Be An Overcomer with Good!

Our Friday Devotion comes to us from Council Member, Lahoma:

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Romans 12:21

Beloved brothers and sisters, we are living in an evil world with people committing evil acts, and at times it may even feel as if evil is winning and darkness is pressing in on all sides to engulf us and pull us down. As a believer in Jesus Christ, what is our response to be when we sense evil is attempting overtake us? What should we do when others wrong us and do harm to us and do evil things? The entire chapter of Romans 12 addresses the topic of evil in the context of those who were being persecuted for their faith but it can also be applied to anyone who is receiving ill treatment from another person for known or unknown evil reasons. It is our human nature, our righteous indignation, and our sense of injustice that flares up when we are treated unfairly or wrongly, and we are tempted to return evil for evil as if that will make things even somehow. All that this accomplishes is more damage and more pain, and an increase to the evil that is prevailing in our circumstance. Evil only feeds evil and allows that evil to “overcome” us, it sucks us down to its level and only brings glory to the devil, and dear brothers and sisters, this must never be the case in the lives of God’s children. Vengeance is not our responsibility to distribute no matter what the situation…. We should never resort to returning evil for evil done to us. Vengeance is the responsibility of God and God alone. He sees, He knows, and He will intervene, but I believe we hinder God’s response when we step out of His Will and into our own will of vengeance driven responses instead of returning blessings to those who curse us.

What God expects of us is to return God’s love and grace toward those who wrong us and who have wronged us in the past. Some of you reading this are in such dark difficult situations that you cannot imagine how it would be humanly possible to follow the directions of Romans 12:21. When I consider some of the things that I or other people are facing, it helps me to remember the powerful testimony of Corrie Ten Boom’s life as she survived through so much evil and atrocities done against her and her family during World War II in the German concentration camps simply because of their support for the Jewish people. She and her sister were imprisoned and suffered greatly at the hands of the soldiers. Her sister became ill and Corrie watched her die there, and then one day, for no apparent reason, Corrie was released. She began a ministry as an evangelist and travelled all over the place talking about God’s love and about forgiveness. Quite unexpectedly one night, she was confronted with making a choice to overcome evil with good at one of her outreach services. Here are her words telling the story of it:

“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing centre at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain blanched face. He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message Fräulein”, he said “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your Forgiveness. As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me. And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”

The Greek word for “overcome” in our Romans 12 passage is nikao, which means "to be conquering, overcoming, vanquishing". It appears 28 times in the New Testament, and used 24 of those times by the apostle John (17 of which appear in Revelation). Both times that Paul uses it in this verse it appears in the Present Tense and the Imperative Mood. This means this is issued as a command which is to be carried out continuously. In other words, God wants us to continuously be in the act of overcoming evil with good in our current situations, and to use our spiritual weapons of grace and mercy and God’s love to overcome the evil we face. The New Living Translation of this same verse reads “Don’t let evil get the best of you, but conquer evil by doing good.” God expects this of us not because it is easy, but because He knows it takes great surrender on our part to trust Him to make things right. He is glorified when we return blessings for curses, He is honored when we choose to not defend our right to take an eye for an eye, and instead offer a cup of cool water to the raging soul of those who persecute and assault us. A soft word turns away wrath, a gentle reply can calm an angry sea, and when let go and let God, then HE is more than able to set things straight and take up your cause. Even in those times when you don’t think you can, just ask God to give you HIS love, HIS forgiveness, and then reach out your hand in faith and choose GOOD instead of evil. You will be blessed in the midst of it. Jesus prayed for His Father to forgive the ones that were torturing and killing and doing evil to Him as He hung on the cross, and Jesus will stand by you and empower you as you extend the same mercy and grace to those who have wronged you.

Shalom,
sister Lahoma

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