Day 4182 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:14 NIV

learns there’s more to life

Than basically the entire sum of everything you’d come to live it for. And yeah, that’s in pretty much every way possible one of the hardest possible lessons for us to learn as, well, most of what we’ve come to learn has been learned in the language of like and dislike. And what defines then the difficulty of this path ever-narrowing toward an eternity promised to do entirely otherwise is that within our lives we’ve all come to find so much we think we like, alongside a rather concrete assurance that we’re pretty sure we’re almost always right, is that our lists of likes as measured against the more we don’t is pretty much set in stone.

Thankfully there’s another set of stones into which at least an alternative theory as to how we should spend our lives does exist for our considering.

It’s called the Ten Commandments and they’re a pair of stone tablets that a man named Moses carried up this mountain, both because God called Him to and, well, He was pretty much the only one among all those there who, though afraid to face the Living God, was more of afraid of not as, well, while we might not fair too fairly well when found face-to-face with the One who we know we’ve wronged, doing even more wrong by refusing to do as He’s called us to is something of a doubling down upon our dumb.

In other words it’s a catch-22 in which nothing you might choose to do makes all that much sense to do.

And that because basically every choice is one with more than plenty of risk involved.

Much like this faith.

On the one hand we can do as we’ve all done and that’s pretty much live our own way doing our own thing and to do so as if we know both what to do and that all we do do is right to do as is an idea won within our having already done plenty of whatever we wanted to only to find within the doing thereof plenty of fun, fame, fortune and, thus far at least, not much consequence. And this is indeed the choice that we see the vast majority of people continuing to make.

Because it will always be easier to continue doing all that you’ve already done and determined is at the very least alright to do if not, as many here seem to consider, the very best thing that they could decide to do.

Indeed, we’re a people of such patterns and repetitions that our lives themselves have become something of these songs in which we sing the same words over and over and over and over, playing endlessly this chorus which is really just us chanting that we know what we’re doing, that, well, we pretty much only keep doing then the same things over and over and over again.

All because we like the music we’ve set our lives to.

Only problem’s that we’re completely out of tune because our lives are utterly out of line because we’ve all become so outside our minds that within our times we continue to find both some way to let God down within our ongoing failure to do the few simple things He calls us to and also more than plenty of apparent reasons as to why we think that’s the best choice to make.

Mainly because I think we all know perfectly well the difference between simple and easy.

And because we really like that which is easy because, well, it’s easy.

But something being simple doesn’t necessarily make it easy.

Such as the concept, which is His call, of surrendering.

It’s an entirely simple idea, surrendering. It’s so simple in fact that I’m pretty confident that everyone alive knows what it means. It’s basically giving up. It’s letting go. It’s laying down. It’s accepting defeat, agreeing to lose, finally coming to terms with the fact that we can’t win, can’t find, can’t figure out whatever it is that we’ve been actively trying to win, to find, to figure out.

In short it’s really just us quitting what is an effort, idea, intention that’s really only getting us nowhere and nothing of everywhere and everything we hoped they would help us to have or hold or be or become.

Surrendering is admitting we can’t do something and making our peace with that.

Simple idea.

Problem is that surrendering, especially that kind called for and considered inside this call to follow the Christ, it’s again arguably the hardest thing we could ever do in life.

Why?

Because the surrendering requested of us by God is that sort in which we don’t get a say. We don’t get a voice. We don’t even have a choice. He’s not up there like our parents who used to barter with us by telling us that we could keep a certain number of stuffed animals in our bed while we sleep or just how many candy bars we could devour from our haul on trick-or-treat night. In fact there’s really no give and take with Him at all.

Instead He calls us all to lay down all we’ve known and thus been known to be and to live out the rest of our days doing endlessly the entire opposite of everything we’d learned to do and probably come to like.

Not because He doesn’t want us to be happy in life but simply because He created us to have a life and, well, He knows that what we’ve done with most of ours is only the sum of everything that once cost His Son His own. Yeah, God knows that we, as sinners, have walked a way that’s earned the wage that He has said that all of sin is going to win. And that’s why He boils it all down quite simply for us into what’s pretty much the single best example of ‘my way or the highway’.

(the ‘my’ in this case being His)

And it’s all because He knows that our way is actually the highway that we’ve all been on for so long that we now know nothing else and too that it leads to only everything that He neither wants for us nor then is willing to simply let us continue to careen toward.

For our way is the highway to hell and, though paved with good intentions, turns out intentions don’t really mean that much when you’re ignorant.

And that’s pretty much what usually proves the last straw, the final nail, the jumping off point in which the vast majority of people finally lose all interest and willingness to hear Him out.

It’s because He doesn’t merely hint that we might have been somewhat mistaken a couple of times in what’s been a life that’s gone mostly right. His Word doesn’t stop at suggesting that we might be a little more wrong than we’ve ever thought we’d been right. The cross doesn’t tell this story of our glory being a thing that’s been so worth worrying about and living for and hoping toward as our way of life has really wanted it to be.

Instead the Gospel in its entirety is written upon this premise that we’re, well, idiots.

Granted, the translation of the Bible that I read doesn’t use that word exactly. But honestly, calling us fools, speaking (as here) about our ignorance, spelling out that certain things that we’ve all done are stupid, yeah, it’s all basically getting at the same idea.

And that’s that we’re in fact idiots.

And honestly, this shouldn’t really come as the surprise that it still so often seems to. I mean, after all, I think we all know by now that life isn’t perfect down here. We can all look around and see things that shouldn’t be whatever it is that they’ve become. All of us hear certain things from time to time that just don’t feel right, that we don’t like the sound of. We all are well aware of the many failures and fractures and fragilities of what we can all agree is a fallen humanity.

Question is can we see any such things within our own lives?

And this time it’s not me asking what are usually all these questions that I share within these posts trying to get us thinking about something other than our plans for this weekend and what we hope to have the guts to say to the pretty girl the next time we see her.

No, this is faith asking. This is the cross calling. This is Christ crying out in an agony we cannot fathom that we know not what we’re doing.

Thus ignorant.

Do we get that?

Can we admit that?

Are we yet to the point that we’re humble enough to own that we are, in fact, ignorant?

Because the simple truth is that we can do absolutely nothing about it, and thus never become anything different, unless and until we can, are, do.

Until such time as we can find that our minds are at the point in time within this life in which we can say that we are fools who have done wrong and don’t really know how then to do better, we’ll never be anything other than everything we are.

And maybe that’s okay by you. Maybe you, like most here, are plenty content with the current content of your existence. Again, I think we could all say that. All of us are always seeking for ways to make our lives here more comfortable, more successful, more enjoyable or meaningful or hopeful. All of that makes sense!

But then we look at the cross and see nothing of comfort, nothing of success, nothing whatsoever that anyone would ever actually enjoy.

And yet it’s the single most hopeful and most impossibly meaningful event in the history of man!

Because it shows a Man laying down His life (surrendering) to what is the will of God even though He fully knows that His doing so means that not only will He die but that He’s going to get there through the most gruesome and horrific and brutally torturous way possible.

Crucifixion was designed to basically tear the body apart using its own weight, bleeding someone dry one tiny drop at a time until such a time as the body literally had nothing left of life left to give.

He took all of that, endured all of that for all of us who’d lived our lives always turning our backs to Him.

And as He hung there He actually asked the Father for our forgiveness because He knew that we knew not what we were doing.

That we were ignorant of what was happening. That our minds hadn’t been made yet capable of understanding the scene we see on Calvary. That our hearts were still entirely too hard to grasp the horror we’d been a part of insisting upon another. That our eyes were still utterly blind to the very meaning of life as we continued to live in accord with this lie that has had us all convinced at times that the meaning of life was whatever we alone wanted it to be.

That this life was our gift to do with as we please.

A lie that’s caused us all to seek for only our own pleasure as if the same is our endless treasure that’s always found as easily as our finding something else we want to have or hope to feel or desire to be.

Problem is that God’s already warned us blatantly against all that within His asking us to give all we have to the poor and to endure suffering as a means of learning humility and denying ourselves the many desires we probably still have.

All of which are again really simple ideas.

It’s just that none of them are easy things to do.

Because we don’t know how to. We don’t know how to walk away from everything we’ve come to want. Wanting has become to us the spice of life! Neither do we understand that misery helps us to learn the meaning of humility. We literally have parades and holidays in which we celebrate pride! And nor then have we any idea what it’s like to deny ourselves anything that we’ve clearly come to like and feel as if we’re entirely justified in so enjoying.

We refuse ourselves nothing.

And yet, because of that, we thus know nothing of He who refused Himself the opportunity to go on living as instead He chose to carry His very own cross upon which He knew He’d suffer even though He was innocent and had done absolutely nothing wrong.

Other than telling sinners that they were sinners and needed to repent if they were to have the hope of coming to know both what life is and the best of where all this goes.

Problem remains that still we think that we know better.

A belief thus preventing us from knowing that we don’t.

Which, that’s the main problem with pride. It’s that it convinces us that everything we do in life is so easily and endlessly justified that we never need to worry then about anything we decide to do.

Cross says otherwise.

And yet our way of life is one in which we all continue to show that we simply do not know, not near enough, about all the He did nor why it was done. Because, yeah, it was to earn our forgiveness. It was promise us eternal life. It was to make all of us once again right in the eyes of the God we’ve so vastly learned to wrong.

But it was to accomplish all of that by helping us see that nothing of all we’ve come to be, learned to want, lived to have, none of it can remain what it was. Everything has to change. To the point that we too lay down our lives and take up our crosses and feebly walk behind He who came to lead the way by showing us how.

Simple?

Yes.

Easy?

Not even slightly.

Why?

Because we’re ignorant as to how. We don’t understand it. We can’t figure it out. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to anyone who’s ever walked this world within all the wants and worries that there are here to have. We see all of these awesome looking things and feel all of these amazing feeling ways and we think that the excitement and enjoyment of it all means that we are right in wanting it all and chasing it all and giving our all to all of it every day.

That’s the life we know.

To want. To crave. To lust. That’s how we’ve lived for as long as we’ve been alive!

What then can we know of laying down a life? What can we understand as to removing our hand from things our eyes probably still can’t see are unclean? What sense can it make for us to walk willingly, willfully away from everything that we’ve ever known and know almost everyone is still running for? It’s the perfect opposite of everything we know and understand and feel as if we should do.

That’s why it took such a piercing sight as the crucifixion to open our eyes!

How better to help us see that these lives as we’ve lived them had only left us victims of such an immoral ignorance that we’d literally be happy that the very Son of Glory was sentenced to die in agony? How better to help us realize that our lives had gone so far from right that we stood with those who do wrong and called them friends as we all joined hands and made fun of Him? How else could He turn our hearts than by turning our stomachs?

Haven’t the two become all but the same?

Yeah, Bible says that one too, that our stomachs have become our gods in what are lives in which we live within this endless gluttony for the equally endless sum of everything this world already has to offer and already has plans to produce up ahead.

He calls us to reject all of it in what come to become, in Christ alone, lives in which we’re no longer ignorant to what’s really going on.

He calls us to understand that everything here is a lie, a loss, a lost way of life that has left all of us promised to die.

Question is whether any of us will live once we have.

But friends, the only possible way to answer yes to that is if we refuse to remain ignorant to the Gospel and why He did what He did to make it in to what it is.

And what is it?

The Gospel is the power of God to set captives free from a life lived in slavery to sin and self. It is the mercy of God meeting those who are lost and offering to kindly, slowly, patiently lead them back home. It’s the goodness of God overcoming the badness of man. It’s the love of Christ laying down His life for those who stood below enjoying the sight.

It’s the will of God which came unto us all in order to change our lives.

Have our lives changed?

Do we see now any signs of past ignorance in which we no longer agree to walk? Do the words we say sound different when we talk? Are we trying anything to stop the fall and quit living as fools?

Or do we still know not what we do?

Friends, being ignorant of something simply means we don’t know anything about it. And the simple fact is that we are all ignorant of plenty of things. But the issue comes in our choosing to remain so unlearned in regard to those things that He’s still trying to teach.

Why?

Because He’s simply trying to show us how to become the people He created us to be, people who will one day be welcomed home into life eternally.

If we choose to willfully remain ignorant of that call simply because we don’t like how it comes or what He asks, then all we’ll know of life is the one we’ve lived in the past.

Problem is the future’s coming and nothing and no one can stop it.

Empty grave proves that.

He who left said grave behind asks us to refuse to remain ignorant as to why He did what He did and what it means that we’re to do now.

All because He did it all to help us live better lives as better people.

Many are sadly still ignorant as to everything that better might be.

In truth, we all are.

But the hope is that we’re learning, that we’re growing, that we’re giving up the way of life we’ve lived in exchange for the life the Way now calls us to live.

And sure, as most so clearly are, we can remain ignorant to that call.

But friends, if we don’t come to know Him by the time we come to leave this life, we shouldn’t then be surprised when He says He didn’t know us either. Because this faith is meant to be a relationship and every relationship is a two-way street. He’s already walked His part toward us.

Are we yet learning how to walk our part toward Him? Or are we still ignorant as to the fact that we should?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold