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 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.