Day 4176 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Titus 2:12 NIV

learns of a life in “no”

Which honestly comes at quite the surprise considering for all our lives we’ve all lived through eyes that knew only of “yes” and “please” and “thank you sir, may I have another?”. Because those are the keys which have always seemed to open every door behind which we’ve learned to believe that all the best of all this life always waited for us to find a desire to feel as though we needed it. That life itself was something that sells upon shelves in stores or is offered on pages in magazines or flashes exciting family scenes on our tv’s telling us all about all the benefits and side-effects of some new something that’s taking the world by storm.

Indeed, we’ve all lived our lives one ShamWow and a roll of Flextape away from utter perfection.

This is in fact why such infomercials were invented. It’s because the makers of their products sold within them, usually even offered us in payments paid in installments so that we can go ahead and receive the products and install them without having to worry quite yet about the 15th payment, intended for us to worry more about the product than the payment. This world has long sought to convince us that we needed just this one more, and usually rather specific, thing and then our lives would be then everything they could ever hope to become.

The very same lie that tells us we need ceiling fans in the light sockets of our ceiling fans is at least arguably close to that which told our fore-failures that they, despite having free and unlimited access to a Garden filled past full with all of God’s goodness, needed to try out that one fruit that had been, up until then, off-limits and unconsidered.

Can you imagine what our lives would have been like had they not considered the devil’s offer to become as gods themselves?

Granted, that’s a pretty hard deal to turn down, which is why neither they nor we ever did or still sadly never have. And that’s because, well, to be our own gods seems like that ultimate prize within this life in which we live so lost in love with what is pride that we’ve all come to be utterly convinced that we are all but owed the entire substance of everything that exists.

That’s what we just talked about yesterday.

It’s this version of life in which we find that we’re so very good at living it that we feel as if we should never go without anything that we can even accidentally perceive as being good within it. Now that doesn’t mean that everything that looks good isn’t actually deceiving us. Trust me, I mow lawns for a living and I’ve seen my share of pocket hoses that have in fact stopped shrinking and look rather just all stretched out and sad.

But that’s the problem! It’s that, in all of our seeking always for the more of everything better that we still for some reason seem to believe that this world holds or has, so too have we then come to become quite stretched out and sad. Stretched because we’re spread amongst a million different desires and sad because we’ve not yet gained them all. And that even before today begins when chances are we’ll be shown or offered something new that we didn’t know anything about just yesterday.

This world continues to come up with endless ways to make endless things for nearly as many reasons. We are told all the time about all these things that we need in our lives because they’ll make our lives easier, they’ll make our houses cleaner, they’ll make our cars faster, they’ll help us stop getting fatter and finally then feel good about ourselves whenever we look in the mirror as we’ve become so vain that we can look at our reflection and only care about the image looking back and not the effort or discipline or determination that the soul housed inside said image sought to undergo in order to finally know what it’s like to be better.

No, we just want to look better, to live better, to experience every bit of every better that this world claims to offer.

And we don’t care if it comes to us in pills or 14 easy payments.

We just want it.

Because we think we need it. Because we’ve learned so well, become so very conditioned to think always that we’re always missing something that we never reject anything. Whenever anyone offers us anything our now instinctual response is “yes please, in fact give me two!”

Why?

Because we know that two is better than one, a lesson that even the Bible teaches us. Problem is that said lesson as left us in Scripture is referring to companionship and the necessity making sure our friends are the good, honest, upstanding and reliable type so that whenever does this life get hard and we start to lose sleep at night, we’ll have someone to call and talk to who is willing and actually wants to help us get through whatever it is that we’re going through.

Issue now though it that all our friends show up to our door in brown boxes with smiley faces printed on them.

And they get here so fast that I think I just heard someone’s doorbell ring as the delivery driver just delivered them something that they’ve not even ordered yet.

Because he knows they will.

Because we always do.

I say this as guilty as anyone else as right now I know that I have probably 20-30 things saved in my amazon cart just waiting for me to pull the trigger whenever the price drops or to finally remove them whenever the wanting stops.

But it never does. Because we’ve again become all but perfectly conditioned unto this endless consumerism in which there’s always something else that we need. We’ve in fact so mixed up the worry of want with the necessity of need that we actually think we need the ability to put screen doors in the bottom of boats for a fun day spent on the water.

We don’t.

In fact, we don’t even need to spend time on the water. Now I know that a whole bunch of people enjoy doing so, and no, there’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying things. In fact Scripture tells us that “a person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.” As, “this too, I see, is from the hand of God.”

Written by the same one who later went on to go even further in that “it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot. Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil—this is a gift of God. They seldom reflect on the days of their life, because God keeps them occupied with gladness of heart.”

We should be thankful for all the blessings that God gives us, including the ability to enjoy them.

But I think that’s where we’ve so clearly lost the plot. It’s that we don’t enjoy anything anymore. As we just discussed yesterday, we don’t even seem to have the ability to appreciate anything anymore. We in fact take everything so for granted that it’s to the point in which manufacturers are actually just making stuff that can’t be fixed as they know that we’d all rather just buy a new one than endure the process of taking care of whatever we have already.

Everything is disposable anymore. Just as soon as something begins to fail to please or impress us, we toss it out. We move on. We get something new from our ever-growing list of things we want.

All because we all believe that all of life is found only in “yes”.

Want to try this? Yes. Want to have this? Yes. Want to go there? Yes. Want to feel a rush? Yes. Want to look better? Yes. Want to feel better? Yes. Want to look and feel better far quicker than even actual science or nature can offer? Yes. Want to get high? Yes. Want to feel alive? Yes. Want to jump off a bridge? Yes. Want to call Christ’s bluff and live your life seeking for life in the substance of stuff that He told us life itself does not exist within?

Yes.

Yes we do because, well, that’s pretty much all we know now to do. To just always seek for something else. To always wonder about something more. To spend hours spent locked inside a store that has no windows reminding us that there’s a life outside that doesn’t ask us to spend money to buy it in bulk nor any clocks to remind us that we’re now late for work because we’ve now spent 78 hours in a walmart wandering the aisles and filling our carts with all the things that have somehow found the ability to fill our hearts.

Our every hope has anymore a price tag, and hopefully a coupon as, well, even a dollar saved on a jug of laundry detergent is a dollar we can spend on another frozen pizza!

Friends, we exist in cardboard and on billboards and through story boards used in movie sets that show us scenes of all these things that we’ll never experience because our entire existence is entirely too consumed with our thinking we’re here only to consume everything here that even going on dates or taking our kids to the lake is considered something of a burden to some.

We’d rather spend that time on our phones scrolling through 30-second videos of other people doing them or inventing ways to invent our dates so that they never say anything we don’t want them to.

Even then coming upon a brand new version of digital heartbreak found whenever the platform issues an update and our “significant other” is all of the sudden rendered lost forever because the system through which we’d made them didn’t take into account our feelings.

Indeed, despite our having learned to worry so much about our feelings, our emotions, our preferences and opinions, we’ve still managed to invent all this technology that cannot and thus will not take any of it into account.

Which, while it sucks for a moment we ourselves know it’ll be okay because, well, we’re used to looking for something else anyway and so we know well how to move on toward the next ideal.

All of them offered to us knowing that from us they’ll hear only “yes”.

Yes we think we need the new iphone. Yes we need a 20th pair of shoes. Yes a new handbag would be nice. Yes we wouldn’t mind a car with better gas mileage. Yes the house could be a little bigger. Yes the closet would be easier to rummage through with a pocket light we duct taped to the wall. Yes we could go ahead and at least discuss the idea of renting a storage unit to give us some more room to house all of our stuff because we can’t afford a bigger house but also can’t afford to get rid of everything because we just know that there’s gonna come a day when we need that bag of zip-ties and that dress might come back into fashion and we, by then, might be able to actually fit into it again.

We’ve come up with so many excuses to excuse our endless agreement to thinking that we need all of this stuff that we don’t have any idea what it is to reject anything. We don’t understand what refusal is. We haven’t the foggiest idea as to what it’s actually like to deny ourselves.

Why should we?

The world always manages to have exactly what we’ve come to think we need if we’re to live the best lives that we can!

Does it not strike anyone else as even a little bit odd that this world sells us both this idea of our living here our best life at the very same time as the very same world sells us all of this junk that it says we just have to have if we’re ever to have even anything of a better life?

Friends, we’ve been had.

We’ve all fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Literally, I mean this one comes right from Genesis. And it’s this idea that there’s something we’re missing. That we’ve been denied something. That someone is holding out on us, and thus holding us back from whatever they’re keeping from us. The problem is that no longer is the promise that we too shall be as gods but that it’s that we too shall be as Greg and, well, Greg has a nice house and a cool car and an impressive title at work and so he must have it all figured out better than we do as he seems to have so much that we don’t.

Yes, we’ve traded the call to keep up with Jesus for trying endlessly to keep up with the Joneses and, honestly, we don’t really know either of them.

And that’s because the Joneses are everyone and Jesus is still considered a nobody that anybody is in any way interested in thinking about, let alone living like.

Why?

Because Christ came to this world to live a version of life that denied the flesh up to the point of embracing its death. Yes, Jesus came to show us how to say “no” to all manner and measure of immorality and immodesty and dishonesty and greed and lust and gluttony. He lived here a perfect life, a sinless life. He lived an “upright and godly” life in this world.

Something we’ve all of the rest of us utterly failed to even pretend we’ve ever cared to even try!

Why?

Because rather than denying ourselves “all the kingdoms of the world” we’ve instead taken the devil up on that offer. We’ve sought here everything that here has to offer. We’ve chosen to spend our lives saying always “yes” to everything that anyone even pretends to suggest we’ll like. We know nothing of “no” as, to us, saying no is the surest way to miss out on something that we probably would have enjoyed or found that we liked having around.

All because we’ve all become basically certain that this world houses and holds all that there is to know about all that a life can be. And we’ve all then become completely convinced that all that life can be is all this world has.

And when the goal is always to have more, self-control becomes a hindrance all but immediately. For there is no control in wanting more. There is nothing upright about spending our lives bowing before the alter of apple and google and amazon. There is nothing godly about giving ourselves so fully to wanting always something else as such lust and cravings know nothing of contentment.

And even God got to day seven and said that it was enough.

We don’t know enough. We have no idea what enough is. Enough, to us, it’s a finish line only ever found by those freaks and failures who fail to find that there’re always still plenty more to have and hold.

Enough is for losers who agree to stop paying so much attention to the inundation of invention and innuendo which flows daily through our window via Bluetooth and 5g allowing us endless connectivity to the tv’s and laptop screens that allow us to spend as much time and effort and money and interest seeking for anything and everything this world has to offer.

And I’ve seen a whole bunch of things that shouldn’t be offered so easily.

But we’ll go into that in another post perhaps.

But even the point of that point is that I’ve come to find that within my life I’ve come to regret more the things that I’ve said yes to than those I refused. I regret all those years spent looking at pornography, saying yes to lust asking me to. I regret going along with “friends” doing things that I wish I could go back and undo, saying yes to their expecting me to. I regret going to college and spending so much money on a degree that’s proven utterly worthless, all because the world told me I needed to.

I regret listening to this world tell me what I needed in order to live the life they wanted me to.

I wish with all my heart that I’d have said no to many things.

I just didn’t know how to as I thought that life was only lived in saying yes.

It isn’t.

Rather life is only to be found, and that later on, should we embrace His help in our learning to reject and refuse all the sin that this world sells as things we need and fun things to do.

And friends, that’s simply because we cannot stand for something so long as we spend our lives crawling around on this ground seeking always for something more here to want, to have, to allow our hope to believe we need.

We need nothing from this world, and honestly, this world should then get next to nothing from us. We are here to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, to do so being thankful for and in fact enjoying all the amazing gifts that God continues to send, and to share the Good News of the greatest gift ever given with all the rest of all God’s children so as to hopefully turn some of them from the darkness of discontentment toward the Light who led the way toward all that life was at first intended.

And way back in that Garden it wasn’t anything like everything it’s become.

But it’s all become what it so clearly has because we’ve all become so convinced that it’s always best to just say yes as doing so always means more.

Friends, we’ve forgotten that less is more in what are lives far from upright and godly and thus lives that know nothing of self-control.

He’s willing to help us learn. And one day He’s going to insist we do when we’re finally forced to leave all we’ve had and known in and of this life.

Shall we learn this one the easy way or the hard way?

Guess that depends upon how much we practice before said day.

Indeed, let us learn to say “no” now so that we don’t risk our hearing Him say it later whenever we’re found asking if we can come in and be forever with Him.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold