My All-Sufficient Father
through Your Holy Spirit
Incarnate in Your Son
Perfect and eternally voluminous in the power of Your grace, by
the love of Your provision, You made it possible for me to endure; and today,
because of it, I exemplified Your gospel’s spirit, which is alive, as a
testament to the risen reality of the Lord Jesus.
Praise is due Your name for the truth indwelt in the power of
Your grace, which demolishes strongholds, setting up victory from the throes of
defeat; on weakness is that victory borne.
The power of Your grace knew the pain I had to endure, which became
a panoply of bedlam threatening to overthrow my spirit. Yet, You came! I sought You, and You came. You came because You are real; alive and tangible
in the experience of my life.
You said, “Calm down!”
and such a loving rebuke, spoken with robust tenderness, reverberated within my
soul, resonating before resting, reviving my hope, even in the tremulous
seconds where the spirit enemy circled, enjoying what would’ve been without
Your help the imminent demise of its prey.
In the moment You wrested from me the odious anxiousness that defeats me
through a busied, bothered, and battered mind.
You healed me when You came into my heart, so my heart could rescue my
mind by cogent awareness to take courage!
Praise is Yours for Your Teaching Spirit; that You teach a
lesson, through the power of Your grace, that only needs to be experienced
once. Once! Power! A power indwelt with the persuasiveness of
truth. An experienced power.
Praise is Yours alone, God of my being, even for the grace You
extend when I fail. Especially when I
fail! Your rebuke is a tender rod of
encouragement, for me to get up, to get hope, to get going, through the getting
of faith.
Praise. For, in You is
true and genuine resilience — for me, for all — for You, through Jesus, are the
Way, the Truth, the Life. Alone, through
You.
AMEN.
***
Experience comes to be irrefutable in the golden mean of the truth
we cannot otherwise know.
One day of pain, patiently endured, through the surrender of one
won to dying, teaches us, that to suffer well is to live right. It isn’t for long. Then eternity. And, in this suffering well, patiently
enduring, is the gospel power won for all those who trust their entire momentary lives to Jesus.
One day of pain is all we’re asked to endure. Then another.
And again. One day’s endurance
secures us the confidence that we can do it again and again, to the glory of
God. But only by going against all
reason and rationality, for the gospel is an upside down reality.
The gospel goes against all reason and rationality,
for the gospel is an upside down reality.
© 2016 Steve Wickham.
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