“…we were burdened beyond
measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. Yes, we had the sentence of death in
ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the
dead, who delivered us from so great a death, and does deliver us; in whom we
trust that He will still deliver us…”
II Corinthians 1:8-10
Have you experienced a defeat, failure,
or burden in life that seemed beyond your ability to endure? We all may walk through valleys of seeming
agonizing defeat, where we feel the “sentence of death,” but I believe that God
is able to raise us up to a place of glorious victory!
When I started out in Christ I don’t
think I realized it would be so hard. I
wanted to be like Jesus. I wanted to
know Him. I wanted to walk closely with
the Lord and do great things for Him. But
praying to be close to the Lord and actually going through the valley of
despair and utter discouragement, where you feel like you’re at risk of losing
it all, that’s a whole other story.
The fact is, there are valleys deep,
dark places in life. I would venture to
say that those who purpose to walk closely with the Lord may go through some of
the darkest valleys of all. We cannot
pray them away. We can’t possess so much
faith that we rebuke them till they disappear.
Sometimes the best faith is the faith that
bears down and perseveres. How about the
faith that, though bewildered, though questioning God at every turn, though
shaken to its very core by the sheer weight of the agony, gets up another day
and presses on? How about the faith that
says, “God, I don’t understand this, but I will follow You.”
We rise up again to face another
day. Tested? Yes.
Tried? Indeed. Despairing of life? Sometimes, yes. Nights where we cry out to God in agony of
soul? Yes, we’ve been there. “We are hard-pressed on every
side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in
despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always
carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus
also may be manifested in our body.” (II Cor. 4:8-10)
Thank God He has not assigned us to a
life of perpetual failure and defeat. We
serve a God who raises the dead, who always causes us to triumph! (II Cor.
2:14) The life of God flourishes in our
deepest valleys, as we do walk closer with Him and we do become more like
Him.
As we press on in faith we are
encouraged, and we encourage others. We
are ministers of the same life of God that raised us up from our darkest
valley. In fact, what we may see as a
valley of defeat may be a pathway to greater and more glorious victory. We need only look at the cross to see this
truth. You may have suffered what seemed
like agonizing defeats, but God looks down on you and sees a glorious victory!
