In All These Things
By Tom Gilbreath
How do we handle the pressures of living in the end times? Experts give dire environmental warnings. Decades of profligate spending by the world’s governments have made the global economy precarious. Supply lines for medicines and other essentials stretch halfway around the world, making our way of life vulnerable and potentially unsustainable.
Enemies gain strength. The nuclear threat reaches toward another all-time high. Defeat one terrorist and, with the help of skewed media and professional campus atheists, ten more arise. Deception runs rampant. It touches everyone, with the young especially vulnerable.
We are not helpless in these times. God is with us. We pray for our leaders that God will help them safely navigate the troubled waters that seem to be engulfing everything. But we also know that the Bible warns about times of persecution and difficulty. We are in such a time right now.
Romans 8:36 says, “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” That doesn’t just describe a few first century Christians, but a growing number of believers around the world today. On February 13th in the Congo, an ISIS-affiliated group known as the ADF kidnapped and then beheaded 70 Christians. Imagine that horror. Imagine Christian children in that region, every day fearing for their lives. This situation has become all too common around the globe.
Even without violent persecution, we face “many dangers, toils, and snares.” Lies and temptations threaten the young, while isolation and disease loom over the aged. To the normal cares of life, add the attitudes and events that turn the last days into “perilous times.” If we let it, the stress of it all can become debilitating.
But the very next verse puts the harsh trials into their true, beautiful, and astounding context. Romans 8:37 says, “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
If you have walked with the Lord for a while, you can probably recount times when God miraculously removed you from a problem, or He removed the problem from you. But this is not talking about that kind of miracle. This is talking about the miracle that happens as we pass through the storm. David stepped into the Valley of Elah to face Goliath. The three Hebrew children refused to renounce their God, were thrown into the fiery furnace, and in the fire found their Deliverer waiting.
“IN all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” IN the pain, danger, and trauma of our world… we win. “We are more than conquerors.” Our victory is decisive. We win overwhelmingly.
In John 16:33, Jesus put everything in context. “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
