Day 4224 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

John 15:5 NIV

Powerless

That may perhaps be the very last thing that we will ever think of ourselves as. And that’s because, unto us, we sure seem to have the ability, the capability at least, to do a great many things. And that’s because we have indeed done a great many things. All of us have lived our lives accomplishing, achieving, assuming if nothing else so many things that we’ve all but curated stories, novels of accolades and attributes that, seeing as we seem to have been always the instigators or investigators, sure seem to have come to pass only because of us.

Alas, just because we may have had a part in something coming unto fruition, that never actually meant that we were the ones who planted the fruit.

In truth we’re but the barren fields in which all that’s planted either yields a crop or simply does not.

And I think one day we’re all going to see just how little we did and that when compared to all we could have had we had the humble audacity to see something, seek something outside and thus beyond our wildest ability. Indeed, I am filled with this belief that a day is coming in which He will set to showing all we could have done, should have been, the very life we were in fact created to have lived.

I just wonder how far off I’ve wandered in search of the life I’ve come to live instead.

And how do I know there’s a difference?

Because I know I’ve relied on me too much. I’ve looked to me too much to lead the way. I’ve asked my mind to imagine the best possible outcomes and my hands and feet to either for them reach or toward them run. In fact, what might terrify me worst of all is that I’ve had some fun along the way. That I’ve enjoyed this thing we call a race. That I’ve even allowed my heart to agree to be pleased with the way of life lived in this place in which we all race after only all we want and wish to be.

Yes, my entire life has unraveled into a story told by me as had been told by the person I’ve allowed me to become thanks to our shared estimation that all of life is all on us.

And sure, I think it fair to say that much of it is as, well, we’re the ones who are clearly tasked with living it. We’re the ones who make all of our choices within it. We’re the ones who determine, or at the very least seem to, what all it is that we want to be alongside then hearts willing, able, eager to agree to do whatever it is that another tells us needs to be done for our to have won whatever it is that we’ve wanted for our lives to become.

But there we find the ultimate failure:

These aren’t our lives.

And that’s a fact as simply proven as in that the simple truth is that we didn’t give them unto ourselves. We’re not the reason that we’re here. We didn’t come up with the miracle that is conception but rather that invention, that intention, that all came from God who created the way for it to happen. And He did the same for our parents and their parents and their grandparents. We all have this same truth in common. None of us who are or who’ve been but humans were created of our own volition.

And I say that because we’ve not the will with which to write anything other than words we’ve heard in lives we’ve learned how to live from those who’ve lived and lost their own.

No, everything we do, everything we have, everything are, it’s all only ours on loan.

Indeed, we are a people powerless to do, to be, to see, say or even seem as if anything without His saying we can.

Struggle is that He’s said we could. He said at first that we could live, wanted for us to. Indeed, He created every human being in His own image because He wanted for the joy of sharing who He is with someone, something that, having come from the same, would be then able to be most grateful for all He does. And that worked well for a time.

Until came the lie.

And that lie told us that we could be more. That there was more that we were missing, more we hadn’t seen, more we’d thus never been. And thus was planted within the seed of greed. And as it grew the first of us fell then into lives that knew of the more that God knew we didn’t need to know in order to live. For indeed, we’d have all been able to live just fine lives had we never known of that line between wrong and right. We didn’t need to know that there was a difference between good and evil as knowing such a thing could only create a distance between He who is good and we who He knew would become curious as to what we were missing.

A curiosity that’s since killed far more than cats.

No, it’s in fact now killed all of us. Truly I tell you that we’re all dead. The strangeness in that is that we’re all alive.

The question is why?

Why are we alive? Why are we here? Why do we hear what we do and why then do we listen less than we don’t? What might we hear if we did? What truths of life might await within a pair of ears willing to hear the call of Heaven as rang through a cross?

What all might we find if we could find that we were lost?

You see, that’s the whole point of the Gospel. It’s the glory of God unto salvation of sinners from their sins. And sin is such the thing we’ve all been drowning in because, again, curiosity doesn’t just go after cats. No, in fact curiosity has gotten the better of us all more times than we might imagine. In truth it’s because of curiosity that we’re now of the ability to imagine that we’ve the power to do, to be, to see, say, assume anything that we do.

Because long ago that lie told us we could and, because we could and in fact did, we fell into the belief that we did because we had the ability to.

Problem is that our every ability is a gift from God. And thus our ability to see, to speak, to imagine, to believe, it’s all from Him. Much the same must be said of every other aspect and attribute that been elsewise attributed to us instead.

Nothing of all we do, none of everything we are, all of it has absolutely no reliance upon us being the ones to provide it.

And that’s because, without the breath given us from above by He who designed the lungs to prove of the ability to breathe it, we’re corpses. We’re all truly nothing more than air mixed with dirt and a bit of water blended in to hold it all together.

We’re nothing.

And as nothing we can do nothing.

And as those who can do nothing because we are nothing, we then need someone who’s able to do something if we’re ever to be of the opportunity to be something that does something other than just sit lifelessly lost inside of ourselves assuming ourselves to be the sails by which we’re to be led toward whatever it is that is that life that we’ve lived or hope to ahead.

We’re not.

Because we’re nothing.

And, well, nothing has no idea where to go as nothing is nothing and that can’t be anywhere.

Thus our every confusion comes in the fact that we are here. And that we know we are. And that we’re doing so many things, seeing so many things, learning so many things while we’re here.

All of which seem to add up to a vastly agreed upon ability for our to believe that we are alive in what are lives in which we all have the ability to do, to see, to learn, seek and say all of those things that we both have and are. Indeed, we’ve all been here for a long enough period of time living what we all agree are what sure seem to be lives, lives that we all too agree are then ours, to have come upon the estimation that this is life and that, because we are doing things within it, we must thus have the power, the ability to do the things we’re doing.

We don’t.

Friends, even the simplest act of life that’s in fact so common that we each do it somewhere between 17,000 and 23,000 times every single day, something thus effortless to overlook and there and then take for granted, we can only do it because He said we could.

Indeed, our every single breath is a gift given to us because He believes in what we can still become.

A goal deposited within the Gospel as was given unto a people who’d become so vastly lost thinking they could that they did to Him what none should have done.

We stole the life from the One who gave it to us.

We killed He who created us to live.

Friends, we couldn’t have gotten this more wrong if we could have tried.

Sadly we thought we could and many still do. And that both think and try. And we do the both because, well, such is life. Again, everything we’ve come to do is all only done because we want to or need to or learn to thanks to what are thoughts we think that allow us to think that we’re the ones thinking them.

We’re not.

Problem here is that our thoughts come from but one of two desires:

The enemy’s or the Father’s.

Problem there is that it was the enemy who planted the lie inside our minds that inspired us to consider that we could do better, be better, have more, become more if we would simply do as the Father had asked us not to.

And thus entered in to every man the death that is sin.

And sin is death because it acts in violent opposition to He who created life.

And yet sin has become such the part of our lives that we needed He who is the Christ to come down here in order to die down here so that we could, with our eyes, our minds, come to see what has become of life down here.

A reality seen inside how impressed we still are with ourselves. A fall witnessed in how much we still try to do only whatever it is that we come to want to do. A crash felt inside our feeling as if there’s still something better for us out there somewhere than simply doing as our Father first created us to do and now calls us back to doing on that side of this line that we’ve considered this life that we’ve thought was ours and thus ours to do with as we please.

It’s not.

This life is His and we’re either living it for Him or we’re not.

Problem is that we’re not.

We don’t know how to. And that because it’s entirely too easy to. And as a people who seek only to be pleased and impressed and that with mostly only ourselves, we can’t accept anything that’s easy as for us in that which is easy, safe, simple, there’s no glory. And where there’s not glory there’s nothing to gain. And where’s there’s nothing to gain there’s no opportunity for us to gloat.

And if it can’t help us to gloat then it has for us no hope, no point, no purpose or promise or path then that we should follow.

Much like the one walked by He who came in humility so as to make obvious our hostility.

A hostility also chosen for us because the enemy seeks only to steal and kill and ultimately destroy as many as he can via that same lie that lives inside our every mind still telling us that we can be as gods.

We can’t.

Because, no matter what we do or don’t, none of it is accomplished or not under our own ability.

Because, again, we are all nothing.

And the promise now is that we’ll remain nothing and as nothing continue to accomplish nothing so long as we remain apart from He who created us to be something other than the nothing we’ve become.

That’s the promise we read right here. That apart from He who is the Vine, who elsewhere is referred to as the Life, we can do nothing. After all, again, simple, if He is the Life then if we’re not right with Him but still lost inside lives spent wronging Him, then we’re too apart from life.

And, simple, if sin is death and we’re all sinners then we’re all dead which is about as apart from life as you can get.

Thus we’re not alive but are rather dead in our sins.

His Word says that too.

And the cross proves it true. And, if the cross is true, then our lives are lies. And why? Because if He died then we’ve lived for only all that necessitated that surrender. A surrender we’ve thus never known ourselves.

And if we don’t know, and thus can’t understand what it is to surrender, then we must then still think that we’re winning in what are lives in which we each go on sinning countless times every day.

Yes, we fail Him constantly as we do things apart from Him the same.

Everything we do apart from Him being then nothing as none of it can ever prove to even accidentally accomplish anything because if it’s done against Him then it’s done against life and that which is done against life is only able to accomplish death.

See, it’s simple.

It’s that we’ve all come to live what are lives in which we’ve lived against Him, even if only as passively as simply ignoring Him. Friends, how can we live a life if we live a life ignoring, denying, refusing He who created life?

We can’t.

All we can live by rejecting He who is the Life is death.

Thus, again, we’re all dead.

We’re just allowed to be here until such a time as we finally come to see it or He simply runs out of patience and removes from us the opportunity to turn from and repent of what have come to become lives that we’ve lived doing so much of nothing good, nothing right, nothing true that, again, we’re nothing too.

He gave us these lives for us each to find how little we are.

All so that we could, having come to see our weaknesses, our inabilities, our insufficiencies, finally too learn to see that He is our everything as without Him we can do, we can see, we can be nothing.

Because vines have to be attached to something which gives them life if they’re to be alive.

Again, it’s so stupidly simple that it’s amazing that we live as if it somehow doesn’t make sense.

Friends, we cannot be here on our own nor by ourselves. We all came from somewhere, from something, from someone.

The Bible contends that we all came from Him who, again, created us in His image. And if we go on living outside of that image, outside of that Word, outside then of His will, then we’re not His. Problem then is that He is, again, the Life and the very Creator thereof!

Without Him we’re not alive. And as those who thus aren’t alive, well, we’re again nothing that can only accomplish the same.

How long do we wish to remain nothing in what are lives then that mean nothing?

Personally, having been there and done that and felt that, I’m over it.

I want this life to mean something but the only way for that to ever prove possible is for me to let it be what it was always meant to be:

Just me dangling down here in this world as what is but a branch clinging to the Vine that both gives me life and thus remains the only One to tell me what all I should do with it.

For in truth I’ve no ideas, no abilities, no anything that is my own. Rather all I have, all I am, it’s all from someone else.

Is this life I’m living growing from the Vine or according to the lie?

Either way the power I have to do whatever I do is only there because He gave it to me to do something with. What I do with it depends entirely upon who it is that I look to, lean on, learn from.

Problem is that there’s only One who gives us life. And the only other side is only he who delights in taking it away.

We’ve all been nothing thanks to our having lived looking to, leaning on, learning from he who seeks to lead us away from the Vine. And we’ll remain nothing so long as remain apart from Him.

Thankfully we don’t have to. Struggle is that at this point we don’t know how not to.

Because we’re powerless.

But thankfully only so long as we see ourselves otherwise.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold