The Mighty Dynamic

“I can do all things in Him that strengthened me” (Phil. iv. 13).

Yes, but who is the man behind the speech? The quality in the man’s testimony is conditioned by the quality of the life which presents it. If a man has been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, if life has been a lazy afternoon in the lotus land of ease, the testimony of his pretended victories is worthless. What sort of life is there behind this witness? What dragons has he encountered? What sort of a devil has he met? And how many times has he been compelled to fight his way through armed hosts? Has life been a picnic or a crusade? The Apostle Paul does not shrink before questionings like these. He has a great history behind him. He has run the gauntlet of the

fiercest fires. He has encountered tremendous obstacles, and he has beaten them into fine dust. He it is who, at the end of his tempestuous days, bequeaths this jubilant testimony, “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.”

What has he done? He has discarded old prejudices, which had grown upon him like a skin. I have very deliberately chosen this figure of speech. A prejudice, which at first is like a loose fitting garment, at last binds life like a vital skin. This, perhaps, is particularly true of religious prejudices, and more especially when they take an ecclesiastical form. Paul had been a Pharisee, a member of the strictest sect of the Pharisees, narrow and exclusive, and possessed by a spirit of keen and bitter jealousy. And in the strength of the Lord Christ he had taken those prejudices, stripped them from him, and had become clothed in the fine sympathies which are characteristic of the Christian redemption.

What else had he done? He had encountered the violence and enmity of those who were still in the bonds of prejudice. There is no antagonism like the antagonism of those you desert. When a politician crosses the floor of the House he is followed by intense and bitter resentment. When a member of a religious society changes his ecclesiastical home nothing can exceed the severe enmity of his old co-religionists. And so it was with the Apostle Paul. He had changed his sphere and he became encircled with the malicious persecution of his old friends. They had no reply to his message, they would therefore kill the messenger. And yet he was not dismayed nor vanquished. Again and again he returns to the sphere of violence and persecution and proclaims anew the evangel of redeeming grace. “I can do all things

What else did he do? He embarked upon a crusade for the propagation of his new faith. A disciple of Jesus, he became an Apostle of Jesus. He went forth to lands afar, carrying the flame of his evangel to peoples of strangely varied conditions. Let us think of the strength and insight required in this manifold variety of condition and need. Every sphere he entered seemed to present a circle of new conditions.

Now he was meeting with a few women by the riverside at Philippi, and now with the philosophers at Mars Hill; and again he spake amid the pomp and luxury of imperial Rome. But Paul was level to the occasion. Every emergency found him fully equipped. “I can do all things.” And how did he do it? “I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.” The strength was transmitted to him. There was a great power-house, and the energy was conveyed to him as a humble receiver. But it was more than a transmission; it was a personal transmission. “Him strengthening me.” At either end there is a person, and a power passes from one to the other. It is not that at one end there is a great historic hero, a supreme example in a great gallery of heroes, and at the other end a living contemporary with searching and immediate need. No, at either end there is a living soul, and the Apostle Paul is dealing with a living communicative energising Christ. Paul drew his sap, his spiritual force, the power which made him effective, out of living fellowship with the living Christ of God.

The tragedy in so many professedly Christian lives is here; they have no adequate power-house, and when they are confronted with a supremely difficult task they fail to cope with it, and are disastrously overwhelmed. They draw their power from ideals and philosophies, and it is as precarious as depending upon the electricity which we can entice from the clouds. What we need is a living Personality, who is Himself “the fountain of life,” and who will pour the floods of His own vitality into our own impoverished souls. It is only “in Him” that there is “bread enough and to spare.” When the new and heavy demand has been met we shall not be exhausted; there is a reserve of power which keeps us fresh for the next encounter. If we are to live a vigorous and triumphant life, carrying all before us, we need a mighty dynamic, and we can find it only in the risen and glorified Lord. “In Him” we “can do all things,” even the apparently impossible. I was speaking with a Salvation Army officer some time ago, and he was telling me something of his dark and unregenerate days.

“And, sir,” he said, “I had a terrible temper. In a minute it would change me into a devil.” “I suppose you have conquered it now?” I said. “Oh no,” he replied, “Christ has conquered it for me.” The impossible had been done. And that is the secret of the victorious life.