SATURDAY 2ND JUNE 2018 MORNING PRAYER DEVOTION
SCRIPTURE READING:- ROMANS 8:26-39
TOPIC:- YOU ARE MORE THAN CONQUERORS [1]
TEXT:- ROMANS 8:37
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?” 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, 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.’ 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. 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 ton 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, “God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.” 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 lapped in the sweet and all-pervading consciousness of the changeless love of the heart of Christ.
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.
Prayer Points:-
1. I refuse to fall, I will make it to the end and reign with Jesus, in the name of Jesus Christ.
2. I’m more than conqueror through Him that loves me, in the name of Jesus Christ.
3. I command every battle confronting me, scatter, in the name of Jesus Christ.
