"I can do it myself." Face it, those words represent our human default setting. Self-dependency is natural, optomistic, and deceptive. It always promises more than it can deliver.

God's solution is the Holy Spirit, who lives in us, and empowers us to live in a fashion after God himself. And when we fit in with the Spirit and walk in step with him, wonders happen, and God is glorified.

F. B. Meyer in a book on Isaiah has a chapter on prayer titled ASKING AND COMMANDING. He concludes:

All the resources of God dwell bodily in the risen and glorified Lord. They are imparted to us through the communion of the Holy Spirit, who goes between the unsearachable riches of Christ and our poverty; bringing the one to the other, as the ocean brings the wealth of the world up to the wharves (a pulley or flywheel) of London or New York.

We have then to deal with the Holy Spirit, to study the methods of his operation - what hinders or helps, what accelerates or retards.

Obey Him, and He pours such mighty energy into and through the spirit, that men are amazed at the pridigality (extravagant wastefulness) of its supply.

Resist or thwart Him, and He retires from the spirit, leaving it to struggle as best it may with its difficulties and trials.

Meyer concludes by pointing out that in the proportion by which we are able to be under the authority of the Commander-In-Chief, to that degree we will have the earthly authority to "say to this and the other resources, "Go," or "Come," or "Do this!"

God will be able to trust us, and answer our prayers, as we lay before him our concerns regarding his sons and the work of his hands, and what we long to see Him do.

A pastor in Scotland for the latter part of the 19th Century, Matheson's eyesight gradually declined to the point of blindness, but thanks to the help of his sisters, he excelled, and armed with an exceptional ability to memorize, he maintained a successful and fruitful ministry from the pulpit. Often those who heard him preach for the first time did not even realize that he was blind.

From Matheson's own recollection, we are told how O LOVE THAT WILT NOT LET ME GO was born.

My hymn was composed in the manse of Argyleshire, Scotland on the evening of the 6th of June, 1882, when I was 40 years of age. I was alone in the manse at that time. It was the night of my sister’s marriage, and the rest of the family were staying over night in Glasgow.

Some thing happened to me, which was known only to myself, and which caused me the most severe mental suffering. The hymn was the fruit of that suffering. It was the quickest bit of work I ever did in my life. I had the impression of having it dictated to me by some in ward voice rather than of working it out myself.

I am quite sure that the whole work was completed in five minutes, and equally sure that it never received at my hands any re­touching or correction. I have no natural gift of rhythm. All the other verses I have ever written are manufactured articles; this came like a dayspring from on high.

O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.