I Have Overcome the World

This Lord’s Day we continue in Jesus’ Upper Room Discourse with His disciples in John 16. In the first part of the chapter He reminds them of the promised Holy Spirit who would be their Helper as they live life apart from Christ’s physical presence. The sorrow of losing their friend to a horrible and unjust death will be all the more painful because the world will rejoice at His death. Yet, as a mother’s pain in childbirth is transformed to joy when she holds that baby, so too the disciple's pain will be transformed to joy at Christ’s resurrection and later their own. And yet as you and I are in the already and not yet of our salvation, Jesus reminds us to live life with a firm grasp that the trouble we face will not overcome us, but rather Jesus has already overcome it and the world.