Victory as a Lifestyle
If you have ever played games or sports with me, you certainly know that I am very competitive. I hate losing. This can be the sports I play, this can be cards at home with my wife, this can be video games with friends, or this can simply be suffering defeat (in my perspective or opinion) in the small moments of the day.
The other night we had a softball game for our congregation’s softball team. The winner would go on to the playoffs and the loser would not. As you can tell by the intro of this blog, we lost. Going home from the game it ate away at me. Could we have done something different? Who was to blame? What opportunities did we miss out on? What does this mean for next time?
The questions and negative self-talk kept flowing like a river and then I found myself really brooding over this loss in softball. Add a fantasy football loss to the mix and you have yourself two falls in close proximity. So, of course, these ‘failures’ continue to weigh on me throughout the day and I keep giving myself over to the distractions of ‘what if’s’ while missing out on the amazing things happening throughout the day and previous weeks.
I find it interesting that in moments of defeat, we don’t think eternally, but rather we look to temporary fixes. We settle for moments of victory that outweigh the moments of losing. We perform harder, push away other things or people, and ultimately, pursue anything to fill the void of the loss that is causing our pain.
Yes, my examples of losing in slow-pitch softball and fantasy football are definitely silly, and there are much greater losses out there: family members and friends, jobs, dreams, abilities, homes, ideas, etc. The outcome remains the same: we lose something and we look for something else to replace our moment of pain with a moment of victory.
The difficulty is that we never actually experience the pain of the moment, and we never actually encounter the eternal truth of how Christ Jesus sees us. In this past week, I have found that rather than looking for small fixes for the moment, or drive-by wins, I have been anchoring myself to the tether of the Lord’s truth in my life more. Because of this, I’m not looking for triumph in the small moments or big moments as a replacement, but rather I’m living from a posture of recognizing that victory is a lifestyle, not a moment.
Let’s unpack this for a second. Romans 8 is an encouragement of the life, hope, and eternal love we have in the Lord. This portion of Paul’s letter to the early Roman Christians is filled with beautiful imagery of the identity that is given to those who receive gracious forgiveness and glorious relationship with Christ Jesus. In this, Paul reminds the early Christians that even in the midst of persecution, famine, danger, the sword, and many other forms of torture, that nothing can separate them from the love of God in Christ Jesus. In fact, Paul goes as far to say that these early Christ followers are “more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Rm. 8:37).”
Imagine with me what it would be like to read or hear this letter read to you. This guy finds the nerve to tell me that I am victorious when all around the Roman Empire is killing my family and friends, taking jobs, removing certain opportunities for me to worship and practice faith freely, and ultimately, threatening my life if I don’t agree to their treaties of ‘peace’. Yet, this is exactly the nerve and the strength of Paul’s exhortation that is rooted so deeply and wonderfully in the power of the resurrection. It is the truth that even when the world defines things as loss, the King of the Kingdom defines them as winning and gain.
The cross looked like defeat, but the Lord proclaims the victory of forgiveness through His atoning sacrifice for sin. The grave looked like a certain loss, but the Spirit who rolls away stones now lives within our hearts declaring hope in the midst of death. The Roman Empire martyred thousands of Christians for their faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, yet it was by their faithful witness that many in Rome came to the same confession as the people they killed.
Beloved, we are surrounded by the pain of loss, by the agony of defeat, and by many things threatening to overcome us through battle and wit. Yet, I feel strongly the Lord is calling us to fasten ourselves to the center and anchor of hope we have in the Risen King who experienced defeat as a highway to victory. The One who was laid in the grave is also the One who rolled away the gravestone to call our hearts His home. And this same One continues to speak that never-ending triumph into our lives: you are more than a conqueror because I love you.
I do not write this to say, “Disregard your feelings of loss”, or “Don’t be sad because of the defeats in your life”. BY NO MEANS. This is a loss in itself if we are missing these emotions. The encouragement is that in the wind and the waves, we have the opportunity to press into the Lord who can calm those storms and bring us back to the perspective that victory is not just a thing of the past or only going to come in the future, but victory is now.
In other words, victory is our lifestyle because no matter what happens from moment to moment, we are connected to the Victorious King who roars over us with songs of triumph, reminding us that nothing can separate us from the Love He is and has for us. This is not to say we won’t experience loss, but it is to say that in the midst of loss, we get to travel with the One who empathizes with our pain in this because He has encountered it first hand and is now raising the glorious banner over our lives that speaks clearly of victory.
Paul ends this eighth chapter in Romans by writing, “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 (8:38-39).”
It is clear that the trials, tribulations, hardships, and defeats of this world will snarl at us and tempt us to walk down their pathways of false identities and temporary fixes. It is also more clear than ever that the Victorious Savior is crowning us not with band-aids for the moment, but with a lifestyle that triumphs in His finished and secure work.
We are more than conquerors not because we have earned it, not because we performed for the moment, not because we found the right fix for our momentary agony, but because the Eternal Victor has declared an everlasting love that is now the foundation and anchor of our lives.
Beloved, victory is a lifestyle, not a moment. We are more than conquerors. His love for us is real, His love for us is in every moment, and His love for us empowers us, crowned with identity, to live in the eternity of His triumph. We really are who He says we are, period. Making this our reality from moment to moment is a great victory as we receive the truth that we don’t live to get the victory, but live from it. Here’s to that lifestyle of victory: a victory we get to live from, and a victory we get to live in. Amen.
