Daily Journal: 18 April

Replacing Sorrow’s Crush

Sorrow can be crushing. It is weighty, heavy and transforming. If you experience deep sorrow, you can’t help being changed by it. It’s a life experience that you learn lessons from. You can’t deny it. You can’t fight it. You have to just go through it. Sorrow is a real expression of deep pain. It can’t be glossed over.

If you are one who walks with sorrow, you know that you need another expression to offset its beleaguering results. If you are one who walks with sorrow and you don’t know how to get past it, if you’ve lost your joy, you need to know that you can overcome it. There is one thing that can help you endure it and move forward in grace, courage and understanding.

It isn’t anything the world offers. Worldly sorrow is suffocating. Replacing sorrow's crush can’t be achieved through positive thinking or meditation. But there is one thing that feeds you with life again, hope, sanity, and refuge. That one thing is praise.

Praise lifts you up out of sorrow’s pit and breathes a fresh hope. It corals self-pity and pours purpose into the stupor of lethargy that sorrow can blanket you in.

Praise consoles you when you mourn, even though it’s the last thing you feel like doing.

Praise coats you with an oil of joy you don’t normally feel. It perfumes the atmosphere around you. It penetrates the power of sorrow’s spirit, which is heaviness. Praise is a gift for anyone willing to put it on, like a garment.

Praise is a peculiarly Christian antidote. It is a divine, supernatural outflow from the Spirit of God. Praise enables you to step into God’s presence and receive healing.

Isaiah 61:3 (NKJV)

[Jesus came to earth] To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;

It is a choice to put on the garment of praise. It isn’t something that magically shoos sorrow away. Praise is a spiritual influence that comes from the love of God. God is enveloped in glory and when we look to God we are influenced by His glory.

Hebrews 1:3 (NLT)

The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God, and he sustains everything by the mighty power of his command. When he had cleansed us from our sins, he sat down in the place of honour at the right hand of the majestic God in heaven.

Read Isaiah chapter 61. This is a prophecy of Jesus Christ and His redemption over our experiences of sorrow and destruction in this life.

Glory, just like sorrow, is weighty. But it is glorious, not oppressively heavy.      

Just as sorrow is transforming – so is the journey back to wholeness and restoration through God’s glory. It is even greater than the crushing of the soul that sorrow brings. God’s glory is the beauty for ashes, it is the oil of joy for mourning. The garment of praise is the expression of that glory back to God and lifts us past our emotions into the realm of the spirit.

1 Peter 5:10 (ESV)

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.