Every day we wake up to a world that celebrates victory and applauds success. Very shortly we will be applauding medal winners in the Olympics, forgetting those who don’t quite make the cut. We like the happy endings of triumph and success.
Every day we serve a King whose ideas of victory and success conflict wih the world’s views.
It’s easy for us to forget the radical nature of the kingdom of God, where at the present time God’s ultimate victory over sin and death is not visible to all, but only to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. It’s very easy for us to be brainwashed into believing that the ‘dog-eat-dog’ mentality of the world is the only one that counts.
The death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ changed our perspective on life for ever. There on that hill, Jesus gave His life as a ransom for sin, showing us an alternative path to victory: one that looked, to all intents and purposes, remarkably like defeat.
Today, if you are tempted to despair and give up, feeling that victory will never be yours and that all life brings is failure, remember that the story does not end at Calvary. ‘Death has been beaten/ The grave has been conquered/ Jesus is risen/ Life ever after.’ (Phil Wickham, ‘The Victory) That is enough to hold on to.
‘The Victory’, Phil Wickham