Reformed Theology Should Produce Conquerors, Not Losers
Our doctrine isn't the problem, we just don't believe it enough.
Insecure people don’t build much. When they do, they’re often trying to prove something. But secure people who are comfortable in their own skin seem to build things more effortlessly. The centerpiece of Reformed theology should make us conquerors, not losers. But that’s not always what happens.
Reformed Christians hold to the doctrines of grace in our theological systems but end up denying them in practice.
When I was a younger Christian, I struggled with a lot of doubts that hindered my faith and growth. I wondered, “what if Christianity is wrong and the Muslims are right?” Or, “what if the Jews are right, Jesus is an imposter, and I’m a blasphemer for worshiping a mere man?” Or, “what if the atheists are right and I’m just wasting my time and energy?” Or even, “what if Christianity is correct, but I believe the wrong tradition such that my soul is in jeopardy and I’m not truly saved?”
Under all these doubts was the fear that I was deceived, that God didn’t truly love me, and I was damned to hell. Thankfully, the Lord led me to resources to resolve all these questions, and God turned those doubts into a calling. But I still remember the fear, and that fear can still linger in the hearts of Reformed Christians whose good doctrine hasn’t completed the journey from their heads to their hearts.
Christians who feel this way are insecure in the love of God, which leads them to take their eyes off of Jesus, focus on themselves, and start trying to earn God’s approval. A Christian who is insecure in God’s love will be too afraid to attempt anything daring because he or she is afraid of being wrong. So they play it safe. They focus on killing sin, which is a good thing, but they don’t take any risks to build things that might fail. They’re afraid of failure because they doubt God’s love for them.
Some traditions overemphasize the love of God at the expense of his holiness and wrath. They might feel more secure in God’s love, but it’s a warped love that doesn’t fully account for man’s sin. They tend to be more antinomian. They have a false confidence that God just adores them and can’t live without them. We’re right to be critical of those teachings. But that’s not my point. My point is that Reformed theology presents the love of God more fully, and if we believed it more deeply, we’d be more confident to take risks and build great things. Simply put, we can be so introspective and hyper-cautious that we doubt God could ever love us at all, thus making us too insecure to build anything.
God Is For You
Romans 8:31 says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Note that first phrase: “God is for us.” When squishy evangelicals say “God is for you,” it makes Reformed Christians wince a little. Our instinct is to recoil a bit and think, “God is for GOD!” Yes, that’s true, but the two statements are not mutually exclusive. We get theologically technical at precisely the moment Paul is being most pastoral. Perhaps we resist it because we’re insecure in God’s love and verses like this sound too good to be true.
Paul asks the question in a way that answers itself. Reformed Christians don’t want to treat God like a cosmic vending machine, so God’s favor stays largely theoretical. We accept it as a doctrine but then live as if God is managing us from a distance, watching for infractions, one bad season of prayer away from withdrawing his favor.
I’ll admit I do this. I can easily fall into the habit of assuming God’s love for me is proportional to my sanctification. When I do this, I think about myself a lot more than I think about Jesus, which compounds the problem. Being insecure in God’s love makes me more self-focused, introspective, and cautious. I fear I’m being presumptuous of God’s love, so I start trying to prove to him I’m worthy of it.
The insecure Christian obeys God in a vain attempt to gain God’s approval, while the secure Christian obeys God because he’s confident he’s already gained it apart from his effort. The insecure Christian serves God like an employee who’s worried about his job security. The secure Christian serves God like the owner’s son who is fully invested in the family business.
If you’re an insecure Christian, you have a nagging, low-grade fear that God isn’t actually for you. Practically, that fear makes you timid. You don’t attempt bold things for the kingdom because you’re too unsure of your standing to risk getting it wrong. This isn’t a minor pastoral problem.
I notice this especially in the Reformed ecosystem of which I’m a part. Since there’s so much love-love-love talk from squishy evangelicals, we end up overcorrecting. We fully embrace God’s holiness, justice, and sovereignty, but God’s love can sometimes be held at arms length. Or it gets theologized into oblivion until it no longer carries the pastoral weight intended in the New Testament. We end up theologically careful and personally miserable.
What Christ Did at Calvary
Paul said, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). He also said, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom 8:32).
God is the most supremely valuable being in existence. It follows that he loves what is supremely valuable, namely, himself. This might sound strange to modern ears, but it’s not a character flaw. It would be idolatry for God to love something more than himself, because nothing is more worthy of love than God. The Father’s love for the Son is the most perfect love in the universe. His love is eternal, unbounded, and without diminishment of any kind. God delights in his Son the way nothing else in creation can be delighted in, because nothing else in creation can compare to him.
What did God do? God gave him up. Why? Because he set his covenant love on us from before the foundation of the world and made us the objects of his eternal affection.
Which created a problem. Our sin stood between God and his beloved, and his own righteousness demanded its punishment. He couldn’t simply overlook it, because he loves his own holiness too much for that. So in a real sense, God himself was the obstacle between God and his people. The only way forward was for him to bear the penalty himself.
That’s what the cross was. The blood of Christ was the price God paid to acquire his bride, and he paid it gladly. Hebrews says Jesus endured the cross “for the joy set before him” (Heb 12:2). They didn’t need to nail him to the cross. His love would have kept him there.
So consider what Paul is arguing. If God was willing to give the most precious thing in existence, at the greatest possible cost, on what grounds would he withhold his favor from you? Paul said, “how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (v32), The cross is the guarantee of God’s continuing generosity towards us.
This means every time you catch yourself thinking God doesn’t love you because money is tight, your prayers went unanswered, or because your prayer life is weak, you need to go back to the hill outside Jerusalem and remember what was decided there. God gave you his Son. What more could he possibly give to prove the point?
Reformed Christians know all of this. We can say it in our sleep. The problem is the distance between knowing it and let it sink so deeply into our bones that we feel it all the time. And when that happens, we become unconquerable.
More than Conquerors
Paul continues, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom 8:37). The Greek behind “more than conquerors” is a single word, huper-nikao. You could think of it as “super conquerors.” He’s describing what happens in our lives when we finally apprehend the astounding depths of God’s love.
We’re not merely survivors, white-knuckling our way through life till we get to heaven. No, we become super-conquerors “through him who loved us.” I’m talking about a joyful, victorious posture in your ordinary, Christian life. In other words, the capacity to conquer comes from Christ’s love. Which means the key to living like a conqueror is being more convinced that God is for you.
This is how Spurgeon put it: “Paul was so persuaded that Christ would never leave him that he became a fighter. He went in with all his might against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Some say this doctrine would send us to sleep. It never does. It wakes us up.”
This is what insecure Christianity gets exactly backwards. It assumes confidence in God’s love would render us more passive, as though we’d start taking God for granted. I’d say, anyone who takes God’s love for granted hasn’t fully comprehended it yet.
Paul says in his own testimony that he was beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, stoned, and more. He planted churches in cities that wanted him dead. He wrote his most triumphant theology from a prison in Rome. The security of God’s love didn’t make him passive, it made him dangerous. It can do the same for you. I pray Christians would be more dangerous, like Paul was.
The Christian who is insecure in God’s love is too focused on not sinning that he ends up not building anything. He buries his talent in the ground because he’s afraid of his master’s severity. But the man who is fully confident in God’s love is fearless enough to take risks, knowing that God will love him despite the outcome.
How do we know this? Because John tells us, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). As Paul brought the first half of his letter to the Ephesians to a close, he erupted in a beautiful prayer that they, “being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Eph 3:18).
The Verdict
At the end of Romans 8, Paul ends his argument like a lawyer resting his case. He summons every kind of power one could possibly conceive of and holds it up against the overwhelming power of God’s unfailing love. He says, “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (v38-39). None of these powers can withstand the power of God’s love.
He opens this statement by saying “I am sure” which doesn’t quite capture the utter certainty of what he’s saying. The original verb is in the perfect tense, indicating a rational, settled, unalterable certainty. It’s a final verdict, not a fleeting feeling.
Paul’s certainty was anchored in his own life experience. He catalogued his various suffering in 2 Cor 11, which included five beatings with 39 lashes, 3 beatings with rods, three shipwrecks, one stoning, and a night adrift at sea, not to mention being constantly hounded by danger, hunger, thirst, and the incessant pressure of anxiety for all the churches (v23-29). Satan threw the kitchen sink at him, but amazingly, Paul’s certainty of God’s love only grew through it.
Just like Paul, we, too are foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and already glorified in the mind of God. Not one link in that golden chain is broken because not one of them depends on us.
Reformed Christians have the richest account of this love in all of Christendom. We trace it from before the foundation of the world through the golden chain to the certain glorification that awaits us in eternity. The doctrine is there. It just hasn’t finished the journey from our heads to our hearts.
God is for you. The cross proved it. Don’t doubt it, trust and believe it.
I have a book coming out soon from Canon Press that develops some of the themes highlighted in this essay. It’s about why the church keeps losing, and why so many of our most trusted teachers have convinced us that losing is more faithful. It is the belief that passivity, retreat, and defeat are more Christlike than courage, ambition, and power. The first half diagnoses the problem and the people responsible for it. The second half prescribes the remedy. It describes what it actually looks like to live as more than a conqueror in ordinary Christian life. I wrote this book to help the church break free from this “loser theology” mindset and pursue a life of Christian victory.
I spoke to the publisher last week. An official title and release date are coming soon. They hope to have preorders ready to go in a few weeks and a ship date in early summer. I’ll keep you updated as things progress. Make sure you subscribe now so you don’t miss anything!