“When it all became too much for me, one night I heard a voice: ‘My child, I have everything in My hands. These things come from Me.’ I replied, ‘If these things come from You, please protect me and my family. Do not allow me to dishonor Your name. I want to serve You and glorify Your name’
“Then I received peace in my heart. I was encouraged by Psalm 68:19, Praise be to the Lord, to God our Savior, who daily bears our burdens. In those difficult years, people let me down, but God never abandoned me. But he did put me through trials.
“The first trial was the struggle to survive. I was only earning 80 cents a day. How could we get by on that? But God took care of us, in the same way that he took care of Elijah. He promised to be my shepherd and provider.
“One evening, my mother-in-law said that there was no food anymore in the house. The next morning, at five to six there was a knock on the door. ‘Are you sister Alice?’ asked a woman in her sixties, whom I didn’t know. ‘God wanted me to give you this.’ She put a package in my hand and disappeared. When I opened the parcel I found there was rice in it and some other food and a banknote to the value of about four month’s salary of a professor! Praise the Lord. Where man comes to an end, God begins! This was only one of the many miracles which kept us alive all those years.”
If the disciplines of spiritual warfare are the Word and prayer, the central attitude for those in battle in faithful obedience. In order to continuously walk in the Spirit and produce the fruit of the Spirit, we must have that quality which we call perseverance.
The enemy's attempt to counter this quality is to create spiritual battle fatigue followed by spiritual lethargy - a general attitude we simply call giving up.
John Bunyan described it in Pilgrim's Progress as the Enchanted Ground --
"When saints do sleepy grow,
let them come hither,
And hear how these two pilgrims talk together;
Yea, let them learn of them, in any wise,
Thus to keep ope their drowsy, slumbering eyes.
Saint's fellowship, if it be managed well,
Keeps them awake; and that in spite of hell."
And hear how these two pilgrims talk together;
Yea, let them learn of them, in any wise,
Thus to keep ope their drowsy, slumbering eyes.
Saint's fellowship, if it be managed well,
Keeps them awake; and that in spite of hell."
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