To write a sonnet to compare with those Shakespeare produced, you would have to have the spirit of Shakespeare... If you want to compose music like Johann Sebastian Bach, you would have to have the spirit of Bach. If you wanted to be a statesman like Gladstone, you would have to possess the spirit of Gladstone. Now, if we are going to reproduce Christ on earth and be Christ-like and show forth Christ, what are we going to need most? We must have the Spirit of Christ! The church is called to live above her own ability. She is called to live on a plane so high that no human being can live like that in his own ability and power. The humblest Christian is called to live a miracle, a life that is a moral and spiritual life with such intensity and such purity that no human being can do it—only Jesus Christ can do it. He wants the Spirit of Christ to come to His people.
It is a great thing when a man comes to rest on God's almighty power for every moment of his life... Oh, let us say to God that we are going to prove Him to the very uttermost. Let us say: "We ask thee for nothing more than Thou canst give, but we want nothing less." Let us say: "My God, let my life be a proof of what the omnipotent God can do. Let these be the two dispositions of our souls every day—deep helplessness, and simple, childlike rest."
I want to ask you, can believers live a holier life than is generally lived? Can believers experience the keeping power of God all the day, to keep them from sin? Can believers be kept in fellowship with God? And I bring you a message from the Word of God, in these words: "kept by the power of God" (1 Peter 1:5). There is no qualifying clause to them. The meaning is, that if you will entrust yourself entirely and absolutely to the omnipotence of God, He will delight to keep you. I want to get that truth burned into my soul; I want to worship God until my whole heart is filled with the thought of His omnipotence. God is almighty, and the Almighty God offers Himself to work in my heart, to do the work of keeping me; and I want to get linked with Omnipotence, or rather, linked to the Omnipotent One, to the living God, and to have my place in the hollow of His hand.
I want to call upon you now to come and worship an almighty God... We should learn what blessedness there is in dwelling every hour and every moment with an almighty God. Have you ever studied, in the Bible, the attribute of God's omnipotence? You know that it was God's omnipotence that created the world, and created light out of darkness, and created man... The cause of the weakness of your Christian life is that you want to work it out partly, and to let God help you. And that cannot be. You must come to be utterly helpless, to let God work, and God will work gloriously. It is this that we need if we are indeed to be workers for God. I could go through Scripture and prove to you how... all God's servants in the Old Testament counted upon the omnipotence of God doing impossibilities. And this God lives today, and this God is the God of every child of His. And yet some of us want God to give us a little help while we do our best, instead of coming to understand what God wants, and to say: "I can do nothing. God must and will do all". Oh, that God would by His grace show you what a God you have, and to what a God you have entrusted yourself—an omnipotent God, willing with His whole omnipotence to place Himself at the disposal of every child of His! Shall we not take the lesson of the Lord Jesus and say: "Amen; the things which are impossible with men are possible with God"?