The anointing of the Holy Spirit helps me greatly when I preach. I would never attempt to teach the truth of God by my own power. One day before preaching at Teignmouth, I had more time than usual, so I prayed and meditated for six hours in preparation for the evening meeting. After I had spoken a little while, I felt that I was speaking in my own strength rather than God's power. I told the brethren that I felt as though I was not preaching under the anointing and asked them to pray. After I continued a little longer, I felt the same and therefore ended my sermon and proposed that we have a meeting for prayer. We did so, and I was particularly assisted by the Holy Spirit the next time I preached. I am glad that I learned the importance of ministering in God's power alone. I can do all things through Christ, but without Him, I can accomplish nothing.
We must learn of Jesus, how He is meek and lowly of heart. He teaches us where true humility takes its rise and finds its strength — in the knowledge that it is God who worketh all in all, and that our place is to yield to Him in perfect resignation and dependence, in full consent to be and to do nothing of ourselves. This is the life Christ came to reveal and to impart — a life to God that came through death to sin and self. The root of all virtue and grace, of all faith and acceptable worship, is that we know that we have nothing but what we receive, and bow in deepest humility to wait upon God for it (1 Corinthians 4:7).
To love the Lord my God with all my strength might, paradoxically, mean to love Him wholly in my weakness. By giving to Him what I thought of as my strength, realizing my actual weakness, He could then demonstrate His real strength. "My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9) took on new meaning. It was often far from pleasant, this learning process. I learned the frightening weakness of fear during the five months of rebel captivity, and it took an African brother, Basuana, to teach me to accept deliverance from fear by faith in the unshakeable Word of God. I learned that Christ could keep me calm and fill me with His peace, even while a storm of fear raged all around me.
Dear Christian! Do you not begin to see that waiting [on God] is not one among a number of Christian virtues, to be thought of from time to time, but that it expresses that disposition which lies at the very root of the Christian life? It gives higher value and a new power to our prayer and worship, to our faith and surrender, because it links us, in unalterable dependence, to God Himself. And it gives us the unbroken enjoyment of the goodness of God: "the Lord is good to them that wait for Him" (Lamentations 3:25). Let me press upon you once again to take time and trouble to cultivate this so much needed element of the christian life. We get too much of religion at second hand, from the teaching of men. That teaching has great value if, even as the preaching of John the Baptist sent his disciples away from himself to the Living Christ, it leads us to God Himself. What our religion needs is—more of God. Many of us are too much occupied with our work. As with Martha, the very service we want to render the Master separates from Him; it is neither pleasing to Him nor profitable to ourselves. The more work, the more need of waiting upon God; the doing of Hid's will would then, instead of exhausting, be our meat and drink, nourishment and refreshment and strength. "The Lord is good to them that wait for Him". How good none can tell but those who prove it in waiting on Him.
God wished to reveal Himself in and through created beings by communicating to them as much of His own goodness and glory as they were capable of receiving. But this communication was not a giving to the creature something it could possess in itself, a certain life or goodness, of which it had the charge and disposal. By no means. But as God is the ever-living, ever-present, ever-acting One, who upholdeth all things by the word of His power, and in whom all things exist, the relation of the creature to God could only be one of unceasing, absolute, universal dependence. As truly as God by His power once created, so truly by that same power must God every moment maintain. The creature has not only to look back to the origin and first beginning of existence, and acknowledge that it there owes everything to God; its chief care, its highest virtue, its only happiness, now and through all eternity, is to present itself an empty vessel, in which God can dwell and manifest His power and goodness.
The life God bestows is imparted not once for all, but each moment continuously, by the unceasing operation of His mighty power. Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is, from the very nature of things, the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue. Humility is not so much a grace or virtue along with others; it is the root of all, because it alone takes the right attitude before God, and allows Him as God to do all... It is simply the sense of entire nothingness, which comes when we see how truly God is all, and in which we make way for God to be all.