January 4

Do You work wonders for the dead? Do departed spirits rise up to praise You? Selah Can Your loving devotion be proclaimed in the grave, Your faithfulness in Abaddon? — Ps 88:10-11 BSB

This is not the voice of a soul dead in sin, but the cry of a living soul struggling against death. There’s a stark difference between a soul where life is struggling beneath death and one where death reigns absolutely—between a soul that has been quickened and one where there’s only death, with no trace of spiritual life, no heavenly teaching. A soul that is completely dead doesn’t groan, sigh, or lament. There’s no pitiful cry, no pouring out of the heart before God, just like there’s no life or breath in a corpse in the grave.

But where spiritual life has been placed in the soul by the Fountain of life, that life groans under the weight of death. It sighs from within the grave; it gasps for breath beneath the dead weight that lies upon it. It struggles to rise up, to break free from the heavy mass of carnality that clings to it, trying to lift itself out from the weight of sin and death that wraps around it, preventing it from rising.

Do you recognize these workings of spiritual life in your own soul—the heaving, gasping, rising of God’s life in you, even when it’s pressed down and overwhelmed by your carnal, dead, barren, earthly nature? If you’ve never known the experience of gasping and groaning under the weight of sin and death, then you haven’t experienced the vital work of the Holy Spirit in your conscience.