Strength comes in so many packages that comparing yourself to someone else will always lead you to feeling shortchanged. You can never be as good at being other people as they are at being themselves. When you imitate someone else, you just become a cheap copy of the original. Yet there is no one else created to be like you.
If you’ve ever cried out passionately to God in faith, fully believing that He is able to do more than you ask or think or imagine, it’s only because He first stirred up that passion within you. So instead of always feeling guilty—personally responsible—whenever your passion in prayer is weak or missing, realize instead that it is God’s work both to give it and then to fan it into flame inside you. Which means you cannot manufacture it on your own.
Let none expect to have the mastery over his inward corruption in any degree, without going in weakness again and again to the Lord for strength. Nor will prayer for others, or conversing with the brethren, make up for secret prayer.
No one is safe by his own strength, but he is safe by the grace and mercy of God.
Great comforts do, indeed, bear witness to the truth of thy grace, but not to the degree of it; the weak child is oftener in the lap than the strong one.
If at any time this life of ours grows feeble, or low, or lonely, I know no other remedy than to return to its Eternal Source, to God Himself; and through Him all the means of grace become again living and true; and through Him all His creatures become again near and dear and accessible.
For this sin hungry age we need a prayer-hungry Church. We need to explore again the “exceeding great and precious promises of God.” In “that great day,” the fire of judgment is going to test the sort, not the size, of the work we have done. That which is born in prayer will survive the test. Prayer does business with God. Prayer creates hunger for souls; hunger for souls creates prayer. The understanding soul prays, the praying soul gets understanding. To the soul who prays in self-owned weakness, the Lord gives His strength.
Nothing is so trying to nature as suspense between a faint hope and a mighty fear; but we must have faith as to the extent of our trials, as in all else. Our sensitiveness makes us often disposed to fancy that we are tried beyond our strength; but we really know neither our strength to endure nor the nature of God’s trials. Only He who knows both these, and every turn of the hearts which He has made, knows how to deal out a due proportion. Let us leave it all to Him, and be content to bear in silence.
The word “comforter” as applied to the Holy Spirit needs to be translated by some vigorous term. Literally it means “with strength.” Jesus promised his followers “The Strengthener” would be with them forever.