Don’t focus on what you can’t do today, do the things you can do. If we spend all our time thinking about what we have lost, we will not see what we have in our hands right now. God works with what we have, not with what we don’t have. The miracle is in your hands.
Strength
Nita Johnson
When a person works an eight-hour day and receives a fair day’s pay for his time, that is a wage. When a person competes with an opponent and receives a trophy for his performance, that is a prize. When a person receives appropriate recognition for his long service or high achievements, that is an award. But when a person is not capable of earning a wage, can win no prize, and deserves no award – yet receives such a gift anyway – that is a good picture of God’s unmerited favour. This is what we mean when we talk about the grace of God.
Jane Douglas White
Too often we say, “I have no talent to teach a Sunday school class.” “My home is not nice enough to have a Bible study here.” “I don’t cook well enough to help with Meals on Wheels.” “I’m a businessman, not a carpenter. I wouldn’t know the first thing about building a house for Habitat for Humanity.” When we step out in faith and offer all we have, God will use it in powerful ways. How much is enough? Just what we have when God is with us!
John Anderson
“It is God that girdeth me with strength.” One of the few articles of Eastern dress which I wore in the East, was the girdle, which was of great use as a support to the body in the long and weary camel-rides through the Desert. The support and strengthening I received in this way, gave me a clearer idea than I had before of the meaning of the psalmist.
Katherine Walden
God often uses the weak to release clear demonstrations of his power. He does so to drive the point home; it is only through Him that the miraculous is performed. It is not by our might, nor by our power. God partners with the weak, leading us to impossible places so that no true rational person can truthfully say that man had any hand in the victorious outcome. He does so to encourage his children and broadcast his loving heart to a lost world.
Richard Sibbes
As men young plants at first and fence them about with hedges to keep them from hurt, but when they are grown they remove these things and leave them to the wind and weather, so God sustains His children at first with props of inward comforts, but afterwards He exposes them to storms and winds because they are better able to bear them. Therefore let no man think himself the better because he is more free from troubles than others; it is because God sees him not fit to bear greater.
John Bevere
Trees endure the hot sun and rainstorms by sending their roots down deeper. The adversity they face is eventually the source of great stability. The harshness of the elements surrounding them causes them to seek another source of life. They will one day come to the place that even the greatest of windstorms cannot affect their ability to produce fruit.
Annie Johnson Flint
God has not promised skies always blue, flower-strewn pathways all our lives through; God has not promised sun without rain, joy without sorrow, peace without pain. But God has promised strength for the day, rest for the labor, light for the way, Grace for the trials, help from above, unfailing sympathy, undying love.
Max Lucado
Sustaining grace promises not the absence of struggle but the presence of God.
Francis Frangipane
Even in times of spiritual fullness, we must delight in weakness, knowing all strength is the product of God’s grace.