God's Power

Now I want you to take special notice of the words written in Jeremiah 36:17, “Ah Lord God! Behold, Thou has made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power and stretched-out arm, and there is nothing too hard for Thee.”

I think the Lord was pleased with this prayer of Jeremiah, for He responds to him in the twenty-seventh verse, “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for Me?” God likes to have His people believe that there is nothing too hard for Him. We talk about Frederick the Great, and Alexander the Great, but how very little are these mighty men when we come to compare them with God. If Tyndall, or Huxley, or Darwin had ever created any light, what a sound of trumpets there would have been about it! But we read in the Bible the very simple statement, “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light,” —and that is all there is said about it.

Here is this Earth of ours, twenty-five thousand miles around, with its great oceans, and its great mountains, and its great rivers; and yet it is only a little ball that the Lord tosses out of His hand. The astronomers tell us that the sun is thirteen hundred thousand times larger than the Earth. Besides this, there are eighty millions of other suns, and millions upon millions of other stars, that have been discovered; yet I suppose these are only like a few towns and villages on the outskirts of God’s great empire. Now what folly to try to measure God with our little rule!

But I hear somebody saying, “If God is so great as that, He will not condescend to trouble Himself about such an insignificant creature as I.”

This is all wrong. If you study the Bible, you will find out that no sooner did the news come up to Heaven that Adam had fallen, than God was right down in Eden after him. Men sometimes get to be so big that they don’t care for little things, but God never does.

We are all the time limiting God’s power by our own ideas. There is a drunkard; the appetite for strong drink has overcome him; he has actually drunk up his will. Well, what of it? He Who said, “Let there be light; and there was light,” can just as easily say, “Let there be life; and there will be life.” The man may be a gambler, a deist, an infidel; the woman may be a harlot, and her feet may begin to take hold on hell; but the Lord, Who created the heavens and the Earth won’t find it hard to save the chief of sinners if they will only give their wicked hearts to Him. Let us get our eyes off one another and fix them upon God. There is nothing too hard for Him.

Whenever we go to a new place the people say, “O, yes; you did so and so in that city, but this place is very peculiar; there are special difficulties here such as you have never met before.”

Yes, I suppose there are special difficulties in every case, but these obstacles won’t stand in the way very long when God rises up to carry on His work. When Mr. Sankey and I first started out, we took this seventh verse of the thirty-second chapter of Jeremiah for our motto, “Ah! Lord God,…there is nothing too hard for Thee,” and we always had great success. After awhile we thought we would take some other motto; but we couldn’t get on at all until we came back to this seventeenth verse, “There is nothing too hard for Thee.”

“And of His fullness have all we received.” It is a very common fault with Christians to forget the Lord’s fullness. They are living on stale manna, and trying to get happy over their past experience. They were converted twenty years ago; and they seem to think that the Lord gave them a blessing which was to last them all their lives. Not so; there is an infinite “Fullness” in Christ, and they who believe in Him may receive of it all the time. Ask Enoch—he received of the “fullness,” and so was able to walk with God. Ask Noah—he was able to live and preach one hundred and twenty years, while he was about the only man in all the world who believed in God, and this he could do because he had received of the Lord’s “fullness.” Ask Abraham—he was able to offer up his only son at the command of God. Ask Joshua—he received the “fullness,” and nobody was able to stand before him all the days of his life.

Now, some people think those old patriarchs and prophets were a different kind of men from what we have in these days. Not at all. They were men of like passions with us. You just let the ministers and Christian workers nowadays get filled with the Lord’s “fullness,” and they will be like giants filled with new wine.

There were the reformers Knox, Wesley, Whitefield, and Newton. Were they any greater men in intellect than a great many others in their time? By no means; but they had received of the Lord’s “fullness.” That was what made them so great and strong in His work. Take the twelve apostles, they were not men of learning and science; they were not great orators; they were not rich, had no social positon. But just think of a Galilean fisherman writing such a book as the Gospel of John! There isn’t a learned man in all the world who could make such a book, unless he had received the Lord’s “fullness.”