By Faith, Through Grief, More Than Conquerors

No, despite all the grief we endure, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loves us. The more troubled we are, the more we are able to overcome victoriously.

— Romans 8:37

This article propounds the gospel truth and power available for anyone who might choose to access the free, yet priceless and miraculous, grace of God to assist when defeat is faced.

When dark times bear down with crushing weight, and that weight has gotten the best of us, there is a power that helps us withstand every plight. That power is found in submitting to the impinging pressure; to allow it to crush us; for a moment of complete surrender helps in reorganising our inner resources. We were never meant to withstand this crushing weight – the force and intensity of thoughts and feelings that we cannot contend with. Either we are overwhelmed into the primary emotions or we fight what cannot be defeated: the reality of loss that insists on being experienced; the reality of grief that demands to be felt.

When we admit through submission that events of grief have overwhelmed us, we have simultaneously agreed that God is Sovereign over all of life; that we cannot understand it; but, equally, for our own good, that God is for us and not against us.

And this is the gorgeous thing that happens.

As we are crushed under the immense weight of the moment of overwhelming sorrow – God’s empathic Spirit with us, powerfully, as we feel understood by God – we experience something of an overwhelming victory despite our circumstances. The more crushed we are, the more we are shortly able to rise as the weight seems lessened.

God’s grace is such an extraordinarily powerfully yet soft thing; it is indefatigable, yet so gentle, that it works only when we come in a submitted gentleness, which may be preceded by the most caustic of anger.

As we come to the end of ourselves – drained of any resource of self-help – then, and then alone, does God’s Spirit work; miraculously, surreally, indescribably.

The issue of submission is important.

We cannot beat many life situations alone. God may be Almighty, but we are not. Jesus modelled this most humble of submissions at the Garden of Gethsemane when he said, “Not my will, Father, but yours be done.”

Whenever we pray such a prayer, in transaction of submission before our all-powerful God, we express such faith; trust in God to raise us at a time when we cannot help ourselves.

Submission before God to the crushing weight of grief is the way to access the help of God. In what seems the starkest defeat turns toward us in an overwhelming victory through Christ. Such a miracle is procured by faith.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.