From Despair to the Hallelujah Chorus

In the summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a broken man. At fifty-six, the once-celebrated composer was drowning in debt, his operas had fallen out of fashion, and his health was failing. A stroke had partially paralyzed his right hand years earlier. London's critics had written him off. He was, by most accounts, finished.

Then a friend named Charles Jennens sent him a libretto — nothing but scripture passages carefully arranged to tell the story of redemption. Handel began to compose. For roughly twenty-four days, he barely ate or slept. He worked in a kind of holy fever, page after page pouring out of him. When his servant brought meals, he found them untouched, and Handel in tears. After completing the Hallelujah Chorus, Handel reportedly said, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself."

What emerged was Messiah — a work that has moved audiences for nearly three centuries.

Here is what strikes me: it was not success that transformed Handel. It was encounter. When a depleted man opened himself to the Word of God, something happened that talent alone could never produce.

The Apostle Paul wrote, "We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us." El Shaddai does not wait for us to be strong. He meets us in our emptiness and fills us with something the world cannot explain.