Day 4142 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 John 2:17 NIV

reconsiders the ruins

Because for all our lives we’ve all been told that anyone who’s doing anything other than whatever is common or normal or elsewise popular is all but simply wasting their lives as, apparently, within this life we’re all here to find nothing but fun and fame and a true fortune then to be made out of what is a life given unto a stage living from which we perform for the masses all the signs and shows and songs they want to hear and see from you and me.

Mostly only those who seem to agree that everything that everyone is doing is both just fine to be done and thus too something we may as well then do.

After all, everyone can’t be wrong, can they?

Well, according to the Word of God, yeah, yeah we are all in fact wrong. And now granted, there’s always some sort of measure to that in which we're all at what are various depths of depravity, delusion, disillusionment, indifference basically the lot. We are all in truth a quite different degree of lost. But the sad reality remains that we are all the fallen, the failed, the failures who fell and that so well that we now deserve hell for having spent a lifetime asking God to leave us alone.

Honestly, to what or where did we think that would lead?

True, the masses running wild within this masquerade we’ve made of life seem to stand in rather obvious agreement that God, if He’s even there at all (definitely a topic of much-touted debate among the pagans and prisoners), He’s nothing but this great big jerk in the sky seemingly always only there to mess up our lives and make things harder and heavier and more demanding of reason and responsibility than our inherent sense of irrationality and personally-preferred desire for irresponsibility can ever find need for.

Yes, so many here think, well, mainly that there is no God and thus no need to live as if there is. (And that for what are glaringly obvious reasons as, if that were the case, well then yeah, doing whatever we wanted to do would never bring with it any cost or consequence and, well, that idea works perfect for those who want to do only whatever they want to do without ever needing worry about paying costs they don’t think they should have to pay nor enduring consequences for their decisions as were made, all of them basically, for no reason other than social success or personal pleasure.)

But beyond the incredibly interesting who apparently find it best to believe in nothing but themselves and their enjoyment, there’s still another sect of those who desire only to select whom and what they’ll serve who are a little more open to God being both there and thus a viable candidate for our consideration, albeit usually way down at the bottom of the list as, well, His list of demands and commands are still entirely too limiting unto a life we’ve come to want to live in which we, again, really only want to do only all the things we really want to do.

In short, there are those who believe that God should be a little more lax in regard to all that He asks so that we could have a little more fun and not feel quite so bad about it, and they alongside what are sadly even more who’ve so insisted that He be lax that they’ve cooked up this idea that He just left and has no longer any interest nor then say in whatever we do from day to day.

All of them though wish only to know what is a life in which it’s always perfectly alright to spend their life pleasing themselves in what is this most common of all lies that still continues to sell in which this life is but a well from which we’re all to draw the waters of only want and wish alongside a downpour of insistence that everyone near us agree always with us in our doing of whatever we want to do so as to make sure that the bottom never falls through and we’re left there sinking inside this stinking stupidity that we all seem remarkably able to always pretend we never saw coming.

Again mostly because surely not everyone could be wrong.

Which is oddly enough a statement made from a state of mind that all but testifies against itself.

Because, well, if we honestly believe, or are even willing to ever consider that maybe not everybody is wrong in their doing of whatever it is that they’re doing, then we’re just as dumb as they are for doing whatever it is that they’re doing which, just playing the odds, is much worse than they would ever care to consider.

And that because there both are none who are good, and too then, none who do what is right.

Meaning then that not only can everyone in fact be wrong but everyone in fact IS wrong because all of us have sinned, all of us have fallen short, all of us have said things, done things, thought things, bought things that only brought us further away from the glory and honor all being given to God alone.

Something we’ve all done, yes, all, because, well, we all want everything for ourselves. At least those things that either feel good or look good or sound good. And, well, glory and honor basically do all the above. They feel good, they make us look good, they definitely sound good as is made obvious by the overwhelming amount of agreement in this world anymore.

Truly, I cannot even begin to understand the amount of affirmation that’s being passed around this place! It’s truly as if we’ve arrived at that time in which the delusion is in fact so powerful that we’ve all just taken it upon ourselves to succumb to the pleasure of being deluded.

Because it’s fun! It’s easy. It’s literally everything that everyone wants. Which, again, is to be left alone by anyone and everyone who may have anything to say about anything they’re doing that doesn’t sound like praise or appreciation. Indeed, there’s always been this adage which encouraged us to say nothing if we didn’t have anything good to say. Problem is that we’ve become so insistent upon our own personal pleasure and success that we’ve kind of shifted it a bit to which it now inspires us all to say whatever it is that another may want to hear so that they consider us to be good.

Basically we spend our lives lying to one another’s faces because we’re more afraid of confrontation than we are condemnation and so we’d rather hold someone’s hand and lead them straight to hell than have to tell them that what they’re doing has them on that course and that they need to change some things if they want to end up somewhere else.

Because we’ve somehow become convinced that Heaven is impossible to find and the road there entirely too hard to follow and He who died to lead the way way too demanding for our to ever imagine following.

And in this we’re at least kind of right for once.

And that’s because, yeah, Heaven is impossible to find unto a people who find personal pleasure of more importance than humble praise offered unto another. And yeah, the road there is entirely too hard to follow as it does lead us daily away from basically everything, and sadly everyone, in this place that’s at present living a life or inspiring the same that has obviously no desire to desire the Name nor then praise the same. And, yes, He who died to lead the way did so because dying to sin is the only way to Heaven and that then is entirely too hard a demand for sinners like us to consider.

Because death is literally the last thing we want to consider inside what is a life that’s basically filled with so many versions of fun and fame and fortune’s perversions that we can see nothing but everything we want.

Mostly assumed because everyone else wants it too and, again, surely they can’t all be wrong, can they?

You see, among all of our mistakes and the many reasons or retardations in which or from which we’ve made them, it’s going to be one day argued, successfully mind you, that perhaps the greatest of them all (because it inspired all but all the rest) is that we looked always first to man. Be it ourselves or someone else who lives here too, we’ve spent a life lived on the loose looking to only those around us, even the one in the mirror looking back at us, to lead us into, unto whatever most agree life’s meaning is.

And the problem is that the directions have always included such directions as “look out for number one”, “you do you”, “live your truth”, “live your best life”, “you only live once”. All of which point endlessly toward this singular ideal of pleasing only ourselves via the many millions and mansions that the masses still measure as the only things that really matter. Yes, the entire point and purpose of this life has always been presented to us as nothing but endless enjoyment and pleasure.

And anyone then who doesn’t seek for those things to the depth or degree that everyone else is and always will (while they’re here at least), those few are freaks. They’re losers. They’re the idiots who have no idea how to live a life as their way of life doesn’t look right, doesn’t sound right, doesn’t seem right to those many more who think that this life is about their right to party, to have fun, to feel good and, again, look out then always for only number one.

Which is always only us as we’ve all fallen headlong into this idea that we’re all that matters and thus it’s only our pleasure, our success, our enjoyment of everything that we should seek.

And most here seek them still.

And that’s because, well, they’re all easy to find and do indeed feel pretty good once found.

Problem is that this world is passing away and so too are every single one of us who are living within it. And we all know this because we’ve all known at least one person who has died. And yeah, odds are they were someone we looked to fondly and remember the same. They were hopefully indeed decent people who then at least tried to do decent things. For that is the overall command of the God that sadly it’s clear vastly few believe in.

Point is that none of us are staying here.

And now if you don’t believe in God then you clearly don’t believe in Heaven either and so the grave probably remains the end of the line of what’s then seen as a life in which you need to have all the fun and enjoyment you possibly can. Or if you’re among them who are open to God being there but just wish He were a little more gentle, a little more lenient, then you probably too consider that Heaven is also a viable possibility as to where all this leads and probably that most people will end up there because God ought to be so nice that He just lets us get by with pretty much anything and everything.

Either way, we all know that this life ends.

Only question then is what are we doing with it until then and why is that what we’ve determined to do?

Again, the most common response to that would have to honestly be that we just want to be pleased. We want to have fun. We want to feel good. We want people to like us, which is why we lie to them so much as we do. It’s all about our winning this life, which just so happens to be yet another of our favorite taglines. It’s that we’ve become so interested in our own personal enjoyments that we just can’t make any sense of His asking us to deny ourselves as nor can we see any harm in enjoying ourselves.

At least partly because most here live as if life’s a party and, again, surely they can’t all be wrong.

Friends, yes, yes they are all wrong!

Because, though you’ll not hear it probably, life here is a prison. Life here is a battlefield. Life here is a death is progress. Life here is meant to rip the life out of us. This world and our lives lived within it, this is either our prize or our punishment.

Again though, most only continue to know to see it as only their prize because, to most, there should be no punishment in life. There should be no pain in life. There should be no misery or suffering or sadness in life. Most people think, and almost everyone else would agree, that life here should be only fun and enjoyable endlessly.

That’s why the message of the cross is foolishness unto most and the idea then of God one that they will never consider even worth considering.

Because there’s no worldly fun in it. There’s no pleasure in it, at least from the flesh’s perspective, which sadly happens to be the only perspective we really know to consider anything from. No, there’s just no benefit to it as it seems all that can come from there being a God above, the One of the Bible no less, is nothing but a life of stress and struggle and the very sum of everything that nobody wants.

And it’s clear what nobody wants!

None of us seem to enjoy personal responsibility. Nobody makes plans for a weekend spent broken over all their failures and flaws. There is no party to ever be thrown in which we all throw ourselves on the ground and beg God for the mercy we need to overcome the millions of mistakes we’ve made.

Rather everyone wants to continue ahead in this idea that we make no mistakes. That we do nothing wrong. That we are nothing but right and justified thus in our doing of whatever it is that we’re doing.

But friends, it doesn’t matter our wants because this life wasn’t written to consider our desires. Rather it’s always been our desires that have led us only astray from the way this life was meant to be lived. For we were all created to praise, worship, honor the Father who created us. Sadly we’ve just come to praise, worship and honor everyone else and everything less.

And that’s why this world is a mess!

And that’s why life here shouldn’t be our prize.

It’s because the way we’ve all chosen to live our lives has led us to living lives as if God’s not alive and thus Christ didn’t die and thus sin isn’t real and thus consequences aren’t either.

And every single day we watch a world all but light itself on fire pretending that the heat feels good.

IT DOESN’T!

And we all know it doesn’t. And I know we all know it doesn’t because I know we all know guilt. We’ve all felt regret. We’ve all said things or done things that we wish we could take back.

Problem is that life doesn’t work like that!

Rather everything we say and do does has a price attached. And the sad fact is that we’ve all chosen to live that life in which we’re literally writing checks that our souls cannot cash.

And while that’s why Jesus came to take up our cross, the vast majority of those around us are still vastly lost as to those He left on the ground beside us.

Friends, do we not yet understand that so long as we leave our crosses on the ground we thus cannot be found lifted up? That so long as we refuse to lose the lost way of life we’ve all come to live that we cannot live the life that He left this world to prove we have promised unto us? That there is simply no possible way to live to please the flesh and enjoy the world all while thinking that we can also please the One who this world ruled by a fallen flesh joyfully put to death?

That’s why He calls us to come out from this world. To take no part in its wicked ways anymore. To touch no more of the many unclean things, thoughts, theories this world is still chasing clearly.

To understand that we are not of this world, that literally the only part of us that is from this world is our flesh and that it was fashioned from the dirt and is promised to return to the same.

Damnation then promised unto the soul whenever it does if said soul had lived a life seeking to please dirt instead of the One who managed to take something so worthless and turn it into something so amazing.

My point is that we’ve all taken every opportunity to follow the ways of this world, to agree with it in everything it does. And yeah, most will continue doing the same because the pleasure, the success, the friendships come far faster and much easier that way.

But one day everything we’ve had here will become everything we leave here.

Most people are living a best life that they’ll leave behind when either this world passes away or we pass away from it. Either way, we’re all leaving this place.

What all will we have to leave behind when we do and where will we go whenever we have?

I understand that these aren’t the kinds of questions that we enjoy being asked as it’s far more fun to talk about what we want for dinner and all we plan to do this weekend. But friends, those things end.

Forever doesn’t.

And so while it may not be all that much fun to think about the harder questions, to ask them of ourselves, the fact is that we’ll only continue to buy every lie here that sells until we start asking ourselves what following the ways of this world has gotten us, where doing so will get us.

The answer to both is obvious.

It’s just not the answer we want it to be because we’ve all lived our lives choosing to believe that surely not everyone is wrong and thus they must be living for something amazing and finding something the same.

But the fact is that most folks are living for nothing and are promised to find the same when living here is no longer an option.

And that’s something we’ve all done. Thankfully He gave us promises like this one to help turn us away from the nothingness that awaits most.

Alas it too remains a choice as to whether or not we listen to it, learn from it, look unto Him who gave it unto us.

Most won’t.

But most will then be found in the wrong and left amongst the ruins of a life lived in and for the same. All because they thought that following the Way would only ruin everything. No friends, following the Way only helps us to see that everything here is ruined already with just enough time to turn our hopes elsewhere:

To the home that we haven’t ruined yet.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold