The Deeper the Dark, the Brighter the Grace
I had a thought today as I walked to kings church runaway bay today and the more i refected on it the more it made sense
I used to think growing in Christ meant feeling less broken.
Fewer cracks. Fewer relapses into the same old sin I swore off last month, last year, last decade. I thought sanctification was supposed to feel like ascension. Like each year I'd wake up a little less of a mess than the year before, until eventually I'd arrive somewhere clean. Somewhere respectable. Somewhere I could finally stop flinching when someone looked at me too closely.
That is not what happened.
What happened instead is this: the longer I walk with Jesus, the worse I discover I actually am. Not worse in behaviour, necessarily. Worse in diagnosis. The deeper I go, the more rot I find. And here is the strange mercy hiding inside that horror, the mercy I did not expect and did not ask for and would not have believed if you had told me ten years ago. The more clearly I see my own depravity, the more spectacular grace becomes. Not smaller. Not more manageable. Bigger. Wilder. More offensive to my sense of fairness. More impossible to explain away.
This is not a tidy blog post about self-improvement. I am not going to give you five steps to feel better about your flaws. I am going to tell you what it has actually been like to stare into the wreckage of my own heart and find, somehow, that the wreckage was the doorway.
Somewhere along the way, most of us absorb a quiet lie about the Christian life. The lie sounds spiritual. It sounds like maturity. It goes something like this: the closer you get to God, the further you get from your sin. Proximity to holiness burns off the dross. Give it enough years, enough discipline, enough Bible reading and prayer and fellowship, and you will emerge a cleaner version of yourself. Depravity becomes background noise. A thing you dealt with in your twenties. A testimony you tell at the front of the room, past tense, safely archived.
I believed that lie for a long time. I built a version of my faith around it. And when it did not happen, when I did not become the clean, ascending man I expected, I assumed the failure was mine. I assumed I was doing Christianity wrong. Not disciplined enough. Not devoted enough. Not enough, full stop. That word again. Enough. The word that has haunted every failed attempt I have ever made to earn my own worth.
But here is what nobody told me, or maybe somebody did and I was not ready to hear it. The saints who walked closest with God did not describe themselves as increasingly clean. They described themselves as increasingly aware of the filth. Paul does not call himself chief of sinners in his rebellious youth. He says it near the end, writing from prison, further into Christ than almost anyone in history. The closer he got to the light, the more clearly he saw what the light was exposing.
That is not decline. That is not spiritual failure. That is what actually happens when a real light hits a real room. You do not see the dust less. You see it more.
I work night shifts. I have stood in corridors at eleven at night where the whole building goes quiet except for the machines and the occasional cough down the hall, and there is a particular kind of honesty that settles into a person at that hour. The performance drops. The version of yourself you maintain for daylight, for colleagues, for the world that expects you upright and composed, that version gets tired around 3am and something truer leaks out.
I have watched trauma play out in real time I have watched families fall apart in waiting rooms over decisions nobody should have to make. And in those quiet, fire-lit hours of a hospital that never really sleeps, I have had a lot of time to sit with my own reflection in the dark glass of a corridor window and ask myself honestly what I am made of.
The answer is not flattering.
I am not the hero of my own story. I have been selfish in ways I am too ashamed to write down even here, on a blog that claims to be unfiltered. I have wanted things that were not mine to want. I have said words in anger that I cannot take back no matter how many times I apologise. I have loved people badly, loved myself worse, and called both of those things love. Depravity is not a doctrine I affirm on a Sunday and forget by Monday. Depravity is the thing I meet in the mirror of a hospital corridor window at half past eleven at night, and it does not blink first.
This is where most people stop the reflection. It is too heavy. It is too honest. Better to close the curtain, go back to the version of ourselves we can live with, and call it a night.
But I want you to sit in it a bit longer with me. Because something happens if you do not look away too quickly.
Descending Before You Can Anchor
There is a pattern I keep finding in scripture that I did not notice until I started writing my own story down. The people who receive the most staggering displays of grace are almost always the ones who first go through an honest, unflinching reckoning with how far gone they actually are.
The tax collector in the temple will not even lift his eyes. He beats his chest. He does not negotiate his sin down to something manageable. He does not say, well, at least I am not as bad as the Pharisee. He simply says, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. And Jesus says that man, that man who could not look up, went home justified.
The woman caught in adultery is dragged into the street with her sin on public display, no room for spin, no defence to offer. And it is precisely there, in the dust, with the stones already in hand around her, that grace steps into the middle of the crowd and rewrites the ending.
Peter, three times over a charcoal fire, denies he ever knew the man he swore he would die for. And it is by another charcoal fire, after the resurrection, that Jesus rebuilds him. Not by minimising the denial. Not by pretending it did not happen. By asking him three times if he loves him, once for every betrayal, and restoring him anyway.
Do you see the pattern? Grace does not arrive to people who have first cleaned themselves up enough to deserve a visit. Grace arrives in the wreckage. Grace finds you at your most exposed, most indefensible, most honestly depraved, and it is precisely there that it does its most spectacular work.
You cannot skip the descent and still call the anchor real. If your understanding of your own brokenness is shallow, your experience of grace will be shallow too. A small diagnosis produces a small savior. But a true diagnosis, an unflinching, honest, fully-lit diagnosis of just how deep the rot goes, produces a Saviour who is suddenly too big for the categories you tried to keep him in.
Here is the part of this that I find almost unbearable in the best possible way.
The gospel does not get less impressive the more of my depravity I confess. It gets more impressive. Every single time. I used to think honesty about my sin would shrink my faith, make it feel fragile, expose it as naive or childish. The opposite has happened. Every layer of brokenness I have had the courage to actually name, out loud, to God and sometimes to another human being brave enough to sit across from me and not flinch, has made the cross look less like a nice moral example and more like an act of reckless, scandalous, world-bending love.
Because think about what is actually being claimed here. Not that God overlooked my sin. Not that he graded on a curve, decided I was probably fine on balance, decent enough overall. The claim of the gospel is far more offensive than that, and far more beautiful. The claim is that God, who owes me nothing, who is under no obligation to feel anything for me but righteous anger, looked at the full and total truth of what I am, the selfishness, the pride, the lust, the cowardice, the small daily betrayals nobody else will ever know about, and chose, at unimaginable cost to himself, to absorb the punishment I earned so that I would not have to.
That is not a story about a slightly flawed man getting a helping hand. That is a story about a wholly innocent God dying in the place of a genuinely guilty man. And the more genuinely guilty I discover myself to be, the more genuinely staggering that substitution becomes.
I do not think we are meant to arrive at the gospel once and then move past it into more advanced spiritual territory, as though the cross were a beginner's lesson we graduate beyond. I think we are meant to keep descending into the truth of our own depravity precisely so that we can keep rediscovering how enormous grace actually is. The gospel is not a door you walk through once. It is a room you keep discovering is bigger than you thought, every time you are honest enough to bring more of the mess into the light.
So what do you do with all this. What do you do with a heart that, the longer you examine it, seems to reveal more wreckage rather than less.
You do not manage it. You do not try to negotiate it down to something you can control on your own strength. I have tried that. I have tried the white-knuckle approach to holiness, the sheer willpower model of sanctification, where you grit your teeth and try to outrun your own nature through discipline alone. It does not work. It cannot work, because the diagnosis was never fixable from the inside. Depravity is not a bad habit you can break through effort. It is the water you were born swimming in.
What you do instead, what I am learning painfully and slowly to do, is lean in. Not lean away from Jesus in shame, hiding the worst of yourself behind a curated version you hope is presentable enough. Lean toward him precisely with the worst of it. Bring the 3am corridor thoughts. Bring the anger you have not confessed to anyone. Bring the lust, the pride, the resentment you are still nursing against someone who hurt you a decade ago and have not forgiven. Bring all of it, not because he needs the information, but because you need the exposure. You need to stand in the light and discover that the light does not destroy you. It refines you.
This is the quiet fire I keep coming back to in my own writing, the fire that does not consume you the way you fear it will but burns off exactly what needed to go. Quiet, because it does not happen in dramatic, once-off moments nearly as often as it happens in the unremarkable ordinary. In the corridor at 3am. In the argument you almost had but chose not to. In the moment you caught yourself about to lie and told the truth instead, badly, awkwardly, but truthfully. Fire, because it still costs something. Because real refining always does.
I am not writing this from the far side of victory, having arrived at some clean plateau I can now report back from. I am writing this from inside the process, mid-descent, still finding new rooms in the basement of my own heart I did not know were there. But I am telling you, the deeper those rooms go, the more I find myself not despairing but leaning further in. Because every new room is another opportunity to discover that grace has already been there before me. Already furnished it. Already paid for whatever damage I did while I was pretending the room did not exist.
An Invitation, Not a Formula
I do not have a five-point plan for you. I am suspicious of anyone who claims to. What I have is an invitation, the same one I am trying to live inside myself.
Stop managing your image of yourself long enough to actually look. Not to wallow, and not to perform some kind of self-flagellating spirituality that mistakes misery for maturity. That is its own trap, its own form of pride dressed up as humility. Just look. Honestly. In the quiet hours when nobody is watching and the performance has nowhere left to hide. Look at what is actually there.
And then, instead of running from what you find, bring it to the one place it has always belonged. Not to fix it yourself. Not to explain it away. Bring it to the cross, where the full weight of it was already accounted for, already paid, already absorbed by someone who knew exactly what he was taking on and did it anyway.
I promise you this much from where I am standing. It will not make you feel smaller for long. It will make grace feel enormous. It will make the gospel stop sounding like a nice story you were told as a child and start sounding like the only thing sturdy enough to hold the actual weight of who you are.
The deeper the dark, the brighter the grace. I did not choose this pattern. I only keep finding it, over and over, every time I am brave enough to stop pretending and finally look.
So look. And then lean in. Every single time.
You dont get clean before you get into the shower you jump in the shower.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 3.9 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
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