Gladness Will Come
Psalm 30:11-12 ESV says, “You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!”
God’s invitation to his people is to relieve heaviness and fill us with gladness and freedom. This verse from Psalm 30 has the language of deliverance and breakthrough.
One of the barriers to living freely in God’s presence is heaviness. I’m not talking about genuine mourning. Lament and grief are God-given aspects of the life of faith. In fact, many movements have cut themselves short from freedom because they fail to adequately leave room for life's troubles and the reality of suffering and pain.
Still, while God is a generously gracious God, able to walk through our pain with us, he is also a God of victory, joy, and freedom.
This is a sensitive topic to dive into because I have seen so many Christians proclaim a “quick-fix Jesus.” Many have experienced hardship only to have people, perhaps well-meaning, tell them they just need to have faith.
When I see Jesus, I see a man who wept over the death of his friends and pushed himself to exhaustion at times because his heart was moved with compassion to meet people in their needs. Show me any reference in the Gospels where Jesus wrote off someone’s struggle as irrelevant. You won’t find it because Christ is full of grace, mercy, and love.
God invites us to overcome grief and mourning by responding to his deliverance. We can enter into gladness. When the time for sorrow has passed, we can enter into peace and joy again, though possibly deeply changed by the loss we faced. We do not have to linger in heaviness when we know an overcoming God.
We might say that we know when it is time to mourn and when it is time to celebrate because we sense God’s presence. Yet many believers have experienced the dark night of the soul where God’s presence seems ever-distant. Likewise, we might be drawn into celebration because we are terrified of facing the weight of our pain.
What I’m saying is that there is no clear path that I can see to navigate mourning and hardship. How could we outline a plan for moving from mourning to dancing? For each person, it is different. Each situation is unique. God writes individual stories through our experiences.
What I can declare is this promise. God will turn your mourning into dancing. This is the irresistible and unprecedented power of God in our lives. We can look at the cross of Jesus Christ, the great mark of suffering, and watch it transform into the empty grave, the promise of resurrection life.
God’s ways are often hard to express and outline in a few paragraphs. That is why I am drawn to point you to this promise. God graciously walks through our pain and suffering but victoriously brings us freedom and gladness. Do you trust him today? This promise is for you, whether in the highs, the lows, or somewhere in between.
Praise God for his goodness to us.
