On Eagle's Wings

“They that wait upon the LORD shall renew (exchange) their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” —Isaiah 40:31

You will notice that, before God gives a promise like this, He is like a good banker. The banker, before he asks you to deposit your money, writes on his window and on his literature his resources.

God says, “Hast though not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting Lord, the creator, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of His understanding. He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might, He increaseth strength.” That is the statement of His resources, and then He adds, “They that wait upon the Lord shall exchange their strength; they shall mount up on wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

First, He shows what He has, and then asks you to take His resources for your needs. What a glorious thing it is that “they that wait upon the Lord shall exchange their strength.” That is, you walk away with new clothes, after leaving your old ones with Him, for “all your righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” You are broken and struggling, but He says there is life and strength in Him.

This is the life for which many folks are seeking. We have a man in our church whom I picked out as being subject to melancholia (whatever that is), or the blues.

The blues come from being cross-eyed. You look at yourself and begin to pity yourself, and your eyes keep turning in a little bit further until you cannot see anything but your poor, miserable self, and the whole world looks wrong. The world is not wrong, but you are wrong.

You may think the whole world is wrong, and it may be you; and you had better get out of yourself. This man suffering from melancholia did not know how to get out of his own skin and get rid of himself. That is our greatest bother—not the world, but ourselves.

This man is one who has courage and goes ahead. Maybe you never knew what it was to feel good. I have met people who never knew what it was to feel fit naturally. I can sympathize with them. The early years of my life, until I was nine years of age, I did not know what it was to breathe without pain, or have a straight body, and suffered all the time. I watched the boys go by on the street, and mother would look at me sometimes and turn away and cry, when I would ask her if I would ever be as big as other boys. I wondered how children could play and laugh so long and not get the headache.

I sympathize with such folks and people who have gone on all their lives and know nothing of what it is to draw a well breath, or to get up and feel as if they were above circumstances and could go out after the world to win.

How are you going to supply anything for a person like this? I picked this man out for just such a man. He began to talk to me about his early life, and I found out he never had any health, and had a bad disposition besides, always looking in, introspective, thinking about his own troubles.

We kept on preaching this glorious Gospel of victory in Christ Jesus, and one morning he woke up and the Spirit said, “Why do you go on in yourself and live on the inside of yourself and depend on your own resources? Did you never know that I have a disposition and strength, and that you can take mine?”

He said, “Do you know that morning in bed, before I had even gotten out (I had been a Christian twenty-seven years, but had never known what it was to lead a victorious Christian life,” I just put myself in His hands, and came into a new life, and a new life came into me.”

That old disposition of his had marked his face until it was repulsive. The majority of people expected he was going to look on the dark side of things constantly, but his face began to change, and now he has a very bright and happy face, and it is all of the Lord. Now he can walk in the Spirit and live in the Spirit.

A Bottomless Well

Jesus said to the woman at the well, about thirty folks, “he that drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but it will be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. Then at the great day of the feast He said, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink, and out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.” Not your own disposition, not your own spirit, but another Spirit that comes on the inside to be a flowing stream out of your heart, His Spirit.

Is that your experience? Have you found that when all your resources have run out there is a well of water that springs up within? Jesus talked of Himself as the vine, the Father as the husbandman, and us the branches, and said, “These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” Oh, the resources in Christ Jesus that are untouched by the majority of Christians. Beloved, there is a life of victory, the life that bubbles!

I will never forget when this life came into my heart. One of its greatest joys to me was that it woke me up in the morning and I didn’t have to pump the joy up, but it sprang up in my breast. This experience changes all of life. It changes your method of living, it changes the outlet of life. It is a simple life, so simple and so easy that you get to see that it is the life that is Christ, not the life that is in Christ, but the life that is Christ, “Christ in me the hope of glory,” “nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” He doeth the works, “no I, but Christ.” It is the life that is Christ. It is His life of victory.

Too many these days are taking Jesus for a pattern instead of taking Him for a substitute. He swaps, He trades, and takes our weakness, and gives us His strength, and it is in His strength that Jesus wants us to walk. He is not satisfied when we walk in the strength of the flesh.

Go back to the Old Testament and see one of the most beautiful figures of this life. In the old temple, God had no windows. It was not lighted from the outside, but from within. The Christian heart that knows the blessing of the fullness of Christ does not need the windows for joy from without. Yet the world is picking at us all the time to put more windows in from the outside.

That is what I am protesting, that in our church life today, we are substituting too many windows on the outside to get the world’s light instead of increasing the light on the inside, which is the Shekinah glory of the life of Jesus Christ. That is the protest I make and think I have a right to make it. I make it tenderly and yet vehemently, but with the highest kind of protest. If there ever was a need for a change, it is in our day, for we are slipping into that which is of the flesh, and that which is of men, and not coming into the fullness of that which is of Jesus Chriist and of the Holy Ghost.

It is very easy as men go along and have a successful time in the flesh, to do things of the flesh. I know how easy it would be to work on your talents or upon mankind’s ingenuity and his organization; but Jesus wants first and foremost to be our life and to work through us.

Paul said, “I came to you in weakness, that you might see the Spirit, and understand the Spirit.” He was strong in the Spirit, but weak in the flesh. He said, “I did not come to you with enticing words of man’s wisdom, so that the Spirit might be manifest.”

His Strength

I was reading a book written by a Christian man who had been in the trenches, and he said he stood there one night and pleaded with those men as they stood before him by the thousands, for the sake of posterity to be clean men, for the sake of their sweethearts to be clean men, and because of their blessed mothers to be clean men. He went on with a eulogy to “Mother,” the most beautiful I ever read.

When he got through, many were weeping, and signed the pledge to do away with liquor and be pure. That is all right, but when they run into temptation and glowing glamor of the devil, that pledge does not amount to a hill of beans. We know that when men get up against temptation, all the resolves they might make before heaven are not for a minute going to keep them from going down.

If I have no more to offer to the soldier boys of this country than a high resolution against vice, then God pity the boy who has to go into the trenches and over top for his government. But, thank God, I have a Jesus that can come in and keep him, yes, thank God, keep him when he can’t keep himself.

It is a beautiful thing to talk morality, and it is a beautiful thing the man said, but, beloved, if he hasn’t any more than that, in God’s name, what are these boys going to do? I would have signed my own name in blood many a time, and said, “There are certain sins of my life that I will never do again.” I have known men that have despised themselves so much that they have taken a gun and blown their own brains out because they did not want to come before their wives with booze on their lips. They despised themselves, hated themselves, and could not break the habit. By the hundreds, they never could break it. The temptations came upon them and they could not break them; but, thank god, I know another power that can walk into a life and shatter the fetters that bind and turn men loose.

I remember Harry Monroe of the Pacific Garden Mission. I never will forget that dear old fat face of his, how it was lifted in a smile as he told this experience, and the tears running down his cheeks. He always looked like a bartender dressed, ready to go on duty, always had a clean shave, and looked as if he had a barrel inside his vest. He always appeared prosperous and had his clothes pressed; but I never saw a man with the passion for souls that Harry Monroe had.

He gave his experience the first time he was at our summer conference at Cedar Lake (a place forty miles from Chicago, run by The Moody Church), where Jesus and a life of victory are held up. We had a Mission Day, and Harry and Mel Trotter came down. Harry opened his book. He was always finding a new little gem. He read that verse, “Of some making a difference, pulling them out of the fire,” and began to plead with us for the poor bums; the folks that have slipped in their early lives, over whom the clouds have come very thickly, and who do not feel as if they ever could get up into decent society.

I said, “Harry, it is a beautiful thing to see the tears in your eyes as you plead for men. If anyone ought to be disgusted with men, it is you. You have stayed there for thirty years at Van Buren Street, pulling them out of the gutter and sin. They lie to you and yet you love them.”

“I love them more than I ever did,” he said. “I have more confidence that my Jesus can pull them out of the horrible net than I ever had.”

Thank God for a testimony like that, that Jesus Christ can do the work when everything else has failed.

He was very tender. He said, “Well, it is peculiar, but they talked to me about salvation. I was standing by a stove, and Mr. Potter, an evangelist of former days, led me to Jesus. I got down to pray. I never told many people about it, but I served time back in Massachusetts. I loved a gambling game, and got the money, and it didn’t make any difference how, but I could get the money and put a scheme over. It was worse than liquor or any kind of a habit a man could get. I did not want to work, and I knew I could get it easy. I was slick and had an honest face, and could put the game over; but I knew it was bad and that the devil had me.

“Mr. Potter talked to me about Jesus Christ, and I said I wanted Him, but would be crooked all my life. I wanted to be saved, but what could help me? He told me something, and asked me to leave my case to Jesus in prayer. I had had the handcuffs on three times in my life. They had come in the back of a swell place and caught me. I could see those handcuffs on my wrists, and thought it did not make any difference what I resolved, that I could not do it.

“He said something to me out of the Word of God that gave me hope, and then he said, ‘Lift your hand.’ I looked at him, surprised, wondering if he saw the handcuffs.

“I lifted my hands, and they were together, as if I had the handcuffs on me, and said, ‘Jesus, you will have to do this thing. No one else can do it.’

“It was as if a pair of handcuffs slipped off, and something snapped. The desire for gambling left me, and a burning desire to be God’s man came into my heart. When no other could help, ‘Jesus lifted me.’ And any man that trusts the power of Jesus Christ to break canceled sin will find that He sets the prisoner free. When no other power can do it, He can. It is ‘not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.’”

A Divine Supply

You remember the glory on the inside of the temple. There was no evidence of it on the outside, but the glory of the Lord was on the inside. Zechariah in his vision said, “I have looked and behold a candlestick all of gold—and two olive trees by it—these two olive branches which, through the two golden pipes empty the golden oil out of themselves.” He tells us that there was no mechanical means that turned the olives into the olive oil and poured it forth. The oil was coming from the olive trees and dropping into the branches of the candlestick, so that the light burned automatically, without any manpower.

This was the vision of that prophet, and God gave him the interpretation in secret: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” He has a way where there is no way. He loves men and uses men. He wants to give through them, but we are only the candlesticks. His is the oil. It is His Spirit that must work. We can only be lamps. It is His oil that is on the inside of these lamps. It is His burning. John the Baptist, who said he was not worthy to stoop down and unloose the shoe latchet of Jesus, said, “I have indeed baptized you with water unto repentance, but there cometh one mightier than I, who will baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”

It is this victory life in Christ Jesus that God is offering. So few are taking it these days, but turning to their own mechanism and their own powers. They do not wait upon God. They are in a hurry, and so they rush on with their little human schemes.

I know that organization comes, but it must come after life—not precede it. After the life comes, then it is easy enough to have these other things. After the birth of this newborn babe, take the clothes and put them upon it;but all the clothes will not make the baby. It is God’s life that must do the work. It is God’s power that must be manifest in our body, and any other kind of power we will get no credit for. There will be nothing in our crown as Christians for the life of the flesh; but only as we dare let God undertake, and as we dare to take from him our sufficiency, shall we add to our crown.

The Lifting Power

He says, “Poor, struggling humanity, I do not expect anything of you, but to take what I offer you.” Learn to take in faith, for the just shall live by faith. Believe in Him, that He has enough for you, and He can do the work. So He gives out this promise, “They that wait upon the Lord shall exchange their strength; they shall mount up on wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

This “mounting up” life is what you want. When you are weak, there is peculiar strength that lifts you up. I was greatly interested in aeroplanes at one time, and was surprised that so much of the mechanism was not patented by the Wright brothers, and wondered how they kept their hold on things, when they did not patent everything, and how the government could protect them. Then I found out what they had patented. It was a small mechanism, but the thing absolutely necessary to an aeroplane.

Other men had made machines and had run along on the ground until the machine gained a certain velocity, caught the wind, and slid into space for a while. Others could run their machines off a hill or down an incline, and make them fly out, but they would get lower and lower and drop again. That had been done for years and years, and the men had [a] mechanism by which they could steer themselves a little, but they could never lift themselves.

Wright brothers came along and invented a little mechanism so that when you got up a certain speed and lifted the front of the machine, it took the air and mounted upward. This same invention could turn the machine right or left. It was a small mechanism, but it was all they needed for successful flying.

You say to yourself, “I seem to feel the power of God, but oh for power to mount up above the world and sin, and for victory. I feel the tug of God in my spirit, but I do not know how to mount up.” He says, “They that wait upon the Lord.”

Thousands of Christ’s own, here and there, have found this blessed mounting up life. John Wesley, in the hour of prayer, felt the Spirit’s working and said, “I felt my heart strangely warm.”

Then, beloved, this is the secret of power, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.” The men or women who dare to believe God, who will wait on Him, will see the fruition of their faith. God brings revivals by men and women being on their faces before God. You cannot work them out, but you can wait and let Him work them out.

The individual life needs this victory in our day. We are living in a mechanical day, a touch-button age of intense organization. Expert men in efficiency are hired to pull a failing business together. They advise the managers, “You are losing time, keeping your books wrong, your filing system is wrong, not advertising right.” They pick up the slack in management and the leaks in methods, and are up to the “nth” power in the “drive.” They know how to get business going and to succeed.

The church says, “If we are losing power and ground, let us go to the experts and put modern business methods together with ours, and see what can be done.” So we have gone ahead; but, when you get there, who gets the credit? The expert. Who gets the glory? The men and everybody around-about realize it has not been God but men. God says, “I have methods and organizations—but life first, and I must get you to the place where you see that ‘It is not by might nor by power, but my Spirit’.”

When a man gets to the crisis he says, “I have done much and many things, but what has it amounted to? God has not gotten the glory, nor the credit.”

The world makes fun of a life of faith and says, “Show me your faith, but I will show you my works.” No, if you have faith there will be plenty of work and stir. On Pentecost there was enough doing to satisfy anybody. The busybodies would have been satisfied with the things going on. The Spirit of God is not a drawback to any work, but they that wait on the Lord exchange their weakness for strength and mount up on wings as eagles.

A life like that mounts up in the hour of prayer, and waits on God, and sees Him answer prayer. God always battles from above. The Christian never was intended to battle from beneath. God says we do not fight against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, rulers of this world darkness. We fight against the devil in prayer, and we mount over him.

Above The Enemy

One of the Christians from here, working with the soldiers in London, heard two or three bombs dropping around his dwelling and threw his window up. The people were rushing everywhere. There wasn’t a light anywhere. Even the blinds were drawn down on the railway trains and the hotels. The bombs continued to drop and, looking into the night, they saw a great searchlight sweeping across the sky. Away in the air high above the city hung a German zeppelin, a gas balloon, with men in the basket below. It was from this the enemy was throwing the bombs down. With their guns at the same time they were fighting flying machines up in the air. There was a biplane shooting at them, and you could see the smoke of the return shots from their guns.

The zeppelin was standing 9,000 feet above the city. More of the biplanes closed in, and they had a very game fight. The people could see great volumes of smoke bursting from the guns, but the shots went wide of the mark, either too low or too high. Something must be done, for the flying machines were making no headway. Finally, Lieut. Robinson came onto the scene, and the machines below him began to cheer as they recognized him in the flashes. Thousands of folks looked up at the great battle going on in the air. Robinson circled underneath the zeppelins, drawing their fire. But the bombs continued to fall. After five or six encounters about the basket of the zeppelin, he made off into the dark, and it was quiet. He had given a signal by wireless to cut out the shooting and the searchlights; he was going to do something else. He went clear above the Zeppelin, two or three hundred feet. Quite a time of suspense, then suddenly, taking his life in his hands, Lieut. Robinson gave a dip and came down on top of the zeppelin, cutting an opening in the balloon and lighting the escaping volume of gas. He slipped to the side, and the world below for two miles around was lighted up by the gas balloon burning. Suddenly, another color of light encircled the basket, and the basket and men shot down through the sky into the streets of London, and the bombing was over.

God Almighty never intended us to be subject to devils nor men, nor the conditions roundabout that hold this spirit in leash; but God says, “They that wait upon the Lord shall mount up on wings as eagles.” Thank God, this old soul may be free and leap up out of the chains of flesh and have the victory.

Beloved, you do not have to live another day a defeated life. You may have the victory in Christ Jesus. It is no honor to Him for you to be struggling and working and not having the victory in Him. No matter what your surroundings, you may have the victory.

Paul said to Silas in prison while their feet were in the stocks, “Silas, let us have a duet.” It must have been wonderful, after he had been preaching on the streets and thrown on the dump heap. He had lots of nerve to say to Silas, “Let’s sing.” That little fellow, beaten with strips, shipwrecked, thrown out, because he believed in Jesus, now with his feet in the stocks—still feels like singing. If someone were to ask you to say something for Jesus on the street you would say, “I do not like the audience.” How would you like their audience—four feet stuck in front of them?

Every time I preach I have to fight against that consciousness of my audience. I know men walk in who are not in sympathy with my message, and I can feel it. A man that walks, and talks, and prays, and moves with the Spirit, is sensitive, and every time he comes near anybody that is opposing faith he knows it, and can feel it. You can feel a man who has his earthly schemes and carnal mind. You know if you walk with Jesus that you are despised by the carnal minded. But, thank God, you can get your inspiration, not through men, but from above, and bring it down to men. So you have to pray to be delivered from any effect one way or the other your audience might have on you.

A man sat on my platform one night looking over an audience of 5,000 people and said, “Rader, this must be an inspiration to you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“To see so many people.”

“That is not the inspiration,” I answered. “If I took my inspiration from them, what would I do tomorrow night? That is Monday, and the great crowd will have shrunk. I have to preach just the same then. Where would I get my inspiration Monday night?”

We have some place better than that to get our inspiration from. If Paul and Silas had depended on their audience for inspiration they would have had a hard time, but they were singing in spite of prison and the stocks. Prison had not crushed the victory and the glory in their hearts

Oh my friends, “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith”—faith in the victory Jesus has for us. He has gone ahead of us and gained the victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil and, then we are to step into what has been purchased for us.

A Picture Of The Enemy

Over in Europe, they send the aeroplanes out and they scout over the enemies’ country. They go up in the air, and they have great telescope photograph instruments, and stick them down over the side and take a picture of the battlefield. They come back with one or two dozen pictures of the battlefield, each picture marked as to where they took them. From these pictures trenches are built for practice behind their lines. They charge into them and must know every nook and cranny of them. When they go “over the top,” the trench they are to take is already familiar to them. They get the spies who have had a closer look, to tell them what is on the inside.

We have never seen the devil, but the man that waits on God will get such a picture of his enemy and how the enemy is working, that he does not have to be blind and fight in the dark. God wants spiritual men who know how to mount up into the heavenlies these days, and get their message from God, and know what they are fighting and the ones in the trenches to deal with. Not spiritualists, but folks filled with the Holy Ghost, who see through the Spirit’s eyes where things are moving, and in God’s name, are brave enough to tell men what God has said, and how the battle is going.

Nothing was ever gained by false news from the battlefield, and the church never has been made better by flattery. The truth is what is needed in any man’s life, and a showing up of real condition is the star of success in any Christian life. My heart bleeds for the poor church that tries to entertain people instead of giving them Christ and having the power of the Holy Ghost in their midst. My heart bleeds for them.

How easy to backslide and get to the place where we do not wait on God at all. When a man waits on God, God gives him a vision of his own heart and shows him the battle of faith ahead of him, and the power of God as his strength. Elihu says concerning the work of God (Job 36:25), “a many may behold it afar off.” If you mount up on wings as eagles, your eyes behold afar off. They used to call the prophets “seers” and anyone who lives close to God is a seer. Oh wait on Him and see for yourself. Those that wait on God can see things also.

When the devil puts a temptation, the waiting ones see the little things that mark the temptation as the devil’s work. They say, “Hold on old fellow, I hear your ‘if’.” It was the “if” that took Eve in the garden—“Hath God said?”

It was the “if” in the temptation of Christ by the devil—“If thou be the son of God.”

Oh, it is the “if,” my friend, that keeps from prayer; but the seer sees it, and the minute the word comes out, he spots it and says, “the devil is behind that business.” He sees the road through sin. I used to wonder how God could ever give a man victory over temptation. Someone says, “Rader, don’t you ever see what you used to see as a sinner?”

Yes, but thank God, I not only see it, but see through it to the last act and to the time after the thing is over. Like the footlights that make the players look as if they were covered with tinsel and gauze, but if you ever get behind and smell the stench of the theatrical world, you not only see the footlights, but you see the paste and the paint and the heart of sin behind it all, and the wickedness it represents. You not only see the temptation at the time, but you see through it, and say, “What is the use, what is the end of it?”

Instead of being deceived, the youth sees what the end shall be, hears the whisper, “The wages of sin is death.” “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” He sees the value of his soul in contrast to temptation. It is Jesus within, whispering. The sweetness of walking with Jesus in power is a delight the world can’t duplicate. God took the Jews through the waters. Will He not bring us? He said to the Jews, “I have borne you on eagles’ wings and brought you unto myself.” Oh the power of the Spirit to draw us in the hour of temptation, out of trouble, out of struggles, out of trials, out of doubts, out of difficulties—to take this Book and open it up to us, and show us the things of God.

Security

The old eagle shoves its young off the rock. Then it takes a dive as the fledgling falls through the air and catches it on its back, and takes it back to the nest. It sits there for a minute or two, and then the old eagle gives it another shove, and it goes down again, but again underneath the fledgling goes the old eagle and catches it, bearing it up and up, and deposits it again in the nest, until it can jump off and fly. That is the figure here which God uses. He says, “When you could not help yourself, I bore you as on eagle’s wings. When you thought you were going down, I bore you up.”

“But, Lord,” you say, “I might fall.”

And God says, “But I am underneath.” Underneath, underneath, always “underneath are the everlasting arms.” They can always bear up, and are always underneath.

Oh the power of Jesus to keep you in the hour of trial—to give you His own life! Beloved, do you know that life? Oh that I might make you hungry for the victory in Christ, complete and satisfactory in Him. It means a cross, it means misunderstanding, it means being set aside by the world, misunderstood by your own family maybe, and your loved ones; but oh my friend, it will be so precious to walk with Him, that the things on the outside will be as nothing for the joy that is set before you in Him. Pay the price, surrender, and allow Him to be all in all to you!

Last of all, an eagle finds rest as no other bird can find it. One beautiful thing about the eagle is that in its mounting up, it has the most peculiar power of suspending itself and soaring without any exertion at all. It floats in the air. The bones in an eagle’s wings are so fixed that it can quickly turn the bones and so lock them that the eagle does not have to hold the muscles at all. They are out of joint, and they do not come into joint again until the eagle makes another quick turn. There is a sweet truth known to those who wait on the Lord, that enable them to float in God, or as the Scriptures say, “Walk in the spirit.”

Someone says, “Mr. Rader, I am afraid of that life, it is hard.”

Beloved, this is the easy life, the mounting up life. Trusting in Jesus is the easy life. The other is the hard life, the other is a struggle. You want to live a spiritual life, and you are in the flesh, and walking in the flesh, and oh it is such a struggle. Paul says, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” But he closes the chapter, “thank God, through our Lord Jesus Christ,” and opens the next thus, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

Thank God there is a mounting up life where you shall run and not be weary, and walk and not faint. Did I not say it was easy—you will “not be weary,” you will “not faint.” You can stick at last. There is victory.

When the eagle perches on a great high crag to sleep, you would say, “Suppose the old eagle would slip and fall on the rocks below and hurts its breast and die before it awakened enough to fly?” It does look like it, for it sleeps in the uppermost places, where no animal could climb. Sometimes it sleeps on an overhanging crag, with a chasm stretching thousands of feet below, and jagged rocks between the base and the summit. But oh, God never asks anyone to rest high without having protection. The eagle’s talons are so made by God that when it grips the rocks and sits down, it hooks those talons in, and those talons cannot open and lose their great grip on the rock without standing up to full height. He must first get up and stretch himself, and when he stretches himself, he can open his talons, but as long as he sits there, those talons are in the rock. The wind may blow and the storm rage, but the talons never come loose from the rock.

Hallelujah, there is a life of victory, and the devil can blow, and every wind of doctrine can rage, and the cunning of man can be roundabout, but you are founded on the rock and the talons hold. God can make a class of people that know how to trust Him and stand when the storms and the isms beat about, and the errors of our day, with their talons in the Word of God, and having done all, to stand. This is the mounting up life. “They that wait upon the Lord shall exchange their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”