More Than Conquerors (Part 2)

 The following is from A. B. Simpson's book A Larger Christian Life: 

"So let us overcome and more than overcome our spiritual foes. The best thing they do for us often is the discipline they bring us in our spiritual life. In this way, and in this alone, do we learn to exercise victorious faith and endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. The two things that the Christian needs most are the power to believe and the power to suffer, and these the enemy often comes to teach us. Not until we are ready to sink beneath the pressure do we often learn the secret of triumph.

". . . the Lord lets the devil act as drill sergeant in His army, and teach His children the use of His spiritual weapons. So we may 'count it all joy when we fall into divers temptations; knowing that the trying of our faith worketh patience.'   This, indeed, is to be 'more than conqueror,' to learn such lessons from the enemy as will fit us for his next assaults and prepare us to meet him without fear of defeat.

"There are some things that cannot easily be learned. Our spiritual senses seem to require the pressure of difficulty and suffering to awaken all their capacities and to constrain us to prove the full resources of heavenly grace. God's school of faith always is trial, and God's school of love is provocation and wrong.

"Instead therefore of murmuring against our lot and wondering why we are permitted to be so tried, let us glorify God and put our adversary to shame by wringing a blessing from Satan's hate and hell's hostility, and we shall find, after a while, that the enemy will be glad to let us alone for his own sake if not for ours."