I experienced World War II as a kid in a British colony in Africa and remember the intense focus on VICTORY! You would see V FOR VICTORY signs carved on the desks at school, displayed in shop windows, and on show on the counters inside. We engraved V and its Morse code symbol on our pencil boxes and wrote it in our notebooks. Moviegoers watched for Winston Churchill’s famous V salute in the newsreels which preceded the main show. VICTORY was very much on our minds.
In one of Winston Churchill’s famous statements, made early in the war, he said the British people would fight “on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” To gain the victory the people would have to fight and the leadership not only gave their vocal encouragement, but demonstrated their willingness to be physically involved.
The Christian faces battles every day in which he or she must take up the weapons of spiritual warfare and fight. Paul says of the battles he experienced in his apostolic work: “Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). He experienced spiritual victory in his fight against all that opposed God and His truth.
The apostle gives us an insight to his personal spiritual battles as a result of which he feels he has been taken prisoner by sin: “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate …. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want …. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members” (Romans 7:15-23).
After telling the story of the inner battles he experiences as he wages war on the sin which he finds himself committing, Paul sounds a victorious note with this question and its answer: “Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24-25). You can almost feel the apostle’s joy at knowing that victory is possible in Jesus. Paul, talking about the Christian’s ultimate victory over death itself at the resurrection says, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57).
Ultimate victory comes to those who are on Jesus’ side, who live for Him, and who serve Him. He helps them fight the day to day battles with sin in their lives, and He will greet them in heaven after their victory over death when they are raised to be with Him eternally.