Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: July 28th

CONTINUOUS STRENGTH

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."

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 plateaux 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," and we shall " run with patience the race that is set before us," if we look to Jesus, and follow in His steps.

A man complains that his path is hid, 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 round the central sun, or upholds with unwearied arms, from cycle to cycle, the circle of the heavens with all its stars. "He giveth power to the faint " is His divinest work.