MORE THAN CONQUERORS

When the Apostle Paul says we are “more than conquerors” the context is suffering and evil that cannot separate us from the love of Christ. He never says we won’t go through suffering, and we know by his life he suffered greatly. We “conqueror” because suffering and evil cannot separate us from God’s love. Scripture says God has delivered us from the “power of darkness”, literally the control of darkness, and “conveyed us into the Kingdom of his Son”, which is speaking of salvation. We were born enslaved to sin, but God gives us the freedom to choose. We still live in the world and overcoming is “by the word of our testimony and the blood of the lamb”: We have a testimony because we went through something and prevailed, lived through the suffering, just as Christ lived through the suffering of the cross. And we learn obedience to God from suffering, just as our Lord “learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” Now this is not to say God never intervenes, removing suffering from our doorstep, for He does at times intervene. We must accept His methodologies as His and His alone. And it does seem, from our perspective, God must think adversity is more effective at producing Christlikeness then miraculous intervention. As C. S. Lewis penned, God “shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

The purposeful God brings good out of all things, even our suffering: God does not “will” every thing that happens to His children – especially bad – but He does “allow” that which He does not will… He is sovereign over everything. God establishes the type and extent of every trial and test, transforming our nature while strengthening our faith. Prayer that does not accord with God’s will is not heard or answered. This is why we have never witnessed someone casting a mountain into the sea. This is not to say that God does not deliver, He does, when it accords with His will and timing. We should and must come against suffering in prayer, but we do so with the full knowledge of who we are and who we serve. We are purchased possessions of the sovereign God, bought with the blood of the Lamb, the most precious and powerful commodity known to mankind. And, we are “in Christ”, in the Beloved of God, seated even now in heaven with our Lord at the right hand of the Father. So, whether God miraculously rescues us out of life’s adversity or gives us the grace to go through it, matters not. In either case we bear witness to the miraculous, we have a testimony, and… we are becoming more and more like Jesus in the process.

PERFECT (RELENTLESS) LOVE CASTS OUT FEAR

(Rom. 8:37; Col 1:13; 1 Jn. 5:14-15; Heb. 5:8; Rev. 12:11; Rom. 8:1,28; Heb. 8:1)