| Things to Live For |
Chapter 4 |
Page 4 |
God’s strength is imparted also through his words of promise. You are in sorrow, and opening your Bible you read the assurance of divine love and comfort, – that God is your Father, that your sorrow is full of blessing, that all things work together for good to God’s children. As you read, and believe what you read, and receive it as for you, there comes into your soul a new strength, a strange calmness, a holy peace; and you are comforted.
Or some day you are discouraged, over wrought, vexed by care, fretted by life’s distractions, weary and faint from much burden bearing. You sit down with your Bible, and God speaks to you in its words of cheer and hope; and as you ponder over the words, the weariness is gone, you feel yourself growing strong, hope revives, courage returns. The words of God with their divine assurances bring strength to fainting ones.
But there is something even better than this. God is a real person; and he comes into our life, if we will admit him with is own love and strength. The teaching of the Bible is that there is an actual impartation of strength from God to be weak and weary children. This is not possible in human friendship. The best that we can give to others is cheer, encouragement, sympathy. A mother, will all her love and yearning for her child, cannot really give any of her strength to it in its weakness. This, however, Christ, as the manifestation of God, does to his friends in their faintness, actually imparting to them of his own life.
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