In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of relying on God's guidance and power in our lives. He highlights that God orchestrates every joy and trial we experience and wants us to trust Him fully. The speaker warns against trying to accomplish things in our own strength, as it leads to dissipation of power and ineffective results. Instead, he encourages us to wait upon the Lord and seek His direction, knowing that without Him, we can do nothing.

Strange scripture, their strength is to sit still. That's a very hard lesson to learn. Sitting still in confidence and quietness shall be your strength. But we're finding it out, aren't we? I've been finding out the greatness of thy loving heart, sitting in thy presence. And I was very much interested in reading some biographies of men and women that have known God very greatly, very richly, that they all came into the same rest, great rest. They ceased from their own works and thereby they won a great victory because God won it for them. When my brother had received the baptism in the Holy Ghost, he came home and we were all a little bit afraid of him. We thought he had gotten into some awful delusion. So he didn't say much. He just came home and he let his light shine. And my, it was a real light. He was a young student and one of the first things that impressed me was a motto he made himself. He cut it out of paper and hung it on the wall. And it said, Let go, let God. That was strange to me. Let go, let God. And the way that motto was created was by another student who was in trouble and somehow he was impressed by the testimony of some man of God, to let God do it for him. And so he made that motto. He made it out of letters, paper letters, strung them on a piece of string and hung them on the wall and said, Let God. But that last letter was kind of weak and it fell off. And when he came to look at it, it said, Let go. Well, that was a revelation, real revelation. And so that's what created that motto. Let go, let God. Their strength is to sit still, praise the Lord. It's a wonderful text, isn't it? Strange. But oh, how strangely true, in confidence and rest shall be your strength. But these folks that God spoke to, they were persecuted. The enemy came with their cavalry regiments. And you know, if you ever saw some of these Arabians thundering through the desert sand, you saw a sight. I saw them in Cairo around the pyramids. It's a beautiful sight. And you know, they know how to ride. They, the tradition said that they, they were horses with men's heads. They rode so fast that you couldn't see the heads of the horses. And so they thought that the Huns and the horse was one. They were fearful, fearful. And these Jews were scared stiff. And the Lord says, Your strength is to sit still. But they said, We don't want to. We want to flee. We're going to flee upon horses. The Lord said, Okay, they'll catch you alive. They did. But oh, if they had learned their to enter into rest, the rest of faith. Oh, what marvelous, marvelous lessons God has for us. You know, you don't find them in theological books. You don't find them in seminaries. You don't find them, you find them in the heart of God. I said to God, when I read the 91st Psalm, He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High, I said, Well, who dwells there? There must be a place like that. He shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. What security, what safety under the shadow of the Almighty. I said, God, there must be a place like that. And if nobody finds it, I'm going to find it. I'm going to hide in there. Hallelujah. Oh, it's been, to me personally, such a marvelous, marvelous discovery to know and to say, Lord is my refuge and my fortress. My God, you know my trust. Newspaper reporter had me on the phone the other day for a half an hour. And I don't know what made him ask me what color my hair was. Why? I said, it's black. He said, do you have any gray hairs? I said, you have to look for them. And how old are you? And what makes you look so young? Well, I sat still, you know, while others were rife hunting. Praise the Lord. Oh, to rest in God, to rest in God, my Father, my Father, my Father. Terce Dagan expresses it. He says, so many people are in great trouble all their lifetime, and all they need is God and rest. All they need is to sit still. My, what a marvelous discovery to know that God really takes over. He really does. He really takes care of his children. I was looking at little Kristen today. She is really cute. And I said, and while I looked at her, God spoke to me, except ye be converted and become as little children. When I saw her romping around and rolling around on the carpet, I said, you happy childhood, no trouble at all, no worry of any kind, nothing to do but to eat and sleep and be carried around. You don't even have to walk. Well, that's what Jesus means when he says, except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. That's the Kingdom of Heaven where the King takes over. He really is King. He really is the boss of everything concerning you. Praise the Lord. Says, you can't turn one hair white or black. Praise the Lord. Well, if he wants to keep it black, okay. And if he wants to turn it gray, gray hair is a crown of glory to the person that behaves themselves. Oh, hallelujah. God and rest. All else a weary load of a traveler on an endless road. Oh, let us learn our lesson. And as we learn to sit still, this has always been our experience in our days of prayer, that the longer we pray, the longer we tarry, the more calm you become. And you sense somehow that that calm is not made up of laziness. Quite the opposite. It's life. Life from Heaven. But you know, we're so stupid. We think that power is movement. Well, it is. It produces movement, but power itself isn't movement. People think a meeting's very powerful. Everybody rolls around on the floor and everybody screams and shouts and claps their hands. My, didn't we have a wonder. I never saw a meeting like that in my life. Well, I've seen far better meetings where nobody moved at all. Nobody said a word. Everything was still because God was in charge. God had come. Look into nature. Someone expressed it like this. If man had to create the irrigation of the earth, what would they do to pump the water of the ocean up into the sky? You know what mighty, mighty waters are up in the heavens? Whole oceans are up there. If you don't believe it, look at the Rhine or the Rhone or the Amazon River. You stand at the shores of the Amazon, you can't look across. And that Amazon keeps flowing like a mighty river. He just keeps rolling along. And where does that water come from? Out of the heavens. And how does it get up there? Well, God pumps it up there, but you don't hear it. If man had to do that, they'd put up pumps and my, you couldn't live for noise to pump all those oceans up there. But God does it quietly. If I was sitting here, the water's being pumped up there. So quietly. That's power. The power that moves the steam engine is invisible. It's in sight, that steam engine. The power of God that works mightily within you is invisible. It has possessed the very center of your being. And people think they're powerful when they, and people actually try to produce power by clapping their hands and making some kind of a noise. And that isn't power. I always tell about the engineer in Switzerland, when he, he was running a train, Appenzeller Ziegler. When he passed the house of his sweetheart, he, he whistled. And then he lost all the steam. He couldn't go anymore. He had to fire up for a half an hour to get enough steam to move that train again. It was all dissipated. The steam was gone. And the steam that you see and hear doesn't drive any train at all. Oh, God's teaching us a marvelous lesson to sit still. There's strength. Have you ever discovered it? Have you discovered the strength of Jehovah being ministered to you? That's what Jesus means when you pray. And when you fast, pray, fast before your father, who is in secret, and he'll reward you openly. Then when he asks some service of you, it's powerful. It's effective. But it was created on the inside when you were alone with God, shut in with the old Lord forever. Glory to God. Oh, I do thank God for having given us grace to approximate this truth. It's a Bible truth. Glory to God. It's God's truth. It's Christ himself. Men dissipate seventy-five percent of their power by not having poise, calmness. For instance, if you go into a bank, you'll find some clerk buried under a pile of papers and pencils and papermates and ink all over the floor and over their fingers and their hair disheveled, and oh, they're busy. You feel so sorry for them, and yet they accomplish nothing practically. When the day is done, they just fool themselves thinking that they did a lot of work. There's a radio shop near here. Whenever I go in there and say, oh dear me, does that man ever accomplish anything? The desk full of wires, full of screwdrivers, full of nuts. Why, and if you want to find something, you can't. You've got to climb over a mountain of wires and nuts first before you can find a little screw that you need for your radio. He's working hard, and the fellow's sick, his liver's sick, naturally. His stomach's on the blink, and yet he looks as if he was very busy. When he sits down, he wants to rest. He'll be sure to sit on a screwdriver, something that he'll, he'll throw on the chair instead of putting it where it belongs. Well, that's dissipation of power. But you go into a bank and you ask for the president, the man that really runs the whole thing and is responsible for results, and what do you find? A man perfectly poised and calm, nice and easy to talk to. You look at his desk and you think he never has anything to do. Every book is in its place. Every pencil is just where it belongs. Does he write? Yes. When he gets through writing, that pencil goes back. It's not in his way. And when he gets through looking up a book, he'll take the book and he'll look up what he needs to know, and he doesn't throw it on the floor or on a chair, but he puts it back in his shelf where it belongs. And thereby he preserves and he conserves power and energy for the real job of managing. In other words, he manages. Most of us are being managed by our work. We're drowned by it. We forget. We do one job and forget the other job. But all the blessing of being composed and being hid with Christ in God and letting Christ really run us, possess us as an instrument that he works through and he works by. And Pentecostal people are like that. Woman came to us and she said, my, this is a dead place. Our preachers are on their feet all the time. Well, I guess that's about all they had, jumping up and down. That's power. You dissipate your power that way. Did you ever see a cat catching a mouse? I like that picture. Cat's full of energy. It's all atomic energy. But that cat purrs so sweetly as if there never was anything to do but to warm herself by the stove. And he just parks herself for himself, herself most of the time, near the hole where the mouse went in. And he doesn't run around that hole to look and see whether the mouse is coming and whistle for the mouse. Oh no, that mouse is bound to come out, come up for air sometime. So the cat preserves her power, her strength and just waits and purrs. Or maybe she'll turn off her motor for a while, so not to scare the mouse. Just as calm, you know, with a nice silk ribbon around her neck, blinking with her eyes. You go by that cat, you think she'd never have anything to do, and all at once, once, ring and the mouse is caught. He preserved all his strength for that moment. By our fidgetiness and by our nervousness, we waste our energy, we waste our powers. We do. I had to learn that in the jewelry business. I wasn't taught that in my home. My goodness, my mother and the Swiss women, they thought, you know, it was a great virtue to appear busy. They didn't believe in, in using a wash machine. Oh no, goodness, one woman said to me, who do you think I am? Do you think I'm so lazy? No, no, she wanted to have holes in her knuckles that she'd rub through on the washboard. And they always lost their grace when they had to do the wash. Everybody, even cats and dogs, had to run for it because these poor women worked so hard. After a while, they found out that with a wash machine, they didn't have to work at all. They just sat in the rocking chair and the wash machine did everything, even hang it on the line after a while. And my beloved, there's no virtue in working. It's in getting things done. Praise the Lord. If you go to work for God with the idea of getting things done, you'll find out that without Him, you can't do nothing. You can't even think straight without Him. You try to run God's business and you'll certainly make an awful job of it. But waiting upon the Lord, unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. Oh my God, I trust in Thee. Let me not be ashamed. Let not mine enemies triumph over me. He says, don't meditate. It'll be given you in the same hour. But I had to learn that in the jewelry business, we used to work and and work day and two days and then finally had to start all over again because we'd forgotten something somewhere. And then the workman came along. He sat right next to me. That was my salvation. I was an apprentice still. I watched him. He was given a design of a beautiful diamond studded brooch, platinum brooch, very valuable job. And he sat down and he whistled a song or he sang a song. He had a good voice. He was an Italian. Some aria from Aida. Got everybody's goat with his singing. But he'd just sit there, you know, if he had nothing to do, just looking at that design. He'd sit there a half an hour and look at that design. And I said, my goodness, what is he doing? Well, by the time he had looked at it for a half an hour, he knew exactly what to do, how to do it, what tools he needed, what step to take first, how to go about it. And in three hours time, that man had done what it would take in most of us a week. I remember how all the men in the shop came running together and looking at that man. And everything so clean. His file pin was so clean. And everything so calm. Oh, what fools we are when we don't use our brains. I mean, spiritually speaking, we ought to think. We ought to let God think for us. Now that's been the life of this work for 35 years. It's been waiting upon the Lord. Because we know we can't do nothing. We can't do anything right. But we know He can. We know we're in His employ. We know that God has made the plan for us and for this work, both in Germany and in Austria and here. And we've never dared make a plan of our own or take a step of our own. And if I were to tell you what's happened, how marvelously God has gone before while we rested in Him. That was our job. To labor, to enter into rest. We don't know how we dissipate and how we waste God's time by not letting go and letting God and recognizing that after all we're just instruments. We're vessels sanctified at meet for the Master's use. And if we're for His use, then He must do the planning. He must do the thinking and the scheming and the equipment. And He must work it out. And I know people look at this work askance and they don't know what it's all about. But you know the very things that we see are so miraculous, are so marvelous, that I don't dare talk about it because critics, of course they, they're moved by the devil. They would never see the sense of it. But God wants us all to learn our lesson. God wants us to get into the stream that flows like a river. Every joy or trial is provided for, is planned by God, traced upon our dial by the Son of Love. We may trust Him wholly, all for us to do. Let yourself get a little bit nervous and you're licked. You're out of God. You lose that contact with heaven. I think we can learn a lot from the world. It would be so good if we did. It would be so good if we as children of God would learn all we can learn from the world. We have some businessmen in Germany, Brother Nahr. He has quite a factory. When you go into his factory, you marvel at the cleanliness. It's as clean as a dollhouse. Inside and outside, every machine shines. Everything is taken care of perfectly. Well, that goes for production. Then you go into some shop of a Christian and what do you see? Shambles. No sense, no brains, no plan. But God would teach us all these things. God Himself would teach us. I know what I'm talking about because naturally speaking, I was a nervous creature. Like someone said, I did 20 things instead of one. But since I came to God, He's taken all things out of my hands. Everything. Everything. Thank God. And He has managed. I know some people don't like it, but I like it. God likes it. And oh, if God could teach all of His servants and could teach me better this wonderful lesson to bother about nobody, about nothing, but to be perfectly abandoned to Jesus. It takes real faith. Why, God knows what He's about. God knows what to do. Right in this present situation, God knows. But if I get nervous about it, I spoil it for God. Then I've got a fight on my hands. And that's where all our fighting comes from. And that's where all our dissipation comes from. And God would have us be machines, batteries, vessels, charged with His power, with no non-conductor to stop that flow of the power of God. And when you do that, He'll never ask you to do something you don't have time for. Now, I know this talk is hard to take and it's hard to give. But some people work and work and work and tell themselves to a frazzle. They have no business doing that. You'd accomplish five times more in five times less time if you'd let God do it. But the trouble is, we like to have the credit.