f Christ? Then
I have conquered it. Has the world loosened my grasp upon Him? Then
it has conquered me.

Note then, further, that this abundant victory depends on how we deal
with the changes of our outward lives, our sorrows or our joys. There
is nothing, _per se_, salutary in affliction, there is nothing,
_per se_, antagonistic to Christian faith in it either. No man
is made better by his sorrows, no man need be made worse by them.
That depends upon how we take the things which come storming against
us. The set of your sails, and the firmness of your grasp upon the
tiller, determine whether the wind shall carry you to the haven or
shall blow you out, a wandering waif, upon a shoreless and melancholy
sea. There are some of you that have been blown away from your
moorings by sorrow. There are some professing Christians who have
been hindered in their work, and had their peace and their faith
shattered all but irrevocably, because they have not accepted, in the
spirit in which they were sent, the trials that have come for their
good. The worst of all afflictions is a wasted affliction, and they
are all wasted unless they teach us more of the reality and the
blessedness of the love of Jesus Christ.

III. Lastly, notice the love which makes us conquerors.

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 instrum