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 feet.  We 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.’

LOVE’S TRIUMPH

’Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’—­ROMANS viii. 38, 39.

These rapturous words are the climax of the Apostle’s long demonstration that the Gospel is the revelation of ’the righteousness of God from faith to faith,’ and is thereby ’the power of God unto salvation.’  What a contrast there is between the beginning and the end of his argument!  It started with sombre, sad words about man’s sinfulness and aversion from the knowledge of God.  It closes with this sunny outburst of triumph; like some stream rising among black and barren cliffs, or melancholy moorlands, and foaming through narrow rifts in gloomy ravines, it reaches at last fertile lands, and flows calm, the sunlight dancing on its broad surface, till it loses itself at last in the unfathomable ocean of the love of God.