Day 4212 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Hebrews 13:5 NIV

Less isn’t more

It’s actually everything. And that’s because it gives us the ability to see everything that would elsewise be missed were we too busy being impressed with only some part or portion of whatever is. It’s the opportunity to stop focusing on trying to see something specific or find something the same and rather just embrace this journey spent through both time and strain. It’s a heart willing to let go and look beyond and live for more. It’s the mind’s audacity to take stock of everything the eye can see and heart can crave and stand there and say, “No! No, there must be more to all of this than all of this.”

Because if all there is is all there is then nothing much matters.

For if in this life we can find our treasures, feel our pleasures, seek out both fame and fortune and, having successfully found them, make friends and have fun with them and because of them, then this world would then be our goal. Because here would have and hold all that we might need to make a life into whatever a life is meant to be. But you see, this is where you start to lose me because, well, what do we know of what a life’s supposed to be?

Even among all of us the reality is that we’ve all lived but one each and that spent learning and losing as we go.

Surely there’s more to life than having to learn how to live (mostly through mistakes being made) and losing even plenty of what we love along the way through the process that does bring pain and does mean rain and does ask strain as we do train through what every day still seems to remain. For the simple fact is that this world, rather than our goal, our home, our hope, it’s a crucible. It’s a furnace filled with all that asks our fealty. It’s a gauntlet of things given us to want, to prize, to prioritize.

And it’s all given unto a people who know only to live through their eyes.

Indeed, they say that the eyes are the widow to the soul, but so too are our eyes our windows to the world and thus the world has direct access to our souls and, well, as we’ve all found, yeah, everyone has a price. And that’s because everyone seeks a prize. Everyone has this thing (or many of them) that they yearn for, burn for, long for, look for within this world that’s long been all we could ever imagine we could need it to be or have to offer.

There is in truth just about everything you could ever need to make a life here. And yeah, that is exactly what it seems as if the vast majority are busy doing every day. They’re making a life. They’re making a living. They’re making ends meet both together and that with hopefully whatever they’ve hoped to catch within the dragnet that is desire. We’re all just down here casting our nets upon a world supposedly filled with all that might fulfill our needs, sitting down daily to pull in closer whatever it might be that we’ve finally caught.

But the sad reality is that we’re the ones who’ve been caught.

We’re the ones scooped up in the net. We’re the ones in over our heads thanks to all of these stacks of stuff and stories piled and piling up around us told us from those who, yes, look like us but who, no, don’t live like us. And it’s this ongoing comparison met between our haves and their have nots and our have nots and all they have that’s causes this life to go so bad. We constantly look upon the lives of others seeking to glean from their existence some semblance of what we might try or try to buy in order to have what, to us, seems a better time.

And we’ve played this life this way for so long now that all we know to do is to continue to pick and choose what we want from amongst all we don’t.

Indeed, rather than living a life for a belief we’ve opted instead to live this life as if a buffet.

And we’ve each grown fed and that until we’ve grown fat upon the many fallen desires of a mankind still falling for the same lies that have always been told.

Truly, the very first lie ever told to man was that there was more for us to see that would result in more for us to be. Yep, the devil enticed Eve to take that fruit from that tree (knowing the downfall it would begin that would play perfectly into his hand as is played seeking still only to steal, kill and destroy) by telling her that should she eat of said fruit that she too would be as if a god. That she would see more, know more, thus obviously become more.

And well, what sounds better to us even still today than more?

We seem pretty sure that more of just about anything is always a good thing. And that’s because we’re a people of quantity. We seek always to see around us an ever-swelling number of things as things, to us, they mean success. They bring satisfaction. They offer even meaning!

Yes, our things have become, to us, our purpose for being here and thus our reason for being!

We exist to seek more stuff.

And so long as we continue to find more stuff, have more stuff, then, at least to us, we’re doing just fine.

But friends, one day we’re all going to look up from all our looking for and forward to the things of this world to find that, as 3 Doors Down perhaps said it best, “My friend, this life we live, it's not what we have. It's what we believe in.”

Problem then becomes that we all clearly seem impressively able to believe in the theory that the devil’s still selling at what seems, for now at least, to be rock bottom prices. And yet this is only because here we don’t really need a soul. Here we don’t really need morals or values. In fact, the sad reality is that around here we do far better and feel far better and find far more whenever we don’t let our souls or their morals or values get in our way of having that one more thing that we can’t imagine life without.

Clearly then forgetting the wisdom offered us in yesterday’s verse:

“Life does not consist inside an abundance of possessions.”

Instead we seem to have become quite certain of the opposite as within this life we spend our every waking moment seeking for something else that we can possess that we can thus add to our again ever-swelling piles of possessions. Piles we love showing off to those who live now like us. And that’s because this is what’s become of all of us. Again, life as we know to live it has become about nothing more than making sure that we look both pleasing and impressive to those we know are always comparing themselves to us.

This is why this world loves social media so much!

It’s this endless stream of things to see that could, if used properly, help us too to find our way to what is that life that has a growing number of friends and followers following along looking unto us to be the ones to tell them how to live their best life.

We’ve become a people so easily influenced that being an influencer is now something that’s literally considered a career!

And it’s one that kids these days want to do, want to be more than anything!!

Yeah, forget being a doctor or a princess or an astronaut, no, kids want to be famous on social media, probably for doing stupid stuff like eating laundry soap.

And yet this is the same world that we ourselves look to, listen to, learn from.

Are we ashamed?

Nope. Instead we seem rather amazed. And why? Look at all the things! Look at everything this world continues coming up with that we’re then offered to have should we have the means by which to afford it. Means we can secure by our too doing something stupid that causes us to go viral. Indeed, being an influencer demands that you have or say or do whatever it may be that will get the attention coming your way, things so many continue agreeing to do so that so too might the money from clicks and commercials start rolling in.

Truly, we’re all vastly lost within a world of such excess that we can’t even seem to see it anymore. And that’s probably for nothing more than our ability to focus. Now granted, thanks to such things as short-form video content basically taking over our lives via rewriting our minds to lose their ability to pay attention to anything that isn’t flashing and funny, that ability to focus is also dwindling rapidly! But thankfully the devil clearly knows what he’s doing as, well, it’s working!

Indeed, even still today the same of us can be said as Jesus said upon our cross:

“They know not what they do.”

All because all we do is only ever done for something. We talk about that sad reality all the time in which we’ll only ever do anything so long as there’s something in it for us. And what makes it really easy is that anymore we don’t even care what. We just want to walk away from anything and everything with some new something that we can show off thanks to our having done whatever it was that we did in order to it get.

All because we still don’t get it.

Still we’re missing the message.

Still we’re overlooking the almost violent simplicity that all of life here was always supposed to be. I mean God literally put man in a Garden in which there was everything freely available that said man might need to be sustained, and that for all of time. That’s something else that I mention all the time! That the very God who created life wouldn’t have initially done so with the intention of ending it. No, God created life.

Man created the need for death thanks to our having all of us done so very much that’s only ever turned our praise and appreciation, our very devotion away from He who gave us this life.

Just makes sense, doesn’t it?

That those who continue to misuse their existence would someday be found as unworthy to continue having it?

And indeed, that’s now the promise, isn’t it? That all will die? And why? Well, it’s because what we’ve told Him is the exact opposite of what He’s told us. For He told us that He would never leave us, never forsake us. But we, well, we’ve left Him. We’ve forsaken Him. We’ve forgotten Him! Just last night I read that part in the end of Hosea that says that, “When I fed them, they were satisfied; when they were satisfied, they became proud; then they forgot me.” Hosea 13:6

Again, in Romans 1:25 we can read that “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” Thus convicting us of having chosen to worship the created rather than the Creator. Charging us with the senselessness of finding more hope, more trust, more value and worth and meaning in that which our hands and hearts have made and held than we have in He who made our hands and hearts.

And, well, it just doesn’t get any dumber than that.

Well, other than the fact that we’ve all clearly never seen it like that. No, again we look at the sum of all the stuff won or wanted under the sun and see more than plenty that we want, believe we need, even eventually become convinced that we just can’t live without.

Up to and including the point in which we only pray whenever we want for God to give us something or to help ensure that something goes our way.

Basically seeming to say that, to us at least, our wants are more important than His will, at least that is at least and until His will agrees to helping us do this all our way.

But friends, that was never the deal. No, the deal was that He would never leave us nor forsake us so long as we followed Him, remained faithful to Him. The deal wasn’t that He would follow us. It wasn’t that He would prove faithful to us even when we’ve proven faithless toward Him. It wasn’t that He would give us all the kingdoms of this earth and all the bounty and success and fame and popularity to be offered or proven within them.

In fact, that was the devil’s bargain that he offered to Jesus.

And again, as I said the other day, the difference between Christ and us is that He said no thanks.

We on the other hand have given our lives to wanting all this world has to give, so much so that we’ve all arrived at that mind that seems to know next to nothing of gratitude. And that’s simply because greed can’t understand what it is to be grateful. Instead greed focuses always on all the more that it always wants, at best appreciating something for a moment before it’s moved on to the next desire on the list.

But you see, that’s the problem! It’s that our lives have come to become lived for lists of things we like, things we love, things for which we lust thanks to our having chosen to place in them a trust that trusts that they can do something for us.

What?

What can the things that we can hold truly hold for us? I literally just prayed about this last night as I’ve too come to have a fairly large number of things around me, my walls offering validity to said testimony. But the difference between having things and getting lost in idolatry is that I don’t expect the things I have to do anything for me. In fact, a while back I told God plainly that I would literally carry it all into my back yard and set it all on fire if He so asked me.

Things mean nothing to me.

Why?

Because the things of this world can’t do anything for me.

But God can. And, well, in Christ He did. In fact, in Christ God did for us everything that we could all of us ever need! In Jesus God has set us free and offered us a kind of forgiveness that is meant to change things! It’s meant to change us!!

How?

By helping us come to see that anything that even acts like it wants to take our time, our attention, our devotion, our praise or appreciation away from Him is nothing but a liar seeking to steal our life. And why is that? Because He is life. And He is life because He gave His that we might at first see what we’ve done to ours and, having seen that horror show, turn and rid ourselves of all that cost Him such suffering.

Yes, that scene which played out on Calvary was endured to help all of us come to see the lengths to which He would go in order to stay true to His Word. He literally came in human flesh, taking on human sin, all to atone for our sins with His death!

A death He willingly took, though entirely innocent, to prove once and for all that He would indeed never forsake us.

And yet we still so easily forget Him. We still so easily give away our praise to other things that aren’t Him. Still we allow ourselves to remain always entangled, ensnared with and by the love of money and all that money can buy.

Why?

Because all of that stuff matters down here.

But you know what money can’t buy?

His forgiveness.

Indeed, He is not to be impressed with how much stuff we have. We’re not going to please Him should we show up to Heaven leading a convoy of U-Haul’s. He’s not going to determine if we’re worthy of entering everlasting life based upon how many storage units we managed to fill while we were here.

No, rather He’s told us plain that He will judge us based on whether or not He sees Christ in us.

But friends, how can He when we’ve in us so much other stuff?

This is why He calls us here to let go our love of money and thus too all that it can buy. It’s because money doesn’t matter to Him. What we have doesn’t matter to Him. What matters to Him is that we come to understand that we are His and that we need nothing else than to live as if we are.

Because, well, as we again last saw in the Garden, life was always meant for us to just be His, a people who exist as nothing but thankful for all that He is and all that He gives.

Problem is that we’ve all lost that simplicity to a life lived seeking always more.

One day we’re all going to find out that more isn’t more and that nor is less then less. No, we’re all going to be helped to see that less of this world is more of life eternally.

It’s just that eternity will probably go far better should we be found helping Him help us via the doing as He called us to and stop giving so much time and meaning to so much stuff and rather spend our lives emptying the same of anything and everything that may prove to get in the way of our leaving this place for that where our every hope should be.

After all, if we can have hope here, then what does Heaven have?

Well, it has a God who told us that He won’t leave us, forsake us, forget us, leave us behind. And, well, that just sounds far more promising, far more hopeful, far more meaningful and valuable than anything I’ve managed to find around here!

What if we stopped looking for more and simply embraced the fact that outside of Him we needed nothing else?

Can you imagine how much easier these lives would be if we didn’t waste them wanting things that we could do without?

Indeed, we might just find that wanting less gave us more of that ability to see all He’s already given and all the more He continues to give. Don’t know about you but I don’t want to miss out on seeing, feeling any more of all that He’s doing.

For the cross proves that the things He does accomplish far more and mean immeasurably more than anything we ever could. For all our deeds win only rewards found on this side of forever.

His death became the bridge that leads us all unto life unending.

Problem is that the only way to cross it is to be content with what we have and spend our lives following He who is the Way.

Hard to do when we keep trying to do more, have more, carry more.

More isn’t the point my friends.

Jesus is.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold