A Devotion from James Stewart
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
-Romans 8:37
God is in it with you, and you are in it with God—that is the message of the Cross on the mystery of suffering. And that message means victory. The crucified figure of Christ looks, at first glance, pathetically like defeat. It looks like the climax of all the pathos of the world. But you do not see the Cross aright at first glance. You have to gaze and gaze again. And those who do that make a marvelous discovery. They see, not Christ the pain-drenched sufferer, but Christ the mighty victor. They see the blackest tragedy of this earth becoming earth’s most dazzling triumph.
Isn’t there a wonderful sense of mastery right through the passion narrative? “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again” (John 10:18). Isn’t there royalty in that? See him marching to Jerusalem. Mark well his serenity through the last terrible days. Watch his bearing before Pilate. See him on the cross refusing the drug they offered. Hear the shout that broke on the darkness: “It is finished!” Is that defeat? Yes, it is, but not Christ’s defeat—certainly not that! But the defeat of suffering. The defeat of the mystery of evil and of all the dark tragic powers of life—and Christ’s victory! You are King of glory, O Christ—Conqueror renowned!
“But what has all this to do with me?” you ask.
Surely the answer is clear. If evil at its worst has already been met and mastered, if God has turned suffering’s most awful triumph into uttermost defeat—if that in fact has happened, and on that scale, are you to say it cannot happen on the infinitely lesser scale of your own life, by union with Christ through faith? If you will only open your nature to the invasion of Christ’s Spirit, you will do as he did. “In all these things”—these desolating, heartbreaking things that happen to us, these physical pains, these mental agonies, these spiritual midnights of the soul—“we are more than conquerors,” not through our own valor or stoic resolution, not through a creed or code or philosophy, but “through him who loved us.”
That is the only answer to the mystery of suffering, and the answer is a question: Will you let God reign? The answer is not a theory. It is a life. It is a dedicated spirit, a fully surrendered soul. May that answer be ours.