Life’s Sweetest Victory Isn’t What We Think It Is

THE world has us believe that victory is in victory, but the world is wrong.  If we believe that we end up feeling like a failure every time something doesn’t work out.

Satan, himself, wants us to equate success with having success, but that attitude is a house of cards about to be blown down.  We need a foundation.

A firm foundation is the expectation of failure and the anticipation of needing to go back to the drawing board.  Such a foundation is not defeatist for an end, but it is realist as a means.  We will experience much discouragement along life’s journey.  We have experienced much discouragement.  Yet we go on… if we believe in Him who called us.

We go on in faith, believing failure is not fatal, but that it’s an important signpost we pass along the road that indicates the direction for success.

Life’s sweetest victory is not victory itself, but the attitude taken in defeat that believed and kept going.  Such an attitude was necessary to debunk the despair we naturally feel having experienced failure.  Sure, it happened, but we can’t stay there if we’re determined to do God’s work.

So, if you need encouragement, pray for God’s resilience, to replace that frown with a smile, to set your sail to catch the wind, and be ready to be resourced by life’s failures along life’s way.

It’s only when we look back from victory that we see how well we looked forward from all those times in defeat where we kept going.

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The way of victory is in the way we take defeat.  It’s our attitude in loss that proves to Whom we are won.  Only in Christ are we the persons who emerge, as He did, resurrected out of the jaws of defeat into victory — because we kept going.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.