Sapping Of Vitality

I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt but that the issue of our day, of this hour in the Church's history is...

More than ever, the issue of life and death in a spiritual sense. 

Are you not more and more experiencing that awful sapping of your very vitality?

That draining of your life, that exhausting of your energy, perhaps especially in relation to prayer? 

Is it not true that it often requires a supreme effort to pray, and to get through when you have started to pray? 

You need energizing from a source other than that of your own natural energies in this matter, and that increasingly so. 

There is a strange, deep, terrible sapping of vitality, mental and physical vitality as well as spiritual. 

Spiritual people, at least, know something of that. 

And lying at the back of it is the final conflict of this age. 

It is the spiritual issue of life and death.

The Lord would say to us something about that at this time...

And we have to direct our eyes in the the way of the Lord's thought to the great issue which is at stake for His people. 

I trust that we shall know that He is not only making us aware of it...

And not only warning us about the perils of it...

But that He comes mightily to our aid and shows us what is on our side in the battle.

~T. Austin Sparks~