as it’s just plain deadly!

And, well, we’re not ready to die. Rather we’re still living pretty great lives. Granted, they’re not perfect. We sometimes make mistakes and mostly find only that we’re left to muddle through those made by those around us. Some days don’t go our way. We’ve still lists of things that we’d like to have or hope to experience. But for the most part, life here is going pretty well.

Or at least that’s what most folks seem to still be able to think!

And that’s the problem! It’s that we’re all blind and dumb that we think that most things are okay. That, as far as we can see, it’s not all that bad. In fact, we still see such things as suffering and loss as things that are bad. We see those who go without as those missing out. We consider those who live lives void of our various enjoyments and excitements as those who must be miserable. Yes, we think of those who we assume aren’t having any fun as those who are failing to live their best life as life here is all about success and pleasure and the persistent pursuit of every other personal treasure we’ve come to try for.

Indeed, we still think this life is all about us and our having always only all that we want.

And, again, none of us want anything to do with suffering, with pain, with the humility that actually seeks them both actively.

That makes no sense!

And we’ll continue to refuse to be renewed so long as that remains our stance.

For the simple fact is that He came to do a new thing in order to make all things new. And the thing new He came to do was to die to sin rather than living as if it was a friend. He came to seek righteousness, to walk in humility, to give His flesh willingly, not to sin, but to the death it wins. Yes, Jesus came to die to our way of life so that, in doing something so new as that, He could accomplish maybe the desire inside of us to do that same thing too as to be able to follow Him toward the new that’s offered only on the other side of the old being done away with.

Do we not yet get that?

He came to suffer in this life to show us that in this we will suffer but so too that if we do, humbly and willingly, eagerly even, then so too shall we share in the new life that He proved is there on the other side of our laying down this one we’ve lived in love with sin.

And yes, those who suffer in this life, in this body, they are doing so because the suffering helps us see the very real cost of doing everything wrong.

And yet we see those who suffer as those who are doing it wrong as we still think that life here is supposed to be lived in pleasure and success and comfort.

It isn’t.

Life here is supposed to be lost so that we can leave it behind for the everything better that He promised in leaving it behind first.

Friends, that’s the only way this hope of salvation and eternal life really works. It relies upon renewal of mind and spirit, both of which finally learn to see the flesh as our enemy thanks to all the evil it clearly knows to want.

We have to be done with the flesh, put our every lust and craving to death if we’re ever to hope in His agreeing that He knows us.

Yes, in Him there is suffering, there is hurting, there is misery. But friends, those are all perfect places for us to experience the fullness of His mercy that we just have no reason to seek so long as we don’t think them a need. So while His path may find us seeing life in a far different way and walking one only away from such things as comfort in preference of pain, it doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong.

Just means that we’re finally learning how to get it right.

For this life isn’t our reward. It’s our chance to learn what our reward really is and just how narrow and humbling the road toward it has to be.

Don’t run away from the suffering, from the shame, from the pain.

Because maybe they’re only there to teach us lessons which lead to growth that He knows we’d never know any other way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold