Forged By Faith

Isaiah 8:14 NIV No escape For where can you go to get away from what another knows you know? How might you outrun the One who goes before and behind? Where might you find a place to hide from He who sees the heart? How is it that we remain so convinced and easily so that we can somehow manage to together our lives hold that we know are falling so wonderfully apart? When could we start to just let it all fall if we knew that it would anyway and that upon a day of not our own choosing nor volition but rather in accord with His timing and provision? What all would we see if we would simply agree to let this life be the misery it’s meant to be? Alas so many days we give to trying our best to make things better both for us and around us and this makes sense from where we stand as, well, here we’re stood. We’re living lives that are mostly going good and so this allows easily that considering that with just a little planning and perhaps a bit of polishing our place here would be pretty much ...

Lamentations 3:17 NIV What is depravation? Is it to be deprived of something in life, of life itself perhaps? It is the missing of something, misplacing of something? Is it the seeing all that another has and holding only in that a list of all we don’t? Is it this insistence upon housing our hope inside all things held either in the hand or heart of those with whom we share this hole? Is it the relative wholeness witnessed within the walk of another, a comparative lack then seen inside our own? Is it to go without, to never know, to never feel, to always wonder what it might be like to be like another? Is it the life of a drifter who’s sometimes unhappy that they’ve chosen a life without a home? Is it understanding the idea of home, and that of hope, and realizing that no matter what we might try our trying still to find either where we are is but as wasted an effort as any might try and that toward anything at all? Of all we have, of all we’ve seen, of every story we’ve lived and all ...

Titus 2:14 NIV The reason I think one of the hardest, most profound, most confusing and yet most common questions in all of Christianity is why. Why would God do what He’s done in sending us His Son knowing that we’d made a life out of trusting in lies to lead what became and still remains the way that most here are walking, aimed only away from the Way that He made? Why would Jesus do what He did, enduring the scorn, the shame, the suffering for what is a people who mostly cheered it on? Why would He, as we discussed yesterday, even go so far as to promise to restore unto said people all the time and life and hope they’d lost to what’s amounted to nothing short of a self-continued plague as has made all of us so cantankerously confused that still the vast majority live only to lose what is everything from His love to the everlasting life offered within it? What is His reason? And I know this is something that all of us struggle with because there so often just doesn’t seem to be one. ...

1 Peter 2:24 NIV The undeserved This is the very backdrop of the entirety of the Gospel purpose for it’s proven in what remains even still unto this day a call answered toward what remains still the way of life unknown by whomever said call is shown. At first this command was carried by Christ in that first cross taken unto a life He’d not lived as was ended thanks to sin He Himself had not known. He knew not the life of a sinner as in Him there is no sin. And so He paid the price of the kind of life that He hadn’t lived. All so that we, through Him, are given the hope of our too finding that life that doesn't end due to the wage of sin which remains what it always was. And that simply because He paid a debt He didn't owe to set free a people who owed a debt they couldn’t pay. A debt we can’t pay. Thus the iniquity. Such is what one well-known verse quoted often this time of year uses to describe the purpose of His life: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has tur...

Isaiah 7:14 NIV God with us. Written at God's design some 500-700 years before its fulfillment, a promise proving that God not only knows what He's doing but that nothing we do can undo what He's begun. Yet it's somewhat a funny thing this trying to contemplate time in regard to Scriptural writings, an undertaking clearly taken only in an effort for us to better understand what maybe isn't ours to understand. Because, as the number of years between this promise being written and the birth of Christ culminating the conception is debated, such just shows that we down here will happily miss the point in preference of the proof. I didn't set out to stumble upon the discrepancy between opinions in regard to how early this verse was written before Jesus came to seal it, but having read a bit about the different ideas, it only speaks unneeded life to the unnecessary trees we plant in this path of faith, failing instead to simply appreciate the woods of refuge it afford...