Raised from the Drowned

“And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I AM the Lord. They shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart.” —Jeremiah 24:7

God alone makes saints, not by erasing their pain, but by baptizing them in suffering, forming them into vessels of holiness and grace. —D.

Only God can carve a saint from the rough timber of human life. It is His work alone, carried out in the deep hollows of humiliation and struggle, where doubt gnaws, the world tempts, and the devil prowls with his wicked angels. A saint is not shaped in comfort, but in the waters of death and rebirth, beneath the weight of the cross, and through long nights when heaven feels sealed. The old self is drowned again and again, not once, but daily, until pride softens, until the hunger for applause dissipates, until the soul is readied for glory, for holiness.

No failure of men—no corrupt priest, bishop, pope, or politician—can stop the work of God. Their poison cannot halt His hand. Even their betrayals become instruments in His design. The world may lie and shout and raise its little gods, but the Truth stands. God lifts the broken, humbles the proud, and reshapes the unworthy through mercy poured out in living water. The saint is not the untarnished one, but the one who sinks, who cries out, and who is raised again. Their life becomes a font where wounds become witness, and death gives way to new birth.

This is the mystery of holiness: God does not preserve us from the flood, but meets us in it. Holiness is not a shelter from judgment, but a cleansing that reaches marrow and bone. It leaves us exposed, yet never abandoned. And in that undoing, we are remade, not into what the world demands, but into what God has always desired. Saints are not born. They are baptized. They bear the signs of death and rising, and live as those claimed by water and Word, fit not for this age, but for the age to come.