By J. Stuart Holden

      "For a great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries" (1 Cor. 16:9).

      Let there be no mistake about this. The place of Christian witness is often a hard and lonely place. But it is under just such conditions, matching the confidence of your faith against the apparent hopelessness of your efforts, that your own personal life will most surely develop. You may not appear to make much of the work entrusted to you. But it will make you! The man you are to be will not emerge from the man you are except by hardness and conflict and by the overcoming of obstacles in the power of Him Who neither dispenses with your personality nor suppresses it as you engage together in the holy warfare.

      Look out, then, upon that open door! And get you through it in fellowship with Jesus Christ! Look at the adversaries through the opportunity. Don't make the fatal mistake of looking at the opportunity through the adversaries. And remember, now and always, that Christ our Lord does not ask us to do anything that He does not propose to undertake also with us! "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" Many adversaries? "Nay. In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loves us!"