get the full good of them. When there is a strong hand at the helm, the
wind, though it be almost blowing directly against us, helps us forward,
but otherwise the ship drifts and washes about in the trough. We all
need the exhortation to be their master, for we can do without them and
they serve us.

Paul here lets us catch a glimpse of the inmost secret of his power
without which all exhortations to independence are but waste words. He
is conscious of a living power flowing through him and making him fit
for anything, and he is not afraid that any one who studies him will
accuse him of exaggeration even when he makes the tremendous claim 'I
can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me.' That great word is even
more emphatic in the original, not only because, as the Revised Version
shows, it literally is _in_ and not _through_, and so suggests again his
familiar thought of a vital union with Jesus, but also because he uses a
compound word which literally means 'strengthening within,' so then the
power communicated is breathed into the man, and in the most literal
sense he is 'strong in the Lord and in the power of His might.' This
inward impartation of strength is the true and only condition of that
self-sufficingness which Paul has just been claiming. Stoicism breaks
down because it tries to make men apart from God sufficient for
themselves, which no man is. To stand alone without Him is to be weak.
Circumstances will always be too strong for me, and sins will be too
strong. A Godless life has a weakness at the heart of its loneliness,
but Christ and I are always in the majority, and in the face of all
foes, be they ever so many and strong, we can confidently say, 'They
that be with us are more than they that be with them.' The old
experience will prove true in our lives, and though 'they compass us
about like bees,' the worst that they can do is only to buzz angrily
round our heads, and their end is in the name of the Lord to be
destroyed. In ourselves we are weak, but if we are 'rooted, grounded,
built' on Jesus, we partake of the security of the rock of ages to which
we are united, and cannot be swept away by the storm, so long as it
stands unmoved. I have seen a thin hair-stemmed flower growing on the
edge of a cataract and resisting the force of its plunge, and of the
wind that always lives in its depths, because its roots are in a cleft
of the cliff. The secret of strength for all men is to hold fast by the
'