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 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.'