WRITTEN BY MICHELE HANSEN
Based on Revelation 19:6-8, this year we are exploring how the Believer’s righteous acts cover us in Christ’s righteousness and represent our Savior to the world.
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33, NIV)
I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like turning on the news anymore because of how dark and dreary, at times downright depressing, the world has become. The scripture for this theme suggests that it wasn’t much better back then and even as far back as our unseemly ejection from the Garden of Eden. It is the reality of the fallen world.
To be honest, humanity doesn’t know what it’s like not to struggle. We struggle to be born, and we struggle to grow, we struggle to live and struggle to die. We struggle physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. We struggle not to struggle with our struggles…
Jesus comes along and says “I know you are struggling. It’s the way of the sin broken world. But I want you to be encouraged. I have come that in Me you can have victory even in the worst of struggles. I have defeated the power and effects of this sin sick world, and I have shown you how to walk in triumph.”
And we’re like… “Cool…Um, how again?”
Jesus had been talking to them in the verses before our focus verse about the fact that He was going to be killed. They were mystified and couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of amazing things that Jesus was telling them. He was explaining the two sides of the same coin in that they would be grief stricken, but it would turn to joy when He sent the Helper, the Holy Spirit, and in His coming, they would understand.
The Adversary, the devil, does not want life restored to the children of God. He is in the world to keep it in chaos and upheaval. He has limited power to do just that, and the Believer lives in the world with the broken and deceived, and that brings the trouble that Jesus was talking about. Through our own issues and the unredeemed of the world, it’s “the trouble.”
Jesus loves us so much that He wanted us to understand that life in this world is hard any way you look at it. He also wanted us to know that He had come into the world to “overcome” the broken and deliver it back into the hands of Almighty God and His children. We needed a way back to our Father and the only way to do that was to bridge the chasm with His very own life.
There is a fascinating truth about the Holy Spirit in v.8. The NIV says, “When He [Holy Spirit] comes, He will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment…” He is going to prove to everyone, who believes, that the way of the world is wrong, about how sin is absolutely devastating (but no one who is “in the world” can see it), about God’s righteousness (because Jesus defeated the power of sin and death and is alive in heaven with God the Father), and about judgement because the devil knows that he is condemned. (But still roams the world, tormenting and deceiving, even himself, for a time).
Here is an absolutely upside down truth about our Triune (3 in 1) God. We can have joy in our lives in the here and now because of the finished work of Christ. Jesus completed the work of righteousness in the believer who has accepted Christ as Savior. Jesus sends His Holy Spirit to live in the believer at this point because the believer has a transformed, cleansed spirit, fit for the indwelling God though Holy Spirit. And in that truth, everything the Father says to the Son is transferred to the Holy Spirit and relayed to us in a way we can understand. This is the work. This is the joy. This is the freedom and deliverance. The devil can not touch this work of God.
So here we are. The redeemed of the Lord, if we have accepted the free gift of God’s salvation through Jesus, and so are filled with the Holy Spirit. With all that backing us up, you would think we would be able to “Skip to my loo, my darlin” all through life. That is not reality and reality takes our breath many times. Life can be just…really hard.
It doesn’t mean something is wrong with us. Jesus said, “I have overcome the world.” He did it. When we submit to His authority in our lives, we are given the right, as His children, to partake in the victory, but we have to get out of the way. Our “flesh” (the human part of us) still fights the perfect Spirit of God in us. Paul talked about this in Romans 7:15 NLT which says, I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. If Paul struggled, we know we are going to.
The truth remains. Jesus has overcome the world by defeating death and the grave. The sin brought into the world by the decision of one man has been forever reversed by the perfect decision of the Man-God, Christ. Romans 8:31-39 NIV sums it all up:
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 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. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Take heart. Christ our Righteousness has overcome the world in its troubles and chaos, to encourage us to live, fully alive, displaying His righteousness to the world.
