◄ Personification ►

God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction" (Gen. 41:52).

To share what we have may minister temporarily to the physical; but to minister to the spiritual in an eternal way we must share what we are, and that calls for growth in the Lord Jesus Christ.

"We can only comfort others with the comfort wherewith we ourselves have been comforted of God. Others can only really be helped by what has been the power of life in the would-be helper.

"Information, by itself, however correct and orthodox, however strongly held in conviction and passed on in passion, will lack an essential and indispensable quality or value for spiritual constitution.

"Hence it has ever been God's way to raise up a vessel, personal or corporate, in which His message has been wrought by fiery ordeal. The messenger must not only have the message in him, but he must be in the message: not only in mind and feeling, but in experience and being." -T. A-S.

"We really can only come into the reality of things by being pressed out of measure' (2 Cor. 1:8). So the Lord has to take much time to make our spiritual history. When at length our eyes are open, we cry, O, why did I not see it before!' But everything else had to prove insufficient before we could really be shown, and that takes time."

"Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time" (1 Pet 5:6).