God is my Strength

I'm tired. In fact, I'm exhausted. I haven't felt this tired in all of my life, at least to my remembrance. I'm tired because I have been running the world's race and not God's race. I'm tired because I have fought to be successful from the world's point of view as opposed to fighting the good fight of faith, as Paul says, and being a successful Christian. I'm tired because the work I've been doing benefits only the secular, materialistic and temporal, while what I should be doing is work that benefits the spiritual and eternal. Do any of you feel this way? We've been in revival this week and I'm quickly realizing the "why" behind being so tired, physically and mentally. My focus has been slowly shifting to the spiritual and away from the material of late, but this week has brought it sharply to the forefront of my attention. We spend so much energy on trying to please the flesh and so little on pleasing the One, who created the flesh. What profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? That question has been running through my mind constantly for the last several months. I started this post before I went to church tonight and I have to tell you that God is Wonderful. I have been soaking up what the evangelist has been saying, but tonight there was one part where he was saying some of the very things that I said above. Not in the exact same wording, but close enough that he could have been summarizing the first half of this post. The answer lies not in myself, but in God and His Word, in prayer and in faith. When we trust in God and His Wisdom, and not in ourselves, we have a freedom to do the work He has called us to do. When we realize that He didn't call us to failure, He called us to do His work and His work doesn't fail. "So shall My word be that goeth forth out of My mouth: It shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it" (Isaiah 55:11, 21st Century KJV) In this verse, God tells us that His Word will not fail and if we are doing His work of spreading His Word, then we won't fail. Does that make sense? Do you understand the point I am trying to make? Let me illustrate this in another way. When God gave Ezekial the vision of the valley of dry bones, was it Ezekial that brought the dry bones back to life or was it the Word of God that Ezekial spoke? What are the key things that Ezekial did in this story? First, Ezekial wasn't some random fellow that God picked up and brought to this vision. Ezekial was a man of God that had faith in what God was doing with Israel. Second, Ezekial obeyed God when He spoke. He didn't say, "Well, that just sounds a little too far out there for me, Lord. Why don't your try that church down the road a bit? They do crazy stuff like that all of the time." No. Ezekial knew that God was in control, so if God said, "Do this," then Ezekial did it. We need to be more like Ezekial and less like Balaam, needing a donkey to tell us what to do. And after this week's revival services, I'm ready to follow Ezekial's lead.