Loss of life for gain of gospel

Photo by Fabienne FILIPPONE on Unsplash

The untapped riches of God’s glory and grace unfold for the one who surrenders what is vanquished for the voluminousness of God’s kingdom.

What does that mean?

It is entirely possible, as we let go of that which once defined our life, to forgive the fact that the worst possible thing has taken place, that we come to be compensated by a knowledge of God we always hoped might be possible but never, until now, experienced.

So, what I’m saying is two relatively impossible things occur in the same season — we are blindsided by loss and backwashed into grief AND we come to encounter the real and risen Lord Jesus in a way He can only be encountered — through loss and the grief that overwhelms us.

Loss and grief hasten us to the valley of decision. Will we fight for what is now gone — an utterly ridiculous concept — or will we let it go, for safe-keeping in the arms of God? As we let it go, forgiving the nature of life to take from us, God ministers to us through His risen Son via the Holy Spirit, through the vacating of our sorrow from a soul pregnant in anguish. And yet we will return again and again and again to the impoverishment of brokenness until all our grief has been consumed by the fire of God; a process of many months or years.

It is well for the pure fact that
through adversity we’re destined to grow.

What I’m suggesting is this: even as we share our sorrow with God, knowing He is present, God’s Spirit showers us with the kind of empathy impossible from human hands. It is important that we can share with humanity, vital for healing and recovery, but our chief sadness is saved for the God who knows us like no human being can.

This is the epitome of prayer, that, there in a beached emotionality, we encounter God in a kind of communication beyond words. And all because we’re enduring loss.

Not to empty the truth of its intensity, or to trivialise solemn matters, but to expound the imagery, loss is an access-all-areas ticket into the mosh pit of God’s Presence. Loss is the avenue through which we enter the streets of grief, where we finally have communion with the Presence of God, through surrender.

To a person of the world, life sucks because of loss, and through loss they enter any one or a number of perils, like addictions, because they cannot stand the grief.

But the person of God finds it is too much for them, the moment breaks them, and there, as they lie in a thousand pieces strewn through the crags of life, only God can instil the reformation of what loss has deformed.

Life’s deformation was the necessary prelude
to God’s reformation.

Only through the purposes of God, through surrender, do we rise, like the phoenix out of ashes.

The gospel is won into our hearts not through an external blessing but through inner privation.