Jesus who once suffered in Gethsemane will be our strength and our victory, too. We may fear, we may also sink, but let us not be dismayed, and we shall yet praise Him and look back from a finished course and say, Not one thing hath failed of all the good things which the Lord [our] God spake concerning [us] (Joshua 23:14). But in order to do this, we must, like Jesus, meet the conflict, not with a defiant but with a submissive spirit. He had to say, Not my will, but thine be done, but in saying it He gained the very thing He surrendered. The submission of Gethsemane is not a blind and dead submission of a heart that abandons all its hope, but it is the free submission that bows the head in order to get double strength through faith and prayer. We let go in order that we may take a firmer hold. We give up in order that we may more fully receive. We lay our Isaac on Mount Moriah, and we receive him back, no longer our Isaac, but God's Isaac and infinitely more secure because he is returned to us in resurrection life.
