Dgc Midweek Service July 15 2026 by Pastor Lawrence Oyor: Sermon Notes

What Is Strength

Strength is the capacity or power to resist force, endure stress, and exert physical or mental effort. It is for defense as much as it is for offense.

Strength Preserves the Body

Proverbs 18:14 teaches that the spirit of a man sustains him through sickness. People who die gradually, rather than suddenly, often hold on to unfinished business, calling grandchildren close, urging a family not to fight, because the spirit is still sustaining a body that is ready to give out.

A season of consecration, such as a ninety-day stretch of many hours of prayer a day for three months, can be carried without strain while the discipline lasts, only for the body to break down badly once it ends. That is proof that a believer must give attention not only to the art of prayer, but to the art of feeding the spirit, so that as a person grows more anointed, the spirit grows stronger to match. Exercising the spirit without feeding it leaves a person open to attack.

Strength Resists Temptation

In Mark 14:28-38, Peter insists he will never deny Jesus, even if everyone else does, and the other disciples vow the same. Jesus does not argue with him. He simply tells the three disciples closest to him, Peter, James, and John, to sit and pray while he goes further to pray alone, because he never expected strength from the rest, only from these three, who had seen him transfigured and understood what was coming.

Even the King of glory needed friends, and he did not show the same vulnerability to the other nine that he showed to these three. Not everybody deserves your depths, and not everybody can be trusted to guard your most vulnerable moments. Watch out, too, for the kind of friend who gossips about others to you. They will gossip about you to others.

Jesus then falls to the ground and prays that the hour might pass, before finishing with, everything is possible for you. Finishing is the hardest part of any journey, and it is where strength is needed most, because most people do not fail to start something, they fail to see it through. Either their bodies will not carry them to the end, or they never invested strength into their spirit in the way their body needed preserving to finish.

Strength Keeps You Free

Luke 11:21-22 describes how a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, and his possessions are safe, until a stronger one comes. Deliverance is not a single event. It takes strength to stay free, and it takes strength to help others stay free once they have been delivered.

Ministering deliverance to someone without also ensuring their ongoing strength is like disturbing water you cannot control. People relapse not because deliverance failed, but because they were never strengthened afterward to hold what they had received. Some carry enough strength to defend a portion but not enough to fully possess it. Strength comes in levels, and there is always a stronger level to grow into.

Strength Possesses the Portion

It takes strength not only to see a promise in a dream, but to take hold of it. Peter labored all night and caught nothing, until tremendous power resolved his delay in a single moment. Isaiah 53:12 and Psalm 24 both describe portions, and gates, opening to the strong.

Watching a promise and only saying amen over it, without generating the strength to take it, leaves room for someone else to walk into what you are merely observing. Somebody, somewhere, is studying, laboring, and pressing for the very thing you are praying about. The call is to stop observing and start generating the strength to take your portion.

How Strength Is Renewed

Daniel 11:32 says those who know their God will be strong. Intimacy with God, and knowing his word, is strength, the same way Jesus resisted Satan in the wilderness by using the word. Waiting on the Lord in prayer renews strength and lifts a believer to run without weariness.

Strength is always in levels. Sometimes the one who is stronger than you is simply a fellow believer who has pressed further than you have. Willpower, the heightened ability to do what is right and reject what is not, is one of the clearest signs that strength has increased, because power must impact spirit, soul, and body alike.