The Fight You Will Win

“But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 15:57 (KJV)

Sibbes is honest: the Christian life is a fight. “There can be no victory where there is no combat,” he says. When Christ starts to rule in someone’s heart, sin fights back. There is, he says, “an army of lusts” that mutinies against him.

That can be discouraging. You become a Christian and expect everything to be easy, and then find that temptation is still there, old habits still pull at you, and you sometimes lose.

But Sibbes’s last chapter is full of hope. Here is the key:

“The victory lieth not upon us, but upon Christ, who hath taken upon him as to conquer for us, so to conquer in us.”

The outcome doesn’t depend on how strong you are. If it did, he says, we might well be afraid. It depends on Christ, who has promised to finish the work he started. Your sins are his enemies as well as yours, and he will take your side against them.

So Sibbes says: don’t look so much at your enemies as at your Captain. Don’t focus on what they threaten, but on what he promises. “We have more for us, than against us.” And then, with a smile, he asks: “What coward would not fight, when he is sure of victory?”

He adds a challenge: “None are here overcome, but he that will not fight.” The only way to lose is to give up. Keep fighting, even when you are tired, because the result is certain.

Sibbes ends his book with a prayer you can borrow: “Lord Jesus, thou hast promised not to quench the smoking flax, not to break the bruised reed; cherish thine own grace in me, leave me not to myself, the glory shall be thine.”

Sibbes died in London in 1635. A week before, he preached on Jesus’ words, “Let not your heart be troubled.” When someone asked him how his soul was, he said he would do God much wrong if he did not say, very well. The writer Izaak Walton said of him, “Heaven was in him, before he was in heaven.”

And his most famous sentence sums up the whole book:

“There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.”

Whatever you are carrying, however weak your faith, however many times you have fallen, that is still true. Jesus will not break you. He will not snuff you out. He will keep going with you until the victory is won.

One thing to do this week: write Sibbes’s prayer on a card or in your phone notes: “Lord Jesus, thou hast promised not to quench the smoking flax, not to break the bruised reed; cherish thine own grace in me, leave me not to myself, the glory shall be thine.” Pray it every morning this week.