How God works
from “True Revivals and the Men God Uses” by Horatius Bonar
When man proceeds to the accomplishment of some mighty enterprise, he puts forth prodigious efforts, as if by the sound of his axes and hammers he would proclaim his own fancied might and bear down opposing obstacles. He cannot work without sweat, and dust and noise. When God would do a marvellous work, such as may amaze all heaven and earth, He commands silence all around, sends forth the still small voice, and then sets some feeble instrument to work, and straightway it is done! Man toils and pants, and after all affects but little; the Creator, in the silent majesty of power, noiseless yet resistless, achieves by a word the infinite wonders of omnipotence.
In order to loose the bonds of winter, and bring in the verdure of the pleasant spring, He does not send forth his angels to hew in pieces the thickened ice, or to strip off the mountain’s side the gathered snows, or to plant anew over the face of the bleak earth, flowers from his creating hand.
No! He breathes from his lips a mild warmth into the frozen air; and forthwith, in stillness but in irresistible power, the work proceeds: the ice is shivered, the snows dissolve, the rivers resume their flow, the earth awakes as out of sleep, the hills and the valleys put on their freshening verdure, the fragrance of earth takes wing and fills the air, till a new world of beauty rises in silence amid the dissolution of the old!
Such is God’s method of working, both in the natural and the spiritual world – silent, simple, majestic and resistless!