Tenth Avenue North - The Struggle Lyrics
Lyrics
There’s a wreckage, there’s a fire
There’s a weakness in my love
There’s a hunger I can’t control
Lord, I falter and I fall down
Then I hold on to the chains You broke
When You came and saved my soul
Save my soul
Hallelujah
We are free to struggle
We’re not struggling to be free
Your blood bought and
Makes us children
Children, drop your chains and sing
So why, Lord, do I still fail
Do I wear thin
Why do I still give in to temptation
On my own, I am bankrupt
I don’t trust You or take You at Your word
What You’ve promised
Hallelujah, death is overcome
And we are breathing
Hallelujah, our stone hearts become
Flesh that’s beating
Hallelujah, chains have been undone
And we are singing
Hallelujah, the fire has begun
Can you feel it
Video
Tenth Avenue North - The Struggle (with lyrics)
Meaning & Inspiration
Tenth Avenue North offers us a line in "Losing" that feels like a jagged piece of glass hidden in a pile of soft fabric: “We are free to struggle.”
At first glance, it reads like a platitude—the kind of thing scribbled on a coffee shop chalkboard to make us feel better about being messy. But look at it for too long, and it starts to itch. To be "free to struggle" sounds like a contradiction. Usually, we associate freedom with the absence of weight, the moment the burden slides off our shoulders and we can finally stand upright. But the lyric flips the script. It suggests that the struggle isn't a glitch in our spiritual hardware; it’s the very territory we’ve been invited to walk upon.
When I hold these words up against the reality of a Tuesday afternoon—when the old habits are still humming beneath my skin—the phrase becomes a problem. If I’m truly free, shouldn’t I be past the struggle? We are conditioned to treat the Christian life as a race to arrive at a destination called "Victory," where the internal wars stop firing. But here, the writers are suggesting that Christ didn't just break the chains so we could sit on a throne; He broke them so we could navigate the chaos of being human without the threat of condemnation dogging our heels.
There’s a heavy tension here. Paul writes in Romans 7 about the law of his members warring against the law of his mind, that agonizing friction where he does what he hates and fails to do what he loves. That’s the real-time feedback loop this song is tapping into. We aren't fighting to earn our freedom—that "blood bought" aspect is the ground we stand on. We are fighting from it.
It’s easy to read this and think, "Great, so my failure is okay." But that’s the cheap reading. The weightier, more uncomfortable reality is that because the outcome is already settled by His cross, I no longer have to hide my bankruptcy. I don't have to put on a mask of perfection to keep God’s favor, because the price was paid before I even started the fight.
Yet, why does it still feel so bankrupt? Why do I still wake up feeling like I’m failing at the basic job of trusting Him?
The lyrics don’t provide a neat bow to wrap up that feeling. They leave me sitting in the debris of my own inconsistency. Maybe that’s the point. If we were never meant to outgrow the struggle, then our "freedom" isn't found in a life without wreckage. It’s found in the ability to stand in the middle of that fire and realize we aren't being consumed. We are just being refined. Or maybe we are just learning that we are much needier than we ever wanted to admit.
It leaves me wondering: if I finally stopped trying to escape the struggle, would I actually find the peace I’ve been sprinting toward? Or would I just have to admit that I’m still a long way from the finish line?