Broken Though Not Yet Destroyed

“If God is for us, who is against us?”

― ROMANS 8:31 (NRSV)

You need to read this, not because I say it, or even because I have written it, but, because it is God’s truth, perhaps for your day, your time, your season.

You perhaps have struggles. We all actually do – if we’re honest.

Maybe your struggles – and it could be an inestimable torment, an estrangement of identity, the deepest trough of grief imaginable – have gotten you so down you don’t know how you can pick yourself up.

Well, that’s okay – perfectly okay.

Because God will pick you up if you don’t give up. The truth you need to know is hedged in this rhetorical question:

“If God is for us, who is against us?”

God is for you. And be that as it is, God will not allow any harm to come your way – not ultimate harm – though we, in our human frailty, think the end for us has come when it hasn’t. Not yet.

“If God is for us, who is against us?”

God is for us, if we call his Son, Saviour, Lord, King over our very lives – by laying down our lives for what God is doing in them.

Though it seems we’re hedged in and about in our struggles, who can possibly and reasonably be against us?

There seem to be so many practical problems to be overcome in our world. But as soon as we realise that God is over all these problems and our circumstances, and that he is for us, and not against us, we know we can surmount these problems, one problem at a time, through the strength that God gives us. Surmounting these problems is not always changing them; it’s many times about accepting our circumstances. We can do that – accept them.

Will life ever be easy? No, probably never. Should it ever get us down? No, it probably shouldn’t, but knowing ourselves and our lack without God, we will get down on ourselves about our situations. God understands.

And then we come to the truth again:

“If God is for us, who is against us?”

As we are reminded, again and again, we begin to understand, afresh and then freshly again, we may be broken but we are not yet destroyed.

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When we understand what it truly means that God is for us, we have everything we need to endure life. No matter how often or deeply anguish resonates, we can endure. We will endure if we know we can endure.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.