He giveth more grace-James 4:6.
God's strength, poured into our hearts, if we wait upon Him, shall fit us
for the moments of special hard effort. "They shall run and not be weary,"
for the crises which require more than an ordinary amount of energy to be
put forth; and for the long dreary hours which require nothing but keeping
doggedly at monotonous duties, "They shall walk and not faint" [Is. 40:31].
It is a great deal easier to be up to the occasion in some shining moment of
a man's life when he knows that a supreme hour has come than it is to keep
that high tone when plodding over all the dreary plateaus of uneventful,
monotonous travel and dull duties.
It is easier to run fast for a minute than to grind along the dusty road for
a day. Many a ship has stood the tempest, and then has gone down in the
harbor because its timbers have been gnawed to pieces by white ants. And
many a man can do what is wanted in the trying moments, and yet make
shipwreck of his faith in uneventful times. "Like ships that have gone down
at sea, When heaven was all tranquility.
Soldiers who could stand firm and strike with all their might in the hour of
battle will fall asleep or have their courage ooze out at their fingers'
ends when they have to keep solitary watch at their posts through a long
winter's night. We have all a few moments in life of hard, glorious running;
but we have days and years of walking, the uneventful discharge of small
duties. We need strength for both; but paradoxical as it may sound, we need
it most for the multitude of smaller duties. We know where to get it. Let us
keep close to "Christ, the Power of God," and open our hearts to the
entering in of His unwearied strength. "Then shall the lame man leap as a
hart" [Is. 35:6], and we shall "run with patience the race that is set
before us" [Heb. 12:1], if we look to Jesus, and follow in His steps.
A man complains that his path is hidden, his course on earth seems so sad
and cloudy and weary as compared with the paths of those great stars that
move without friction, effort, confusion, dust, noise, while all these
things-friction, effort, confusion, dust, noise-beset our little carts as we
tug them along the dreary road of life. But, says Isaiah, His power does not
show itself so nobly up there among the stars as it does down here. It is
not so much to keep the strong in their strength as to give strength to the
weak. It is much to "preserve the stars from wrong," it is more to restore
and to break the power into feeble men; much to uphold all them that are
falling so that they may not fall, but it is more to raise up all those that
are fallen and are bowed down. So, brother, what God does with a poor, weak
creature like me, when He lifts up our weakness and replenishes our
weariness; pouring oil and wine into our wounds and a cordial into our lips,
and sending us, with the joy of pardon, upon our road again; that is a
greater thing than when He rolls Neptune in its mighty orbit around the
central sun, or upholds with unwearied arms, from the cycle to cycle, the
circle of the heavens with all its stars. "He giveth power to the faint" is
His divinest work.
In Celebration of Life in Him,
Dr.Jim DeBruhl, gembeaux@bellsouth.net
