Right Now

I wrote this piece a few days ago to share with our small group and some of our ministry leaders at church. God kept nudging me to share it here too, so if you're one of the readers who needs to hear this today, keep reading!

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
- Romans 8:37 –

            It’s one of those pump-your-fist-in-the-air verses we love to quote. In fact, I found it on a list of verse to study, meditate on, and pray during this pandemic. It’s a great verse for that, by the way. But it’s the kind of verse that deserves a little extra elbow-grease on the study end of that three-part suggestion.

            It deserves extra study, because it begins with the words “in all these things…” What things? If you glance back up a couple of verses, you see a question that lists these things. Romans 8:35 says, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”

            Did the words trouble and hardship stick out to you like they did for me? I did a little study on those two words from the original language and learned this: the word trouble comes from the word Thlipsis, which means to crush, press, compress, squeeze. Tribulation, affliction pressing in from the outside. It demonstrates grievous physical affliction, or mental and spiritual distress.  Hmmm…anyone relate with that? How about hardship? It comes from the word Stenochoria, which means literally a confinement to an uncomfortably narrow space. Symbolically, it means great distress that arises from within. Again…anyone?

            We’re pressed in and crushed by outside fears and regulations. We’re confined to the narrow spaces of our homes (which may suddenly be feeling much narrower than square footage would indicate). And some of us are distressed from within, facing fears that well up from places we didn’t even know existed in our hearts.

            Yet in all these things, we are more than conquerors. Did you see that? MORE than conquerors! I looked that one up too, and it said that means to prevail mightily…to vanquish beyond…to experience a decisive victory. So in all the crushing and confining we’re experiencing from within ourselves and coming at us from outside forces, we aren’t going to just squeak by in our hearts. We are MORE THAN CONQUERORS. We might not be able to perceive it in the moment, but we are prevailing mightily. We’re in the middle of a victory of the soul that will be easily distinguishable – not determined through still photos from the finish line.

            And how will it happen? Through Him who loved us. Through the tender esteem and concern (which we call love) that comes from God to us.

            One more note for you, here. This verse doesn’t say we will be more than conquerors. It says we are. Right now. More than conquering all the things that pile up around us and within us. Right now He loves us. Right now He’s giving us the power to prevail mightily.

            Right now.