Acts 19:2

Christmas Evans, a Welsh preacher of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, once wrote the following account in his diary.

“One Sunday afternoon I was traveling by horseback to an appointment. Suddenly as I went along a very lonely road, I was convicted of having a cold heart. I dismounted, tethered my horse to a tree, and found a secluded spot. Then, walking back and forth in agony, I reviewed my life. I waited before God in brokenness and sorrow for three hours. Finally a sweet sense of His forgiving love broke over me, and I received a fresh filling of His Holy Spirit.

General Gordon regretted that no one had told him when he was a young man that there was a Holy Spirit which he could possess and which could possess him. The knowledge would have saved him weakness, and sorrow , and loss. But when the later loneliness came, Gordon knew the inner strengthening of the Spirit. A power not his own came to his help. He was “strengthened with all power” (Colossians 1:1 1).

This is the apostle’ s sense of the magnitude of the Spirit. There is nothing we can need at any time of pressure, whether of duty or of danger , of temptation or of anxiety , but the Divine Ally will make Himself the resource of the soul to meet and endure the strain.