RENEWED STRENGTH

ISAIAH 40:31

 

            This passage from Isaiah lets us know that God often has to renew our strength.  The reason for this is that we grow weak.  Our weakness may be physical, emotional, mental or even spiritual.  Whatever the reason we need the Lord in our life to renew our strength.  We may need strength to heal.  Sometimes we need strength just to hold on.  There are also times that we need strength to achieve something that we are sure we cannot gain on our own.

            Healing is something that must happen.  When we are sick or in the recovering process after surgery, we anticipate healing but we cannot make ourselves heal.  It takes patience, good medicine, time and, most of all, the hand of God.  He alone can provide the strength to heal.  The Great Physician is the only one who truly heals.  We are the subjects when it comes to healing.  When we are down, we find that it takes strength (that we do not have) to heal.  Christ is our provider of strength.

            We sometimes need strength to just hold on.  One might be in a difficult marriage or bad situation at work and need the strength to stay put until he or she can pray through the difficulty.  When I was a teenager I had an old car that had an engine that had probably been abused over the years.  The car was old when I bought it and had been used to deliver the mail.  My emergency brakes did not work and the car would not hold if you parked it on a slight grade.  In other words the engine did not have enough compression to hold the car in place when the engine was shut down.  It did not have the strength to hold on.  Sometimes our life situation may have us abused or beaten down to the point it is hard to just stay put.  We want to run.  God can renew our strength.  He can rebuild our engine; give us the compression to hold.

            When the task ahead is difficult, He gives us strength that we had no idea we could possess.  For the mountain so high, He provides the strength to climb.  When we have gone as far as we think we can go, He gives the strength to go further.  Is it not good to know that we do not have to live in our own strength but His.

 

Yours in Christ,

 

Brother Randy Burtram

 

(Originally published March 18, 2018)