Text and art by I. Lilias Trotter
It has come to me freshly how every bit of weakness, ignorance and insufficiency can come full of blessedness if we unite it with the death of Christ. Each bit of it sinks down into his grave, touches the spring of resurrection, like the man who was let down into Elisha’s grave of old. We just need the faith to let it go down and down until it finds Christ. ‘He went down and touched’ (2 Kings 13:21) and in the touch of death, life thrilled… There it lies; that quiet, blessed grave of Jesus, a refuge from the oppression of the enemy. To ‘go down and touch’. That is the secret.
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The sense of pressure on body and soul means that God is going to bless us here… In that wonderful story of the fall of Jericho, it must have been in utter exhaustion that the shout of victory was given. An earthly general would have taken his troops to their first battle as fresh and bright in body and spirit as could be. God, on the other hand, drained out every vestige of human energy by that silent monotonous march day after day, repeated seven times on the seventh day, till the shout of faith must have come from the very depth of weariness…. Also a great comfort came today from Job 28 about the ‘way of wisdom’ and how God finds a way for the wind, the waters and the lightning. It struck me with blessed power what these ways are: the way of the wind is the way of greatest emptiness; the way of the water is the place of lowest depth; the way of the lightning is along the line of greatest weakness. ‘If any man lack’ – there is God’s condition for his inflow.
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I suppose that the natural result of living at such high pressure… is to find oneself in low water. Such low water that there is every hope that God is going to do something great. ‘Weak in him’ are such wonderful words. For, after all, the world’s salvation was not wrought out by the thirty-three years in which he went about doing good, but in those three hours when he hung in utter exhaustion till his heart broke. So, little wonder if, for us, the price of power is weakness.
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May we let go our all to him as utterly as did the lad with his poor store of loaves and fishes. ‘All’ may mean the last ounce of strength, the last sum of our balance, the last available hour for prayer, but that is the kind of giving we shall long to have laid in those pierced hands when we see him over there. It will be too late then for earthly possibilities; it is not too late now, and we do not know what bit of inadequate offering he may use still, as he did then, for the fulcrum of his power.
