Doing God's Work

Here are a couple of thoughts connected to devotions from Streams In The Desert:

Straining and striving does not accomplish the work God gives us to do. Only God Himself, who always works without stress and strain and never overworks, can do the work He assigns to His children. When we restfully trust Him to do it, the work will be completed and will be done well. And the way to let Him do His work through us is to so fully abide in Christ by faith that He fills us to overflowing. A man who learned this secret once said, "I came to Jesus and drank, and I believe I will never be thirsty again. My life's motto has become 'not overwork but overflow,' and it has already made all the difference in my life. There is no straining effort in an overflowing life, and it is quietly irresistible. It is the normal life of omnipotent and ceaseless accomplishment into which Christ invites each of us to enter... 

Reminds me of the classic Psalm 23 where "the Lord anoints my head with oil, my cup overflows."

On the other hand we know "God runs a costly school, for many of His lessons are learned through tears. Richard Baxter, the seventeenth century Puritan preacher, once said, "O God I thank You for the discipline I have endured in this body for fifty-eight years." And he certainly is not the only person who has turned trouble into triumph. Soon the school of our heavenly Father will close for us, for the end of the school term is closer every day. May we never run from a difficult lesson or flinch from the rod of discipline. Richer will be our crown, and sweeter will heaven be, if we endure to the end. Then we shall graduate to glory."

"God pursues us in our restlessness, receives us in our sinfulness, holds us in our brokenness.