Day 4218 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Timothy 6:19 NIV

Get a life

Don’t worry, it’s actually remarkably easy to do! For while I know it sounds both confusing, degrading, a little bit childish and a whole lot of rude, the fact is that it’s actually the pursuit that we’ve all been called to. And that’s simply because He who created us at first created us for basically everything better than everything we’ve chosen instead to become and then He actually chose to come to become among us so as to, having put both on us and up with us, save us by doing with His life what none of us had done with ours.

And that’s honor God through the violent upholding of His will as if it were all that ever mattered.

No, the tragic reality of our reality is that our humanity has really neglected to even simply acknowledge Him. And we’ve in truth done this in every possible way that we could imagine to. We’ve blatantly gone willfully against His Word and will. We’ve brazenly rejected His offering to lead us for the mere repayment of our loving Him for loving us so very much as still He does. We’ve fought with those He sent and equipped to lead us back to our senses and that away from ourselves. We’ve even killed both many of those who had tried to help, all of which culminated in our having killed the One who came to die for us.

Indeed, there’s an ego in us that, were we to actually believe that Jesus did die upon that tree, would still believe that we had a hand in ensuring He did. After all, we were the ones who did the things that caused His demise. And yet so too were we the ones who would have gone to the leaders of the time and insisted the entire idea remain firmly in mind. Yep, we’d have all been among that crowd that back then gathered around to cheer on this stranger losing His life thanks to His audacity to so try to interfere with yours and mine.

And why?

Well, He did it because He loves us entirely too much to let us go on blindly into a life remained inside the shallows of disbelief and denial as He knows the Father will punish most severely those who seriously continue to actively choose to continuously so do. That and He again created us at first to be His and, well, thankfully He’s not nearly as quick as we’ve all proven to be to give up on those like you and me who, though outwardly are indeed tragically wasting away, and in many ways inwardly too, He still sees what we can come to become through the painstaking process of repentance unto salvation.

Painstaking for everyone involved because, again, Jesus literally embraced crucifixion on our behalf and painful also for all of us because, well, in order to receive this gift that He literally died to give we too have to die too.

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” Matthew 16:25

Why?

“The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.” Romans 8:7

And, well, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.” Luke 6:43

And this is what will prove a very big issue because, well, “seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he (Jesus) went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’” Mark 11:13-14

Thus cursing a tree to never again fulfill the purpose for which it was created, thus removing from it its very reason for living, thus all but ending its life.

And, the simple reality is that we’re all going to be judged one day according to the fruit we bear whilst we live here in what is a world in which, sure, we are technically alive and thus indeed living a life, but sadly the life we’re living is more often than not focused only on ourselves and our flesh which leaves us bearing fruit which leads unto death because, again, the mind governed by (focused on) the flesh is hostile to God. And, well, our continued refusal to submit to Him means then that we’re bearing fruit which will lead to death as He has absolutely no need to put up with our senseless rebellions forever.

Rather He has determined a day upon which everything will be forever complete. It’s a day when all of us, both those who’ve already gone before us and those we’ll leave behind us and those who will leave this world after us, we will all be led before the judgement seat of Christ whereupon we’ll all receive the just due for our lives determined in accordance with how we lived them and just how much of Him is seen in us by then.

Yes, God is going to determine our eternity based entirely upon whether He sees any of Christ in us as, well, He sent Jesus to die for us so as to become for us the Holy Spirit whom He’s since sent back in order to be with us and within us and there lead us and guide us unto both a remembrance of all He said and did and also then unto lives in which we share the same as such has became unto us our very reason for being here still.

Or at least I would hope it will.

Why?

Because He is the Life. And thus until He we find, we’ve found not life. And yeah, I can see where this can again be rather confusing as we are in fact here doing what all of us fairly consider living as, again, we are alive and thus living a life. Only problem is that thanks to any sin that still we walk within, we’re thus only losing a life because the wages of sin have never changed.

Rather the wages of sin is death and, though He died to atone for our sins and make us all new and clean again, He can only take away those sins that we’re able and willing to confess unto Him.

It’s kind of like that whole ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ idea.

He can’t fix what we can’t/won’t admit is broken. And, well, looking around at the current state of the world and the depressingly impressive lack of change being seen and rather only a furthering decay being shown, it’s pretty clear that we’re not yet there to where we can admit we’re broke. For everyone, or most everyone, just continues along as if nothing’s all that wrong about all that much of anything that’s being done under the sun, under which there oddly enough remains nothing new.

Which is an obvious testimony to the trouble we’re in because, well, He came explicitly to make all things new and thus if we’ve not been made new unto changes being made, then it’s pretty clear that His work has either failed us or we’ve failed it.

Only problem is that He’s proven that He would literally die before He failed the task for which the Father sent Him.

And, well, we haven’t.

No, we’ve on the other hand proven perfectly that we’d rather fail, forsake, literally forget the very existence of the Father well before we’d ever come upon any willingness to do much if anything of all He calls us to. Why? Because He calls us to die. Maybe not physically, at least not yet, but literally nonetheless. Indeed, this is the request we see inside His asking that we take up our crosses daily and follow Him, counting as if already loss upon them everything that He will open our eyes and break then our hearts having come to see as having always been only sin.

Yes, He will break us.

But He will never forsake us.

And the issue is that we get this entirely confused as we’ve become entirely too used to this idea that He is nothing but good and kind and loving and merciful. And granted, He is and so our having gotten used to that idea is reasonable. Problem is that that’s not all that He is for He is also jealous and angry and literally filled with hate for the way in which we’ve all come to live our lives against Him.

Sure, I too know the amazing hope found in such as Jeremiah 29:11!

But I also know that the vast majority of the rest of Scripture’s entirety talks far more often about how angry He is with us because of our limitless sinfulness.

The whole book, all 66 books which make it, it’s filled with stories and statements saying clearly that He is going to unleash His wrath upon this world. And that in what will soon prove a way that leaves all the times He’s done so before all but forgotten. And that because within all the times before there was still a world left upon which those who were left could find that He’d chosen to give them a second chance to live their lives doing something better with them this time.

This next time there won’t be a next time.

For He’s promised that this world is passing away and that because no matter what He does nor how much He loves, wide remains the road leading to eternal damnation and there remain entirely many who travel boldly, boastfully upon it.

Indeed, this world continues to do as we all have done and throw their sins in His face all but daring Him to do something about it.

And we’ve all done this because, as He is so patient, He hasn’t yet.

Yet being the obvious point.

Because He will. Seriously my friends, though He may seem to some slow in keeping such promises as, yeah, within this world some of us still find so many wrongs waiting to be made right, His slowness is actually patience as He wants for none to perish but all to come unto repentance as there exists only life, the only life, in our turning from our sins and spending our days following the Son.

And He’s giving every single one of us every possible opportunity to do just that. To turn from our sinful ways, repent of our foolish days, and find in Christ what is that new approach to life that He literally died for us to find.

Issue is that His new approach is to die daily upon crosses taken up and our every single sinfulness and selfishness nailed upon them.

And, well, we’re not about it. And that because, while we may know about it, we just can’t seem to make sense out of it. And that’s because our minds in many ways still cannot surrender to His will. We’ve all of us spent so much of our lives fighting against Him that we’re bound to struggle mightily in the call to at first submit unto Him and then to spend the rest of our days walking so clearly in His ways that the pagans amongst whom we once tried so hard to belong only become testimonies for us that they’ve indeed seen our good deeds and thus had no reason to not at least wonder why we’d changed so much.

Yes, His entire reason for dying that way was to inspire us to change so much that some of us have literally had to have our names changed because we’d became, or hopefully become, so very different that we indeed were not the same person we used to be.

This is the entire point, purpose, promise of that tree!

It was and is to set us free from the lifeless lives we’ve lived so wonderfully lost in sin so that, in Him, we might live for what is the life.

The life that is as He designed it to be. The life that lives forever as life itself knows nothing of death for, well, why would it? Life has no need of death as death is the loss of life. Why then would He who created life insist upon His creation being lost?

That’s entirely counterproductive.

No, the only reason that death is now such the promise in life is because we’ve all of us managed only to find so very many ways to reject His will and His Word and His Way that He’s determined that He wouldn’t put up with us forever. Rather, way back in the very beginning of the entire book that is the Bible, He decided that man’s years would never again extend beyond 120.

That’s it.

We’ve, at best, 120 years upon this earth in which to live what is, again, yeah, a life.

But friends, even if we manage to remain healthy enough and safe enough and smart enough to make it to 120 years old, we still gonna die!!

What then does that say of the life that we are living here? It ought to say that this isn’t the only life there is as, again, He who created life would have only been undermining His own creation by insisting that said life be thus so lost. No, that’s again why Christ came and paid our cost upon our cross! It was to help us see that what we’d come to live was not a life and that rather He was the Life. That He is the Life. That without Him, both here and now and later and forever, we will not know life.

All because, well, look at all we’ve done in life, to life.

Friends, we’ve destroyed everything.

And all He’s still trying to do is pick us up from the ashes into which we’ve sank thanks to all the fires we’ve set so that He can set us again on the narrow path that leads unto life.

And yet still the vast majority of people, like that fig tree, live producing at best no fruit and at worst bad fruit. Is that being judgy? Yeah. But friends, if we don’t judge the fruit then how are we to ever determine what’s best to do and what all not to?

We are called to judge the things we see, hear, feel even. And, well, most things in this world look bad, sound worse and hurt so much that it’s become daily grievous just going into town to try and buy groceries!

Because the vast majority are still living the old way. They’re still doing the same things that they’ve always done or those that they see another do. We are in every way sheep being led unto slaughter, oddly lost and able to offer laughter as we go. We think it’s all a joke because, again, if He is there He hasn’t done anything yet.

Taking then His patience as weakness and thus the promise of His wrath as pointless.

Thus meaning we’ve taken nothing for us to better us from the cross and torment He took for us.

Problem is that that debt of that death will be paid because of the way that we’ve lived our lives thus far. Only question is will it be His having paid it or will we still owe it?

Friends, we’re called to follow Jesus thus spending our lives doing with them as much of what He did with His as we can while we can. And He has indeed shown us and told us and taught us what is good, what to do, what all not to. He’s literally offered us all the Holy Spirit which will invade our hearts and from there help us hear and see and feel all from which we should turn, run, flee.

But seeing as how that’s not the life we’ve lived, it will for many continue to be the life they reject. But again, rejecting He who is the Life is thus rejecting the life.

And while we may think that we’re here living a life as down here so many continue to do so seeking after their best version thereof, those same will have had here their reward for what is, again, at best 120 years.

Is that all the life you want?

Sure, 120 years would be an incredibly long life! It would probably for us find us a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. And yeah, that would mean that we’d then be all but immortalized unto any who would ever happen to find a curiosity as to who the oldest person to ever live was.

But friends, even the hope of being so unique or special or important or powerful while we’re here may mean that we could be immortalized when we leave, is it not better to be made immortal before we do? For in truth our greatest problem is now our own mortality. And that’s because, while we all will die, most will do so thinking they’re living their only life. And that’s why so many don’t want to think about it, talk about it, be told about it.

That’s a big part of why they insisted Jesus be killed.

But killing Him didn’t change the fact that they all died and that we’ll all do the same.

Every life here will end.

Question is will we find life waiting to be lived when we have or will we have truly lived the best of all the life we will live?

The point is that eternity comes for everyone but for the majority it brings not life but rather unending death in a place filled of such internal torment that external torment (the fires and tears and gnashing of teeth around them) won’t be noticed. Hell will be so miserable that death will become a desire.

Why live this life to find that fate?

Especially considering that His salvation from it is free?

Look, I know it’s not easy for us to understand all of this, hardest of all right at first. But friends, if we can’t look at our lives and the world in which and of which we’ve lived them and see anything that needs work, change, mercy and forgiveness, then there’s a dwindling hope for us. Why? Because we’re all of us closer today to leaving this place than we were even yesterday. We are running out of time.

And yet many still live as if they don’t care what they find nor where they go once they’ve gone.

And if we spend our lives not caring, not trying, not even pretending that we know of Jesus and wish to even wonder what it might be like to be more like Him, then we will be turned away when we do finally meet Him.

Why?

Because He introduced Himself long ago and He did so unto telling us, showing which way to go. And if we won’t do as He did, as He calls us to, then He clearly won’t see any of Him in us and thus no reason to welcome us to spend forever with someone that we clearly didn’t care to come to know.

It’s simple.

And that’s why we need to get a life. It’s because the one we’ve all lived has left us all so confused, lost, able to make everything so utterly complicated that we’ve even come up with all of these religions trying to make sense out of what He literally died to make simple.

Let it be simple!

Lay down your life. Take up your cross. Deny yourself. Love others. Love God. Love the fact that He helps us to know what love is and to feel what love does, to do what loves does. We don’t deserve the chance to experience any of that!

But we do because love is the down payment on life. Thankfully He who is the Life has already paid it in what is a way that we simply never could.

And that gift should inspire us to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and willing to share and able to care and eager to hear only Him say, “Well done good and faithful servant.”

For after all, doesn’t that already sound better than “I never knew you”?

It ought to. Because, well, life isn’t found in rejection. And so it’s time we get a life that finds us finally willing to stop rejecting He who is the Life.

Thankfully He’s also the Way. But friends, it’s a way we have to follow if we’re to find the outcome that He went to make ready for us.

So get a life.

Because He says we can.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold