Sunday, January 29, 2012

More Than Conquerors Through Christ




“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”


~Romans 8:35, 37 (NRSV)


In a supreme victory the victor gains ground forever indisputable. They have rights permanently fixed. There is peace to the defined requirements of their need. And there is also much safety—the full realisation of hope, notwithstanding any imagined or actual threat.


This describes the Kingdom: the kingdom of God.


This is the reality we have long yearned for, to feel truly at peace, and beyond any other claim on our souls. When we’ve been bought and won by our Lord—the Saviour of humankind—we have realised our full share in the Kingdom of Grace where victory has been established in the eternal realm.


There is now no reasonable fear. There is now no separation from God because of the love of Christ sealed in one act.


Christ’s Love Defeats All Fear


If we will allow, the Spirit of God accessed by faith in Jesus will disarm our non-clinical fear. This will occur as surely as the Holy Spirit ministers to us in our reading of the Word—particularly passages like Romans chapter 8—and in our prayer time.


We can know with all surety that what has been done on the cross, and through the Father’s vindication of Jesus in proving him as God through resurrection, has been done completely and for all eternity. It, as a result, is incontestable. Not only were the claims for evil stopped, their power has been nullified to an unprecedented extent.


The spirit of evil in Satan is a veneer power—it is a mirage—and it only, truly, has power when we attach to it, power; though this power has incredible cunning. Its standard modus operandi is deceit manifest in myriad form of fear; such that will convict us for evil, principally not instituting faith.


This veneer power is crushed, however, at the presentation of truth.


Any time we institute knowledge of our salvation, glorying in the established fact of Spiritual victory, humbly obeying the Lord any way we can, and this way by thought for truth, we trample this evil power in the all-conquering power of God.


More Than Conquerors


In this way we are more than conquerors; if hardships won’t tear us away from the bosom of love, and indeed they push us even closer—and the same occurs for distresses, persecutions, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword—then we not only have nothing to fear, we have every reason to hope.


The more that is against us, the more that is actually for us. That is the gospel truth.


That is why the Gospel power is beyond evil’s reconciliation—the more that is against us, the more God works for us, through our faith, and the more the love of Christ can be experienced and known.


© 2012 S. J. Wickham.

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