Day 4236 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Matthew 7:23 NIV

Workers of iniquity

For any work that is done without the reason being the Son cannot then equal what has already been done because, well, nothing can match the mercy met in such misery as was met upon our place upon that cross that was the cost that both we owed but that He paid so that we might be then freed to spend our days doing only those things, in fact doing all things unto the glory of He alone who walked that road for what was our redemption and that as was purchased through such pain and suffering that for us to now do anything in word or deed without Him being the purpose, such a doing is worthless.

It’s even worse than worthless for it’s lawless.

It’s wickedness, evil in every form for us to have both found and to continue finding all of these ways to continue thinking that we deserve any say in this story of our salvation. Because, honestly, how can those who’ve done the things from which they needed to be saved thanks to their having even prior been the ones who made the choices to do said things that need salvation, how can they then be the ones who do all of the sudden anything good?

Friends, we don’t know what good is.

Sure, we have our guesses. We’ve all our interpretations, our estimations, most of all are only assumptions. But even these measures of whatever good might be as were decided by you and me, well even this measuring only proves further the failure. Because, again, it just resorts back to us being the ones to determine something, to decide something, to deny then anything and everything else from said decisions and determinations onward as anything else must be wrong.

I feel myself struggling with this reality all the time as within this life I spend nearly every moment of every day studying the very sum of everything I think, see and say looking for what is that better way to live this life. And yet in the doing so I’ve also come to know that so much of the time I seem to find only myself thinking that I’m the one who has it all figured out, who knows best how to do all things better, who understands what it is to be clever and clear whilst everyone who’s then not me must not be.

Indeed, I’ll catch myself all the time measuring everyone against my line.

As if I’m the one walking the best this life.

But then I remember all the faults and failures I’ve found and been that then all combine to give me every possible reason why I simply can’t be.

I get still entirely too much entirely too wrong to believe as often as I do that I know both what I’m doing and that I’m doing it well. And yet I live every single day according to all the laws I’ve written for myself. I stay always in the plans and patterns that I’ve made for myself. I refuse to choose to do anything that doesn’t seem to me as being the right that I think I’ve already found, a consideration considered simply because I’ve happened to have made some better choices that have led to some rather vast improvements.

Am I done?

Have I arrived?

Here at 38 am I truly able to live a best version of this life that I know I’m still trying to figure out, make sense of, discover how better to uphold whatever it might be that my purpose might be? I’ve literally been wrestling for months at this point with this whole process of writing and sharing these posts. Are they too long? Do they come out too wrong? Do I need to do this differently?

Do I need to keep doing this at all?

I’ve all these internal arguments, conflicts between what are anymore so many voices and divisions that I feel only more frequently the victim of my own victories.

Why?

Because who am I to think that I have any? Who am I to think that I’ve figured anything out? Who am I to have become so staunch, so strict, so stone-like in what are all of these little assumptions as to my always doing both what I should be and that I only do it all as I should?

All while making so many mistakes that I retain this amazing ability to ignore, overlook, simply deny?

How can I be getting any of this right whenever I know I still get so much of it wrong?

And how dare I imagine that I might find myself outside of Heaven talking with He who is good, who is right, who is Truth and Life and expect Him to congratulate me on how well I’ve done? And that in only whatever little it will probably be that I determine to do as this person I’ve become who’s so prone to patterns and plans and keeping them revolving that then nearly every aspect of my life revolves around me and my patterns?

I think I’m just now finally starting to realize that I’m tired of trying to be the one to figure this out.

Why?

Because I suck at it. And that because I am indeed a worker of iniquity. I get things wrong. I say things I hate the taste of, despise the sound of. I focus on things that lead me nowhere. I get lost in the warmth of nostalgia and its endless ability to convince me that that which is behind me is everything that better could ever be. I allow myself to trust myself, to applaud myself, to like myself.

And that even though I still sin and fall daily short of even the better that I want to be!

How much further then must I be falling short of the man He created me to be?

A question I wonder because I know He didn’t create me to rely on me so much as I try. I know He didn’t create me to become the kind to think I know what I’m doing in what remains a life in which so much of what I do do is only done wrong or simply shouldn’t be done at all. I know that He didn’t create me, doesn’t call me now to lean on my own understanding nor the audacity to actually imagine that I have one!

What can I possibly claim to understand about this life or then the process of living one whenever I continue living one so scattered amongst so many plans, projects, prerogatives and performances?

Most of which I only peruse and then pursue because I personally consider them to be the best plans for me to make and the best paths for me to take in the arrogant expectation that I can somehow be the one to find them.

Much like how we treat Heaven.

That we can find our way there. That we can show up there and do so having done plenty of good to be found deserving of being welcomed in. That we can stand face to face with Him and watch Him smile and grin at all the great things we’ve done.

Friends, WE KILLED HIM!!!

It was our sins that He paid for on the cross. It was the way we’ve come to live our lives that demanded His life lost. It was us who made all the choices, refused all the changes, incurred all the charges in what have been, for every single one of us, lives lived as if He didn’t, isn’t, won’t. For that’s what sin is! It’s our deciding upon a decision that utterly devalues the dignity of His divinity. It’s us missing God in the moment. It’s our doing anything without Him being the reason why.

And we do that all the time.

We break the Law every day. We say things we shouldn’t say and that with the same mouths that dare imagine we give Him praise. We curse our neighbors and judge the same all while asking that He not do so to us. We spend so many of our many moments focused on everything that is in and of this world and yet we still expect that He’s okay with it even though He’s the One who told us this world is passing away.

Yes, we continue to ignore Him and yet believe Him to be one day pleased or impressed with all we did?

All things probably then done without any sign or semblance or even slight suggestion that we knew Him?

Why then would He claim to know us? Friends, He knows our hearts and has already determined that they’re wicked beyond repair. This is why He tells us that He intends to remove from us our hearts of stone and to put in their place hearts of flesh.

A very radical procedure I would suggest as, well, we can’t live without hearts and so to have ours removed basically then removes from us our ability to live life.

And, well, that’s the point!

It’s that He does wish to remove from us and us from the lives we have lived because we have lived outside of His Law. We have lived lives in which wickedness was too alive inside! We have done things that shouldn’t be done, things that He’s literally said never even entered His mind. We’ve literally blown God’s mind with just how morally corrupt we’ve become.

So much so that He sent His one and only Son to literally die as miserable a death as we remain entirely unable to imagine just to help us begin to fathom how pitiful and pitiable and punishable our lives have been.

And yet we live as if we can please Him? As if we can impress Him?

As if we know Him!

What do we know of Him in what remain lives in which we know clearly far more of everything less and everyone else? What do we know of good works when still we do so much so far away? What do our mouths know of praise whenever they still clearly know how to stand in condemnation of our brothers and sisters? What do we know of unity when we’ve become a people of youtube videos constantly denouncing one another?

What do we know of faith whenever our faith is mostly still placed in ourselves and our ability to stick to our estimations of a life’s best vocations?

We know nothing.

Worse than that, we are nothing. We’re mutants who were at first created in the image of God but who’ve ever since taken on so much of the appearance of the world that Jesus again had to die in order to help us realize the difference found in the distance of our fall and that as taken always only away from everything He is who is everything we cannot be nor become.

For we’ve already failed. We’ve already gotten things wrong. And, well, we can’t undo any of it. It’s like the whole concept of a new car’s depreciation. Once you sign on the line and drive it off the lot, it’s no longer new.

Neither are we!

Rather we’re sinners. We’re heathens. We’re criminals and convicts who are yet convinced that somehow we’re not.

A consideration that will keep us apart from Him for as long as we continue to believe it.

A belief we have because we’ve chosen to settle for this outlook toward faith that involves nothing more than pretending we do most things right. An outlook that sees Christ as just a friend there to help us whenever we need something. An outlook that then believes Him to be ready and waiting at Heaven’s gates to pat us on the back and tell God about how awesome we are.

After all, just look at all the awesome things we think we’ve done! Just look at how many times we went to church. Just look at how many times we opened the Bible. Just look at how many verses we know, how many we post. Just look at how long our sermons are, how detailed our comprehension of the Gospel seems. Just look at all the people we helped. Just look at all the great things we achieved.

All of them in lives we’ve lived thinking that what we did mattered somehow.

That faith was to be measured in church attendance records. That our piety was proven in our daring to be kind every now and then. That our renewal was evidenced in our not saying quite so many cuss words nearly so often as we used to. That our salvation was accomplished thanks to our having managed to make some decent changes that thereby made our portion of the debt a little easier to forgive. After all, we didn’t kill anybody. We didn’t get arrested. We never raped or pillaged or burned down another village.

We’ve been pretty good little kids!

Who still break the Law. Who still seek after our own glory. Who still refuse to accept that part of the story that tells us that if we’ll not deny ourselves and take up our crosses and follow Jesus into the grave, and that every single day, then we’re not worthy of Him.

We’re not worthy of Him.

In truth, we’ll never be worthy of Him.

The best we can possibly do is humble ourselves unto living our lives as if we understand that fact.

And yet so often we don’t. Rather still we focus so frequently on what all we’re doing and how great we think we are at doing it, how great we are for doing it. Still we consider Christ just there only to fill in the gaps and plug any holes we might possibly miss. Still we think of God as being there just to give us what we want and the kind of help we need, the need measured by us and what we want and what we think we need to help get us there to where, who, why we want to be whatever it is that we’ve probably chosen for ourselves.

We are so lost inside ourselves that Jesus had to die just to get us to look out!

My point is that so often in life, faith specifically, we get caught up in this idea that we can help. That we can do something, say something, change something and all that all by ourselves that will somehow manage to impress Him. That’s what we discussed just yesterday in regard to the verse just before this one. “Did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?”

Wasn’t it us who did all of this stuff and simply attached your Name to it as if that would always justify it?

Wasn’t it all about all we did?

No.

And why?

Because most of what we’ve done is wrong. Most of what we’ve done is sin. Most of what we’ve done is ignore Him, steal His glory, mishandle His story, ruin His people and destroy His creation.

All of which really lean toward a pretty clear agreement that we’ve not known Him.

And if that continues to be the case then why would He say He knows us?

If we continue to do anything without Him being the point, the purpose, the promise, then everything we do has no point, no purpose, no promise.

Why?

Because without Him we have no hope, no meaning, no life.

Do you know Christ are you just spinning through life hoping that one day He might say He knows you?

That may not seem like all that big of a difference but I have this feeling that one day we’re all going to find that it couldn’t have been bigger nor then more meaningful.

For we’ve spent our lives at best living as if we know of Christ. But to know Him means more than knowing of Him. Because to know Him demands a relationship and relationships demand reliance, trust, humility, honesty.

Can we say that we honestly know Him and that He then has no reason to deny that He knows us? Or are there perhaps still things in our lives, our hearts, our minds that show clearly otherwise?

My point is that we all have work to do but that the work that needs done is nothing we can do. He’s the One who began this good work and He will be the One to finish it. The only part we can play is getting ourselves out of His way and that being done best in our being done with them so that we raise no questions and have no concerns whenever He continues to show us to all the parts of everything we thought we had figured out that we need to let go and flee from.

That’s His good work, saving us from ourselves and our amazing ability to think we’re doing this well.

Do we know that side of Him yet?

Because the truth is that if we don’t know the part of this process in which it’s no longer us who can do what needs to be done, then we do not know the Son who came to do everything we couldn’t. We rather just know of a Name of someone that we think we can help.

But He who is perfect needs no help from those who get lost thinking they are.

He rather just needs us to admit we aren’t so that He can then help us start getting better.

A work done in which we’ll have to get to know Him as without Him the work will never even begin.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold