Day 4152 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Amos 5:10 NIV

welcomes their wrath

Because at some point within this life as is lived within this world you’re bound to find that no matter what you do, sad truth is that someone will hate you. Someone will disagree with you. Someone will doubt you, debate you, deny you, decry you as one of an ever-growing list of names meant to scare us into always staying inside the lines that mankind has drawn for mankind seeking to keep all of us falling always behind everything better that most never now have any intention or desire to ever become.

Indeed, this world has chosen the direction it delights to go in and it is both so convinced that it’s right, because it’s so broken that it can’t see that it’s not, that now those many who follow it, falling daily in love with the welcome of the width, all but insist that everyone who doesn’t isn’t.

Yes, this world is absolutely packed with those who are absolutely assured that they know what they’re doing and are right in doing it simply because their lives sure seem to be going quite right to them. And, being a most loving of friend, they want for everyone else to enjoy their amazing existence too. Because, well, that’s what we should do. We should want the best for those around us. In fact, I don’t even think it’s selfish or shameful to want the best for ourselves.

Problem is that the world thinks we can get there without demanding the best from ourselves.

And that’s why everything’s falling apart.

It’s because we’ve become of the collective heart that’s all but given out. We’ve chosen to become a culture of the chase rather than one of change. We’ve gotten it communally in our minds that our lives are to be lived fine only whenever we find all the fun and friendship that we’ve come to believe we need. And agreed, life should be enjoyable and filled with those with whom we get the undue opportunity of sharing said enjoyments.

After all, God gave us the ability to physically experience happiness and even pleasure and in fact surrounded us with an endless number of people who too can feel the same.

It’s that we’ve taken such things and so confused them that we now think we find them in such places as sin, in drugs, in sex, in popularity, in politics, in pride.

Yes, we’ve taken what was once a gift given unto every single life and rather come upon a way of life in that which was good is now used as that which is about as far as you can get. We’ve truly corrupted everything to the point in which sin is the only fun that most folks seem to know, pornography has replaced a mutual affection shown between two committed partners, drugs are being done on the streets as the laws regulating them have been laxed if not lost altogether, popularity is the drug that we all feed on, politics is the only thing that most folks seem to care about and pride is the very purpose of life itself unto many.

Even have a month spent celebrating it though it be the gateway sin which leads to so many others as our eyes and hearts and minds all collectively forget the promise of humility and thus the necessity thereof.

No, it’s becoming increasingly clear that humanity has no appreciation left for humility. Rather many here see it as a weakness. And that which we see as weakness, being a people of pride and politics and popularity and power, we see too as worthless. And, to a people such as us who now exist seeking worth and wealth within everything, that which we deem to be seen as worthless is that which we then want nothing to do with as, to us, any measure of weakness or loss or even control given unto something or someone else, it’s a story that doesn’t sell.

Because nobody’s buying it.

That’s why the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. It’s because both they refuse to see or accept that they are perishing in what are lives going so very amazing that it would be considered unkind, unloving to ask they leave them, lose them, and too because what we see, or have at least come to through what are these eyes tinted green thanks to everything from money to its ability to inspire envy, what we see is just a man caught in a moment which made Him so weak that He lost everything.

And, well, being a people who want not to lose anything, seeing Christ’s suffering alongside hearing of His asking that we too take up crosses and follow, it’s foolishness. It’s silly.

It’s just plain stupid.

Unto those who haven’t the courage, the humility, the heart to see that in reality such is only we.

No, we’ve long since lost our societal ability to see just how dumb we are, just how wrong we are, just how lost we are. And that because we again think that we’ve found something worth having, and that simply because we can hold it. Indeed, our measure of value and worth and purpose have all devalued to the point in which all it takes to mean anything is for something to have some weight to it. If it can be measured then it can be meaningful. If it weighs something then we want it.

And if it can’t or doesn’t then we don’t.

All because for all we know all that matters and or then means anything is only everything that has mass. All because we’ve become entirely reliant upon our eyes to see that we’ve indeed allowed all of life to be assumed within only all that is easily seen. If you can show it to us then we’ll believe it. If you can hand it to us then we’ll become convinced we need it. And if we can be in any way so convinced then our every focus becomes so intent upon having it that nothing else matters anymore.

At least until we have it and the new wears off and we find ourselves right back at step one.

And this is the life that we’ve come to love. It’s the one in which such things as quantity and width are seen as of more worth than quality and depth. We’d rather have more and enjoy it less than to have less and enjoy it more.

Why?

Because we’ve all become convinced that life does consist inside an abundance of possessions. That fun is had inside an abundance of enjoyments. That excitement is found within a bunch of entertainment. That pleasure is felt in having so many partners that you slowly forget their names. That friends are found in only those who agree with everything you do and come daily unto your door bringing you some such gift as praise or approval or pizza.

Seriously, we’re so very willing to discount our time and attention that the pathway to a person’s heart does seem to run through their stomach.

Probably because most folks house their gods there.

A truth which, were it more widely known, or at least more widely accepted, would indeed set captives free from what is so clearly a life lived in slavery to every human idea and manmade ideal and cultural idol that we can find some reason to trust and believe and perceive as able to better uphold our hope than He who took up our cross.

Yes, we give more weight and worry to the flags we fly than He who was lifted high as He did so only to die while the flag has become a symbol of a freedom that never will.

A freedom that we’ve all indeed used as a cover for evil and thus a reason to do entirely too much of the same.

All because it’s fun. It’s normal. It’s popular and thus too profitable. For example, the porn industry earns over $100 billion dollars a year. Billion with a B. That’s $100,000,000,000 per year. That is more than the entire global music industry in terms of consumer spending. It makes more money than all of the US’s professional sports leagues combined, and that by a lot. It even competes with all the tech companies such as Apple and Google.

And why?

Because it sells a lying version of love that allows people to feel good without having to work for it. It’s love at its most lost and lazy.

And why do we so enjoy that?

Because so too are we lost and lazy, so much so in fact that we’ve all stopped even trying to understand what love is, what love does, what Love did!

Because we don’t want to accept that He died for us to live our lives in vastly better ways than staring at screens watching fake scenes written by the very same hellyweird producers that helped to make the most recent blockbuster.

We don’t care.

We just want to feel good, to have fun, to so please the flesh that we manage to keep only our now inherent fear of death found and felt only because we’ve all come to believe that both all of life is only lived here and thus we’ve everything to lose whenever we’ve to leave.

And so whenever anyone comes along and tells us that we will die and that because of our sins and that thus when we do it might not go very well as many it’s promised will be sent straight to hell having lived the entirety of their lives mocking that even being a possible possibility, we hate them. We despise them. We absolutely loathe those who speak in reminders of a truth that we all know seeing as how God has written it into, onto, unto every human heart.

Why?

Because of the truth we do not want them to remind. We’ve rather come to live for and in so very many lies that the truth is now criminal and those who dare speak it guilty of crime. In fact, speaking the truth is considered by most a crime against humanity as it speaks in direct opposition to humanity’s tragic loss of all humility and modesty and morality. The truth testifies that we have fallen and that so far that wrong is now considered right in a world that sees more fun and purpose and worth to be had in the darkness than in the light.

And this world has become so dark that now anytime any light dares to shine, it does so like someone holding a flashlight up to your face while your sleeping and turning it on.

It blinds. It awakens. It can even leave you shaken as you’re hastened into this situation that you both never saw coming and thus were entirely unready to face, unable to handle.

Yes, the same exact reasons that everyone hates the reminders of Jesus that are spoken of by some of us who feel this unyielding, undying need inside our bones to keep doing, saying, sharing whatever we can to help whomever we might see that this isn’t our life and this world then neither our home.

It’s because such doings and saying and sharings only come unto the alarm of those who’ve, at this point, all but forgotten everything other than everything they like. They remind people of such things as personal responsibility, self-control, even the value of humility as is perhaps the very best example of less being more.

It’s because the version of life that most folks have come to live and love is one in which they are asleep, caught perpetually inside this dream version of everything, eyes then closed to anything that doesn’t match their dream version of life. Entirely unready then to face the Light having lived the lie that the dark is better somehow.

Yes, people all around are entirely unready to meet Jesus having spent the majority of their lives living as if He isn’t there and thus isn’t coming.

But He is.

And yet, again, dare tell anyone that and they’ll either think you’re an idiot or in fact hate you so very much because of it that they may well resort to a sort of human lowliness in terms of kindness and caring that they find themselves more than willing to help us feel at least a little of all that our Jesus did.

Indeed, make no mistake but do understand that there are those within this world who would just as soon watch us suffer, even see us dead than have to endure the sound teaching that we’re here to share.

Why?

Because it would be better for them and thus too their lives if we weren’t here living ours saying things that they don’t want to hear and doing things that prove the things they’re doing to be empty, hollow, without hope.

Yes, we who are following Christ and sharing His message are in fact the aroma of death to those who think they’re living their best lives.

And it may eventually come to the point in which they come to feel that they can only go on living and enjoying their best lives should we stop living ours, either how we are or in fact altogether.

Don’t believe me?

Consider please Calvary.

That scene shows the lows to which humanity will go to silence they who dare speak in the perceived violence that all truth and honesty is. It shows us what we will do whenever we’re faced with a truth, the truth that we don’t want to hear. It proves that we would just as soon kill another than even reconsider what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and what it is that we’re benefitting from it.

Yes, this world would happily kill Jesus all over again.

Why?

Because His Word still contradicts their version of life as is lived thinking that they’re living it right all because they’re having fun and making friends and enjoying so very much sin that even modesty is mocked anymore.

And we’ve in fact been told that days are coming in which if we’ll not do as the masses tell us to, then we’ll neither be able to buy nor sell. If we don’t take their mark and live the kinds of lives they want us to live, doing and saying and thinking and believing only that which they say is acceptable, that we’ll risk being removed, and that physically, and that permanently if you get my drift.

Yes, the Word tells us that some of us will be handed over to the courts wherein we’ll reach our end having finished our work of testifying to the truth of our faith before those who don’t want to hear and agree we needn’t live any longer because we’ll believe it. Jesus himself tells us plain that within this world we will have trouble.

But He also said that He’d come to overcome the world and thus that those who endured said trouble to the end would be the same as would be saved.

Not from the trouble. Not from the trials. Not from the torment. Not even from the torture.

No, we’d be saved from the worst that’s still to come.

And that because we’ll become those who place our faith and hope and trust and treasure in both Christ and thus in Heaven and spend out the rest of our days seeking nothing from this world but rather only to lose everything we’ve ever had within it so that we’re ready whenever He returns to get us and take us home.

Leaving the rest, sadly the most considering the wide path and how obviously well-traveled it is by most, to know never again anything of peace, of joy, of hope, of love.

No, all most will come to know is all the death and misery and shame that they never agreed to feel within this place in which, no, we don’t have to listen to anything we don’t like the sound of. Here we don’t have to admit to any mistakes we make. Here we can evade the consequences of our actions. Here we can bribe justice systems. Here we can keep friends in low places who do indeed do dirty deeds dirt cheap that get us out of binds from time to time.

Here we can do literally whatever we want to do.

And most here are doing exactly and sadly only that.

Life here has become all about our pleasing ourselves. And anyone who says anything derogatory or condescending or elsewise considered combative against our doing of whatever it is that we’ve come to clearly enjoy doing, they’re not acting in kindness or love and thus are fair game.

It’s all become incredibly precarious down here, even to the point in which saying one wrong word at just the right time can inspire someone else to actually end your life.

And, well, the Bible has plenty of those “wrong” words that are considered as such simply because most of those around us just don’t like what they say. Because the Bible says plenty of things that point out our failures and flaws. The Bible straight up calls us all sinners who have thus earned death and tells us that therefore we all need to repent, to stop doing whatever it is that we’ve probably come to really love doing, to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and spend our lives following behind He who is the Christ who asks that we get rid of everything we have and embrace a life spent wanting only to leave.

None of which makes any sense to those who think life begins and ends within their chase of treasure and their feeling of pleasure within every step of the journey.

My point is that we’re all going to be hated by someone for something. Let’s at least make it something good. Let’s give this world a good reason to hate us.

And, well, what better reason than our trying to do good in a world that anymore finds goodness and decency and even morality to be silly, stupid, foolish and foreign?

Yes, there are those who, as the Bible says, hate the light and therefore refuse to come into it, unto it because they know that it will show forth their lives for what they know they’ve become. And so whenever we take up the task of living like little mirrors reflecting a little bit of Christ’s light into this darkening world, this darkening world won’t like us very much as most folks here are sleeping and do not want to be woken up.

What they don’t realize is that we’re doing it the nice way.

He who comes to take us home, well, He tried it the nice way once and, well, the world killed Him because of it.

Hear tell He’s got plans to do it differently next time.

But it seems that telling this world that truth is the surest way to find all the hatred we could never want in life as this world will most certainly shoot the messenger.

Or crucify them.

Either way.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold