Acquainted with Grief

We are not "acquainted with grief" in the same way our Lord was acquainted with it. We endure it and live through it, but we do not become intimate with it.

There is much in Isaiah that falls with greater weight on my heart than it once did. The truth that Christ bore not only our sin in its entirety, but that our griefs and our sorrows, too, burdened His back. Grief and sin are blood-bound, relatives in a dark family tree. Their guilt-fullness, their God-emptiness was laid on His battered frame.

Grief, when traced back far enough, is always sired by sin.

Sin is blatant mutiny against God, and either sin or God must die in my life... If sin rules in me, God's life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed. There is nothing more fundamental than that.

Sin will kill the life of God in us.

But thank the good Father and the crucified, buried, risen Christ.

By His wounds we are healed.

{Text in italics taken from My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers}