July 30

The Lord God is my strength. - Habakkuk 3:19.

AND the prophet found that this strength was indispensable, and that every moment he must live in dependence upon it. Thus the Psalmist said, “I will go in the strength of the Lord God.” It will be both instructive and profitable to enter further into this, for it is a very experimental part of a Christian’s religion. Why did not David say he would go in his own strength? Because he knew he had none. The fall deprived us not only of righteousness, but of strength. It is not easy to convince men of this. It has always been found easier to convince them of their guilt than of their weakness. There are few to be found who will not say, “God knows we are all sinners;” perhaps rather to draw in others, than to express their own sins. There are few but will say, “We have done the things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things which we ought to have done;” though they will not add, but in a public assembly, “there is no health in us.” They think it is in their power, and resolve that by-and-by they will attend to those things when they shall have more leisure.

But it is otherwise with the believer: he knows that his own strength is perfect weakness; he has learned this, not only from Scripture, but from his own experience, for he has been led to make the trial, and it has issued in this conviction. The trial has brought him where we always ought to be brought in religion,-on his knees; convinced that he knew nothing and could do nothing without the grace of God, he has therefore been brought to pray, Work in me “to will and to do of thine own good pleasure.”

They pray to be strengthened with all might in their inner man, and then their strength is restored. And as the Christian advances in the divine life, instead of finding his need of divine strength diminishing, he finds it daily increasing, and the increase is a blessed evidence of his faith; he need not be afraid of the increase of this conviction, that he has no strength of his own, for the apostle says, “When I am weak, then am I strong.” Therefore he exhorts the Ephesians, “Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might;” and to Timothy he says, “My son, be thou strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.”