MERRY MONDAY BY PARRIS
-“I have the strength for all things in the One strengthening me.”
Phil 4:13
Have you ever fallen into the honey pot of Gods word. Do you ever listen to God’s word by audio for hours on end? So often I love to turn off the worship songs and turn on the audio bible. It seems it almost wraps me in his presence. I love to work outside in the gardens or paint inside with the word being played. Have you ever dug around in the endless commentaries available on your phone? Have driven around listening to sermon audio of the great Jonathan Edwards. It feeds my soul, straightens me out, and helps me cool my jets. Love the fact the all of God belongs to me.
Mclaren states – Paul here lets us catch a glimpse of the inmost secret of his power without which all exhortations to independence are but wasted words. He is conscious of a living power flowing through him and making him fit for anything, and he is not afraid that any one who studies him will accuse him of exaggeration even when he makes the tremendous claim ‘I can do all things in Him that strengthens me.’ That great word is even more emphatic in the original, not only because, as the Revised Version shows, it literally is in and not through , and so suggests again his familiar thought of a vital union with Jesus, but also because he uses a compound word which literally means ‘strengthening within,’ so then the power communicated is breathed into the man, and in the most literal sense he is ‘strong in the Lord and in the power of His might’. Then, all of God belongs to me, and the whole wealth of His aggregated perfections are available for stopping the crannies of my heart and filling its emptiness. My emptiness corresponds with His fullness as some concavity does with the convexity that fits into it, and the whole that He is, waits to fill and to satisfy me. There is no limit really to what a man may have of God except the limitless limit of the infinite divine nature, but on the other hand this great promise is not fulfilled all at once, and whilst the actual limit is the boundlessness of God, there is a working limit, so to speak, a variable one, but a very real one. The whole riches of God’s glory are available for us, but only so much of the boundless store as we desire and are at present capable of taking in will belong to us now. What is the use of owning half a continent if the owner lives on an acre of it and grows what he wants there, and has never seen the broad lands that yet belong to him?’