AP

Romans 8:33-36  Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?  It is God who justifies.  Who then is the one who condemns?  No one. Christ Jesus who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?  As it is written:  “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

What a wonderful comfort it is to know with full assurance that there is nothing to fear in death for all those who, by God’s sovereign grace alone, are in Christ Jesus!

What does it mean to be in Christ Jesus?  I think Michael Morrow’s song embraces the concept in all its parts extremely well:

“This life I live is not my own for my Redeemer paid the price; he took it to be his alone, to be his treasure and his prize.  The things of earth I leave behind to live in worship of my King: his is the right to rule my life, mine is the joy to live for him!

“I died to sin upon the cross, I’m bound to Jesus in his death.  The old is gone and now I must rely on him for every breath.  With every footstep that I tread what mysteries he has in store; I cannot know what lies ahead but know that he has gone before.

“There is a voice that pierced the grave, a power that rolled the stone away; a sound of life, I know I’m saved – the voice of God has called my name.  So I will rise, and in the air behold the glory of the King; I will not fear to meet him there, I know my life is hid with him.”

By responding to God’s amazing grace in faith we hand over our whole lives, everything we are and everything we have into his hands – all our relationships, possessions, achievements and aspirations so that we become completely one with him.  To say, “This life I live is not my own” is a very powerful and all-embracing commitment – as Paul puts it elsewhere: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

Yes, as we live out all our days in this broken, decaying, sin-affected world, being in Christ might involve “trouble,hardship, persecution,famine, nakedness, danger, even sword” but none of these can ever “separate us from the love of Christ.”  We have been born again into a new sphere of existence, ‘Everlasting Life’, where “there is now no condemnation” (verse 1), and the living, death-conquering, Risen Lord Jesus Christ is continually ‘interceding for us’ personally by name at the throne of grace, and will not allow us to ever be separated from him!  Yes, while still here in this present ‘Land of the Dying’ (which we often refer to, quite wrongly, as the ‘land of the living’!) we do daily, for Christ’s sake, ‘face death like sheep lined up for the slaughterhouse’, but, in all these things we are “more than conquerors through him who loved us” because he has already conquered death for us and we are now alive in him!

“‘Forever with the Lord’, ‘Amen’, ‘so let it be’!  Life from the dead is in that word, ’tis immortality!  Here in this body, pent, absent from him I roam, yet nightly pitch my moving tent a day’s march nearer home. … … So when my latest breath shall rend the veil in twain, by death I shall escape from death, and life eternal gain.  Knowing as I am known, how shall I love that word, and oft repeat before the throne, ’Forever with the Lord’!”  (James Montgomery).

– Bruce Christian