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Laborers Together with God, October 31
For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry,
ye are God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:9
.
Man cannot be towed to heaven; he cannot go as a passive passenger.
He must himself use the oars, and work as a laborer together with God.
If you think you can lay down the oars, and still make your way
upstream, you are mistaken. It is only by earnest effort, by using the oars
with all your might, that you can stem the current. How many there are as
weak as water, when they have a never-failing Source of strength! Heaven
is ready to impart to us, that we may be mighty in God, and attain the full
stature of men and women in Christ Jesus. But who of you in the past
year have been making progress in the way of holiness? ... Who have
been enabled to gain one precious attainment after another, until envy,
pride, malice, jealousy, and every evil stain have been swept away, and
only the graces of the Spirit remain? ...
God will help us if we take hold of the help He has provided. “Let
him take hold of my strength,” He says, “that he may make peace with
me; and he shall make peace with me.”
Isaiah 27:5
. This is a blessed
promise. Many times when I have been discouraged and almost in despair,
I have come to the Lord with this promise.... And as I have laid hold of
the strength of God, I have found a peace which passeth understanding.
There are two grand forces at work in the salvation of the human
soul. It requires the cooperation of man with the divine agencies—divine
influences, and a strong, living, working faith. It is in this way only that
the human agent can become a laborer together with God. The Lord
does not sanction in any one of us a blind, stupid credulity. He does not
dishonor the human understanding, but, far from this, He calls for the
human will to be brought into connection with the divine will. He calls
for the ingenuity of the human mind, the tact, the skill, to be strenuously
exercised in searching out the truth
as it is in Jesus
.... Ye are labourers
together with God.
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