They never tell you that the crown of real authority doesn’t come after applause—it often comes after agony. In the economy of heaven, elevation is not earned through empty rituals or loud declarations but through hidden crucibles where men are stripped of everything they thought they needed. True power isn’t given to the loudest voice in the room; it’s bestowed upon the one who survived the silence. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15) is not a poetic line for the faint-hearted; it is a war cry of those who stood in the furnace and found God dancing beside them. The authority that shakes kingdoms is not borrowed oil—it is forged through fire and tears in secret places.
The prophet Elijah didn’t become a voice of thunder on Mount Carmel until he became a man of famine by the Brook Cherith. Jesus didn’t rise in glory until He first wept blood in Gethsemane. Before David wore a crown, he wore rejection in the cave of Adullam. There is a spiritual formula in pain that heaven understands: private crushing leads to public coronation. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (John 12:24). The oil that truly heals nations is not pressed in comfort—it is born from seasons of stripping, when all you have is your worship and your wounds.
The ancients knew this. The desert fathers did not chase visibility but intimacy. They whispered to the rocks and bled on the altars of obscurity. “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,” wrote Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, echoing truths older than temples. Pain is not a punishment in God’s kingdom; it is a preparation. Heaven never wastes suffering. Every tear is a seed, every silence a sculptor’s chisel carving authority deep into a man’s spirit.
Those who have endured fire become living scrolls. They speak not from borrowed sermons but from branded encounters. As Apostle Paul declared, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). These marks are not cosmetic—they are credentials. Real authority does not come from titles but from the testimonies engraved in flesh and spirit. The prophetess Hannah said little, but her groans in the temple birthed a prophetic era. Her oil came from ashes, her song from sorrow. Authority is not proven in speech; it is proven in scars.
The pain you’re enduring might not be warfare—it might be welding. God does not train His generals in palaces but in prisons, pits, and deserts. Joseph’s authority to feed nations came after years in chains. Moses’ authority came after forty years of divine silence. “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). The stripping is strategic. The fire is not meant to kill you but to reveal you. Fire tests every man’s work, but it also unveils the gold that cannot burn (1 Corinthians 3:13).
So when your season looks like ruin, understand—it may be royalty in disguise. The ashes are not your end; they are the soil of your authority. The same God who allowed the stripping will also anoint the rising. “To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning…” (Isaiah 61:3). This is the mystery of God’s refining love: He hides crowns in crucibles and gives thrones to those who didn’t quit when all they had was pain and prophecy. And those who emerge from this furnace will not just have oil—they will carry fire.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
08152094428 (SMS Only)
