If God alone is enough to support joy when all else is lost, it is a miracle of grace.

Irony and disproportion are all God's way. He keeps us off balance with his unpredictable connections. We think we know how to do something big, and God makes it small. We think that all we have is weak and small, and God makes it big.

Paul worked hard. He did not say that God's grace made his work unnecessary. He said God's grace made his work possible.

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:8).

Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.

And I am the rather induced to do what little I can in this way, because I can do nothing else: being prevented, by my present weakness, from either travelling or preaching. But, blessed be God, I can still read, and write, and think. O that it may be to his glory!

not a shadow thereof, but a real degree, by the preventing grace of God,)

Now when you can no longer be active, and infirmities press upon you, all that God requires of you is to trust Him.

They must have His grace, the Spirit of Christ, to help their infirmities, or they cannot resist evil. Jesus loves to have us come to Him just as we are, sinful, helpless, dependent. We may come with all our weakness, our folly, our sinfulness, and fall at His feet in penitence. It is His glory to encircle us in the arms of His love and to bind up our wounds, to cleanse us from all impurity.

In order to encourage us to have confidence and trust He comes near us by His holy Word and Spirit, and seeks in a thousand ways to win our confidence. But in nothing does He take more delight than in receiving the weak who come to Him for strength.

Strong is the strength which God supplies/Through His eternal Son.

Poor, frail human nature! God can do little for men who lose their sense of dependence upon Him.