Finding Grace in Disappointment (Lessons from Lazarus)Sample

 The power & authority for freedom.

“Now, so that these who stand here with me will believe that you have sent me to the earth as your messenger, I will use the power you have given me.”  

Then with a loud voice Jesus shouted with authority: ‘Lazarus! Come out of the tomb!’” (Jn 11:42-43 TPT)

Jesus has already displayed the power and authority given to Him by His Father. But here in the midst of mourning He shows us the greatest outcome of His deep compassion for our frail human condition when connected to the Father’s power and authority—resurrected life with Him. This is where powerful love leads. To resurrected union with Him. The resurrected life cannot come without death; death to self, death to ego, death to ‘I’ so that the great ‘I AM’ may enter in and bring true life.

It is powerful, but it is personal. He knows you. When He calls you out into victory, it is your name that is on His lips. His grace is towards you, it is overflowing and flooding into every aspect of your life. Every aspect.

“Jesus said to them, ‘Unwrap him and let him loose.’” (Jn 11:44)

Is that not a most beautiful picture of what Jesus has provided for us? He calls us out of our deadness, out of things that entomb us and keep us in darkness. He calls us out into life, breaks off the death of sin, brings us into the light, to walk with the One who gives light.

The miracle of Lazarus walking out of the tomb that day began with a heart-cry call to Jesus from his sisters. Jesus, the one you love is very sick. Please come!

In between the cry and the answer was much pain and anguish. But there were also deeply precious, sacred moments of tender intimacy, and of revelation of who God is when we come to Him in all our honest brokenness and disappointment.

Grace is there waiting in all its radiant fullness to enfold you, to rebuild and restore the things that feel broken beyond repair.

He doesn’t do it according to our timing, nor rarely in the way we want it done, but He can be trusted with the final outcome. 

It is your name that is on His lips today, and He invites you to not merely be alive, but to truly live. 

All and only by His grace.