IN order to understand and feel the full force of this triumphant saying of
the Apostle, we must observe that it is a negative answer to the preceding
questions,

‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’ A
heterogeneous mass the Apostle here brigades together as an antagonistic
army. They are alike in nothing except that they are all evils. There is no
attempt at an exhaustive enumeration, or at classification. He clashes
down, as it were, a miscellaneous mass of evil things, and then triumphs
over them, and all the genus to which they belong, as being utterly
impotent to drag men away from Jesus Christ. To ask the question is to
answer it, but the form of the answer is worth notice. Instead of directly
replying, ‘No! no such powerless things as these can separate us from the
love of Christ,’ he says, ‘No! In all these things, whilst weltering amongst
them, whilst ringed round about by them, as by encircling enemies, "we are
more than conquerors.”’ Thereby, he suggests that there is something
needing to be done by us, in order that the foes may not exercise their
natural effect. And so, taking the words of my text in connection with that
to which they are an answer, we have three things — the impotent enemies
of love; the abundant victory of love; ‘We are more than conquerors’; and
the love that makes us victorious. Let us look then at these three things
briefly.

I. First of all, the impotent enemies of love.
There is contempt in the careless massing together of the foes which the
Apostle enumerates. He begins with the widest word that covers
everything — ‘affliction.’ Then he specifies various forms of it —
‘distress,’ straitening, as the word might be rendered, then he comes to
evils inflicted for Christ’s sake by hostile men — ‘persecution,’ then he
names purely physical evils, ‘hunger’ and ‘ nakedness,’ then he harks back
again to man’s antagonism, ‘peril,’ and ‘ sword.’ And thus carelessly, and
without an effort at logical order, he throws together, as specimens of their
class, these salient points, as it were, and crests of the great sea, whose?148
billows threaten to roll over us; and he laughs at them all, as impotent and
nought, when compared with the love of Christ, which shields us from
them all.

Now it must be noticed that here, in his triumphant question, the Apostle
means not our love to Christ but His to us; and not even our sense of that
love, but the fact itself. And his question is just this: — Is there any evil in
the world that can make Christ stop loving a man that cleaves to Him?
And, as I said, to ask the question is to answer it. The two things belong to
two different regions. They have nothing in common. The one moves
amongst the low levels of earth; the other dwells up amidst the abysses of
eternity, and to suppose that anything that assails and afflicts us here has
any effect in making that great heart cease to love us is to fancy that the
mists can quench the sunlight, is to suppose that that which lies down low
in the earth can rise to poison and to darken the heavens
There is no need, in order to rise to the full height of the Christian
contempt for calamity, to deny any of its terrible power. These things can
separate us from much. They can separate us from joy, from hope, from
almost all that makes life desirable. They can strip us to the very quick, but
the quick they cannot touch. The frost comes and kills the flowers, browns
the leaves, cuts off the stems, binds the sweet music of the flowing rivers in
silent chains, casts mists and darkness over the face of the solitary grey
world, but it does not touch the life that is in the root.
And so all these outward sorrows that have power over the whole of the
outward life, and can slay joy and all but stifle hope, and can ban men into
irrevocable darkness and unalleviated’ solitude, they do not touch in the
smallest degree the secret bond that binds the heart to Jesus, nor in any
measure affect the flow of His love to us. Therefore we may front them
and smile at them and say:

Do as thou wilt, devouring time,
With this wide world, and all its fading sweets’
‘my flesh and my heart faileth, 
but God is the strength of my heart, and my
portion for ever.’

You need not be very much afraid of anything being taken from you as
long as Christ is left you. You will not be altogether hopeless so long as
Christ, who is our hope, still speaks His faithful promises to you, nor will
the world be lonely and dark to them who feel that they are lapt in the?149
sweet and all-pervading consciousness of the changeless love of the heart
of Christ. ‘Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution?’ — in any of these
things,’ we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’
Brethren, that is the Christian way of looking at all externals, not only at
the dark and the sorrowful, but at the bright and the gladsome. If the
withdrawal of external blessings does not touch the central sanctities and
sweetness of a life in communion with Jesus, the bestowal of external
blessedness does not much brighten or gladden it. We can face the
withdrawal of them all, we need not covet the possession of them all, for
we have all in Christ; and the world without His love contributes less to
our blessedness and our peace than the absence of all its joys with His love
does. So let us feel that earth, in its givings and in its withholdings, is
equally impotent to touch the one thing that we need, the conscious
possession of the love of Christ.

All these foes, as I have said, have no power over the fact of Christ’s love
to us, but they have power, and a very terrible power, over our
consciousness of that love; and we may so kick against the pricks as to
.lose, in the pain of our sorrows, the assurance of His presence, or be so
fascinated by the false and vulgar sweetnesses and promises of the world
as, in the eagerness of our chase after them, to lose our sense of the all-sufficing
certitude of His love. Tribulation does not strip us of His love, but
tribulation may so darken our perceptions that we cannot see the sun. Joys
need not rob us of His heart, but joys may so fill ours, as that there shall be
no longing for His presence within us. Therefore let us not exaggerate the
impotence of these foes, but feel that there are real dangers, as in the
sorrows so in the blessings of our outward life, and that the evil to be
dreaded is that outward things, whether in their bright or in their dark
aspects, may come between us and the home of our hearts, the love of the
loving Christ.

II. So then, note next, the abundant victory of love. Mark how the
Apostle, in his lofty and enthusiastic way, is not content here with simply
saying that he and his fellows conquer. It would be a poor thing, he seems
to think, if the balance barely inclined to our side, if the victory were but
just won by a hairs breadth and triumph were snatched, as it were, out of
the very jaws of defeat. There must be something more than that to
correspond to the power of the victorious Christ that is in us. And so, he
says, we very abundantly conquer; we not only hinder these things which
he has been enumerating from doing that which it is their aim apparently to?150
do, but we actually convert them-into helpers or allies. The ‘more than
conquerors’ seems to mean, if there is any definite idea to be attached to it,
the conversion of the enemy conquered into a friend and a helper. The
American Indians had a superstition that every foe tomahawked sent fresh
strength into the warrior’s arm. And so all afflictions and trials rightly
borne, and therefore overcome, make a man stronger, and bring him nearer
to Jesus Christ.

Note then, further, that not only is this victory more than bare victory,
being the conversion of the enemy into allies, but that it is a victory which
is won even whilst we are in the midst of the strife. It is not that we shall be
conquerors in some far-off heaven, when the noise of battle has ceased and
they hang the trumpet in the hall, but it is here now, in the hand-to-hand
and foot-to-foot death-grapple that we do overcome. No ultimate victory,
in some far-off and blessed heaven, will be ours unless moment by moment,
here, to-day, ‘we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’
So, then, about this abundant victory there are these things to say: — You
conquer the world only, then, when you make it contribute to your
conscious possession of the love of Christ. That is the real victory, the only
real victory in life. Men talk about overcoming here on earth, and they
mean ,thereby the accomplishment of their designs. A man has ‘victory,’ as
it is phrased, in the world’s strife, when he secures for himself the world’s
goods at which he has aimed, but that is not the Christian idea of the
conquest of calamity. Everything that makes me feel more thrillingly in my
inmost heart the verity and the sweetness of the love of Jesus Christ as my
very own, is conquered by me and compelled to subserve my highest good,
and everything which slips a film between me and Him, which obscures the
light of His face to me, which makes me less desirous of, and less sure of,
and less happy in, and less satisfied with, His love, is an enemy that has
conquered me. And all these evils as the world calls them, and as our
bleeding hearts have often felt them to be, are converted into allies and
friends when they drive us to Christ, and keep us close to Him, in the
‘conscious possession of His sweet and changeless love. That is the
victory, and the only victory. Has the world helped me to lay hold of
Christ? Then I have conquered it. Has the world loosened my grasp upon
Him? Then it has conquered me.

Note then, further, that this abundant victory depends on how we deal with
the changes of our outward lives, our sorrows or our joys. There is?151
nothing, per se, salutary in affliction, there is nothing, per se, antagonistic
to Christian faith in it either. No man is made better by his sorrows, no man
need be made worse by them. That depends upon how we take the things
which come storming against us. The set of your sails, and the firmness of
your grasp upon the tiller, determine whether the wind shall carry you to
the haven or shall blow you out, a wandering waif, upon a shoreless and
melancholy sea. There are some of you that have been blown away from
your moorings By sorrow. There are some professing Christians who have
been hindered in their work, and had their peace and their faith shattered all
but irrevocably, because they have not accepted, in the spirit in which they
were sent, the trials that have come for their good.
The worst of all afflictions is a wasted affliction, and .they are all wasted
unless they teach us more of the reality and the blessedness of the love of
Jesus Christ.

III. Lastly, notice the love which makes us conquerors.
The Apostle, with a wonderful instinctive sense of fitness, names Christ
here by a name congruous to the thoughts which occupy his mind, when he
speaks of Him that loved us. His question has been, Can anything separate
us from the love of Christ? And his answer is, So far from that being the
case, that very love, by occasion of sorrows and afflictions, tightens its
grasp upon us, and, by the communication of itself to us, makes us more
than conquerors. This great love of Jesus Christ, from which nothing can
separate us, will use the very things that seem to threaten our separation as
a means of coming nearer to us in its depth and in its preciousness.
The Apostle says ‘Him that loved us,’ and the words in the original
distinctly point to some one fact as being the great instance of love. That is
to say they point to His death. And so we may say Christ’s love helps us to
conquer because in His death He interprets for us all possible sorrows. If it
be true that love to each of us nailed Him there, then nothing that can come
to us but must be a love-token, and a fruit of that same love. The Cross is
the key to all tribulation, and shows it to be a token and an instrument of
an unchanging love.

Further, that great love of Christ helps us to conquer, because in His
sufferings and death He becomes the Companion of all the weary. The
rough, dark, lonely road changes its look when we see His footprints there,
not without specks of blood in them, where the thorns tore His feel We?152
conquer our afflictions if we recognise that ‘in all our afflictions He was
afflicted,’ and that Himself has drunk to its bitterest dregs the cup which
He commends to our lips. He has left a kiss upon its margin, and we need
not shrink when He holds it out to us and says ‘Drink ye all of it.’ That one
thought of the companionship of the Christ in our sorrows makes us more
than conquerors.

And lastly, this dying Lover of our souls communicates to us all, if we will,
the strength whereby we may coerce all outward things into being helps to
the fuller participation of His perfect love. Our sorrows and all the other
distracting externals do seek to drag us away from Him. Is all that happens
in counteraction to that pull of the world, that we tighten our grasp upon
Him, and will not let Him go; as some poor wretch might the horns of the
altar that did not respond to his grasp? Nay ! what we lay hold of is no
dead thing, but a living hand, and it grasps us more tightly than we can
ever grasp it. So because He holds us, and not because we hold Him, we
shall not be dragged away, by anything outside of our own weak and
wavering souls, and all these embattled foes may come against us, they
may shear off everything else, they cannot sever Christ from us unless we
ourselves throw Him away. ‘In this thou shalt conquer.’ ‘They overcame
by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of His testimony.’