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dr. greg austin

Category Archives: Encouragement

The Limp of Life

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Discipleship, Encouragement, Pastoral

≈ 2 Comments

In October, 2012 I suffered a devastating fall from a tall ladder onto unforgiving concrete. Despite the best efforts of good surgeons, I live each day with unwanted limitation, imperfection, disability and discomfort.

jacobwrestles300714_02

The falls of life, either literally or figuratively bring limitation to us all. The critical thing is to understand the purpose of collapse and crushing and to know how to respond to them.

On almost a daily basis I find myself wishing that having sustained various injuries and following prayer and surgery, I could be ‘over it.’ But I’m not.

Adding to the mechanical limits caused by the replacement of bone with steel and the “after market” installation of screws and pins is the ongoing experience of a congenital heart disease called Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy or ‘HCM’ as it is typically abbreviated.

Jacob ‘wrestled’ with the Lord and noticeably, conspicuously limped for the remainder of his days. A limp is an indicator of limitation, of frustration, of imperfection and finally, of surrender.

Two years prior to the ladder incident, I underwent a complex surgical procedure to alleviate a condition that should already have killed me. At the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, my heart was removed and detached from my body to enable Dr. Hartzel Schaff to carve out an enlarged muscle that was preventing the heart from doing its job of pumping blood into and out of the organ.

Following my surgery, Dr. Schaff informed me, “I removed the muscle that has blocked blood-flow, but you still have the disease.” I didn’t fully appreciate the gravity and full meaning of those words then, and only with time have I begun to understand and to accept my ‘new normal’ as opposed to my “old normal.”

Through the cross of Jesus, God has removed the influence (our sin nature) that blocked the flow of life, but until we are made fully and divinely perfect, we still have the disease (of being human and error prone)

I often, with or without exercise become almost completely breathless. If that sounds romantic, it’s not. It’s downright frustrating; sometimes scary; always unwelcome when my lungs are screaming for air and my pulmonary system refuses to respond as it was designed.

It’s very much like the feeling of having run a 100 meter dash. You know the feeling: Your body bends at the waist; your hands jut out to grasp your knees. Your chest heaves with the activity of refilling lungs with life-giving air. You’re dizzy, and the atmosphere  begins to blur and to fade. That’s the way I often feel; but without the running. And it’s frustrating. It’s restrictive. It’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s actually scary. And it’s an imperfect way to live.

But that’s my life. It’s yours, too: Imperfect. Partial. Limited. Flawed.

Maybe your limitation and frustration isn’t caused by a heart disease that you contracted by being born with flawed DNA. Maybe your limitation and frustration is caused by something else. Maybe your limitation is your fault. Maybe it’s not. As we eventually all discover, and as Alexander Pope observed: “To err is human.”

The apostle Paul was human and imperfect even as he strove for divine perfection. He called his limiter, his frustration a ‘thorn.’[1] He testified, speaking of perfection (resurrection), “Not that I have already reached the goal or am already fully mature …”[2]

And he isn’t the only Good Guy of scripture to have experienced imperfection. Moses lived the bulk of his days anticipating his entrance into a land that flowed with milk and honey. He never got there. He saw, but he did not possess his heart’s desire.[3]

Jacob, of Old Testament fame wrestled – a graphic and apt but somehow unsuitable sounding word to the religious-minded crowd who want squeaky clean, unsoiled, and so largely untested biblical heroes. Jacob ‘wrestled’ with the Lord; a messy, sweaty business and noticeably, conspicuously limped for the remainder of his days. A limp is an indicator of limitation, of frustration, of imperfection.[4

What’s your limp look like? What’s your limitation? Your frustration? We all have one. Or two. Or more. Where did your limp come from? How did it come to be?

David, Samson, Peter, James, and on and on the list goes until it includes you and me and everybody we know – none of us gets through this life without challenge, difficulty, failure. None of us is perfect. None of us can claim that we are without imperfection, limitation; without the limp of life.

Paul’s resume’ doesn’t stop with “Not that I have reached the goal (of resurrection from the dead – consider this not physical death, but dying to himself, to his “old” nature and dying to the world that he might be raised in newness of life), but he writes to the Philippian church, “I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”[5]

The power of the resurrection cannot be known without our first becoming conformed to death.

We will never know perfection until we have tasted imperfection. We cannot experience full ability until we are intimately familiar with inability.

In Old and New Testament terms, we can’t know the value of Grace until we understand the weight and the price of the Law.[6]

We were all, every one of us born “in sin.” We entered this world with a fully functioning “sin nature.” In our original, seemingly innocent condition, as sweet, little infants, we each arrived with a proclivity for iniquity.

The purpose of our imperfection is to both reveal to us and to lead us to “that which is perfect.” And “perfection” has a name; it’s a person, and his name is Jesus. Paul’s explanatory continues: “I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it (perfection), but one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. But we must hold on to the progress we have already made.”

My imperfection then is engineered by God’s own hand to produce, eventually, perfection. My limitation is designed to encourage and to enable me to press forward. John Wesley explains it as being “stretched out over the things that are before – Pursuing with the whole bent and vigour of my soul, perfect holiness and eternal glory. In Christ Jesus – The author and finisher of every good thing.”[7]

Wesley is careful not to ascribe the effort, the struggle, the process of perfection as the result of our own, valiant and persistent effort. His final, victorious declaration reveals that it is “Christ Jesus (in us) – The author and finisher of every good thing.”

Simply put, we cannot, by any measure of effort or valiant struggle or dogged determination be made perfect. “It is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”[8] “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”[9]

No wonder the words of the Apostle ring loud and clearly through the ages until we find them resounding in our own hearts, “the life that I now live I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.”[10]

Perfection is achievable, attainable, reachable, only as we give way so that He can have his way in our lives, through our imperfections, in spite of our inadequacies, despite our limping, wobbling weakened conditions. So long as it is “Christ in you,” there is more than hope for your tomorrow; there is promise, divine promise, from the God who will never leave you, or forsake you and who cannot, in any sense, fail. [11]

The Hebrew writer discloses concerning those faithful saints of history, all these died, and “none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.[12]

And until then? Until the day of perfection? Until then, we see in part, we know in part,[13] we live in partial fulfillment of the promise that surely, one day will be achieved and we shall be presented, without defect or flaw, before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy —“[14]

[1] 2 Corinthians 2:7-10

[2] Philippians 3:12

[3] Deuteronomy 34:1-

[4] Genesis 32:22-32

[5] IBID

[6] Galatians 3:24

[7] Wesley’s Explanatory Notes

[8] Philippians 2:13

[9] 2 Corinthians 4:7

[10] Galatians 2:20

[11] Colossians 1:20

[12] Hebrews 11:39,40

[13] 1 Corinthians 13:9

[14]  Jude 24,25

Abandoned To Be Found

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Discipleship, Encouragement, Pastoral

≈ 3 Comments

What images do these words conjure for you?

Abandoned

         Deserted

                      Discarded

                              Forsaken

                                      Alone

Whatever impressions emerge or pictures are drawn in your mind as you consider these words, it is likely that you have also experienced the feelings, the emotions, yes, the hurt and pain of abandonment or rejection.

Perhaps it was a parent – a mother or a father who abandoned you. Maybe it was a spouse or a child or a brother or a sister who rejected you. Those you believed were your friends, fellow “believers” in Jesus coldly and inexplicably forsook you and you found yourself suddenly and silently alone in your aloneness, shivering in the icy chill of your isolation, waiting in stunned silence for some sense, some understanding of what had happened, some reconciliation between what you thought you knew and believed and what you so painfully experienced.

Rejection and abandonment can come in a thousand costumes and speak with myriad voices. The effect, the result produced is always the same:

Rejection brings injury to the soul and anguish to the mind. Abandonment makes the heart grow weak, but more; desertion destroys self-worth. We learn early in life to discard what we do not need; what we do not want; what is not essential or profitable or useful or even acceptable.

Garbage is disposed of; trash is discarded. We keep only that to which we attach value.

An abandoned soul feels valueless, worthless, insignificant, useless.

A forsaken heart is more than empty and crushed and bruised and injured; it is a playground for devils, a gymnasium for demons.

From the soil of rejection flourish the sour fruits of bitterness, resentment and, dark, brewing rage. Implacable, stone-hearted and pitiless wrath proceed from hearts that have known the frigid winds of torment spawned by the uncaring, the unfeeling and the unaware.

From such renunciation Americans have become familiar with the name “Columbine” and “Red Lake High” in northern Minnesota and other, more recent scenes of torment and terror.

Most rejected and broken hearted people never pick up a gun or seek to lash out at others. There is no need and no desire. The slow, grinding suicide begun by the deadly injection of aloneness and friendlessness is as deadly as any bullet that ever roared in tortured anguish.

We cannot control if and when or by whom we will feel the lethal claws of abandonment.

What we can do, what we wield control over is our response to rejection. Options exist for the heart that was crushed. Brokenness may come, but annihilation is not inevitable. No soul that was crushed was ever beyond repair.

And there is Someone who knows…..feels….. empathizes…..understands….. cares, who is “touched by” our pains and who also possesses the power to heal even the most trampled upon and crushed heart. It was foretold of Him;

“I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice…He will not cry out, nor raise His voice, Nor cause His voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed He will not break, and smoking flax He will not quench.”

Who is this shining Knight; this Rescuer of offended hearts? Who is this Champion of the soul Who comes to right those who were wronged and to heal those who’s destruction seemed certain?

He came forth of misinterpreted illegitimacy and was raised in humble anonymity; He came forth from obscurity and moved about in lonely exile. He left His home country and renounced his nobility, He was self-effacing and pointedly unassuming. He sought nothing for Himself and was content by Himself.

He was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

It is He Who “will bring forth justice for truth,” and God will hold His hand; “He will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house.”

And to the One Who promised, “I will hold Your hand” hear the anguished cry from the central cross on that Crucifixion Day of all Days when Innocence was fixed to the Tree of Final Death: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him….” because He saw your face and knew your brokenness and He anticipated through forsaking Him, your wholeness.

This Man above men, “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the    likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross” So that He might see you, find you, know you, touch you, heal you, a bruised reed, tender, delicate, nearly too far gone to be repaired, but repairable in the Hands of a Master Physician.

And when we – you and I – accept and receive healing and restoration and the comfort of friendship with Him, we then carry within ourselves the knowledge, the ability and the sympathy to carry Him to another abandoned, rejected, forgotten heart, “that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

So, we reach to the “least of these.” We find ourselves among “orphans and widows.” We observe pure religion and undefiled before God because we become what He has always been; a Father to the fatherless; a Lover of the unlovely; a Friend to the friendless. A visitor of prisoners and a provider of a cloak, a meal, a home…a heart that knows, that feels, that sees, that understands.

Our Abandonment was essential for anothers Recovery

We were deserted so that we might learn to Salvage

                     Discarded so we could Recapture

                              Forsaken that we might Comprehend

                                         Alone that we might find the true Companion

What images are conjured in your heart? What scenes play before your mindscreen? Someone has been abandoned, deserted, discarded, forsaken. And who will notice? Who will go? Who will touch them in their brokenness and in their loneliness and who will bring them to the Forsaken One who alone has the antidote for this poison of the soul?

The Heart of the Matter: What God Wants…

17 Thursday Nov 2016

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Discipleship, Encouragement

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It is beyond me, past my feeble ability to comprehend that the God of the Universe, the Creator of all that Exists, Lord of heaven and earth “wants” for anything.

David, King of Israel by a resume’ forged in the hills among sheep and pasture and lions and bears declared “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. . .” The verse has been rightly interpreted, “I shall have no lack.”

The word, “want” is “lack.” My mind grasps, struggles, and concedes as I try to comprehend that the God Who owns far more than the cattle on a thousand hills could possible lack anything.

But He does.

He wants; He needs for His creation to love Him,

and loving Him, to know Him,

and knowing Him, to commune with Him

and in communion with Him, to serve Him, to co-labor with Him.

God needs for man – for you and for me – to serve Him not because we fear hell and somehow by serving God our escape from hell is purchased. Our Creator needs for us to serve Him not because someone with religious power and authority demands that we serve Him. God desires that we follow Him and know Him because we are nothing without Him and because we desperately need Him even when we do not know that we need Him.

God is not Law, or Commandment or Duty or Obligation: God is Love.

He is Giver, Father, Lover of His creation; of all His creation, and the manifestation of God is the Son, Jesus. It was He Who gave us the revelation: “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” 
He chose those words carefully. He did not say “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Ruler of the earth or the Judge of all flesh or the Creator of all life,” but you have seen – “Father.”

In Jesus we look into the very heart of God and find there an unfathomable depth of compassion and love and mercy.

In Jesus we see God’s desire to come close to mankind. In Him we learn that God longs to make His home in our hearts so that He can draw near to the center of our brokenness and be close to our wounds and our fears and myriad struggles in our lives.

In Jesus we make the inconceivable discovery that God is willing to pay an exorbitant price to create intimacy with our fallen, muddied, life-torn souls. The terrible price of the Cross and its agony; a darkness and judgment and curse we can never comprehend was paid so that we might return to our Maker and in returning, find that He had moved to us before we had ever moved to Him.

We have a God with a heart. More than Righteous Judge, more than all-powerful Creator, more than all the adjectives and superlatives and descriptions both revealed and given, our God has a heart!

 We must know that truth; we must immerse ourselves in that reality, we must understand because when trials come, when pain presses us into near-insanity, when a baby dies for no rational purpose, when the cancer grows, when friends forsake us, we see the pain but we don’t see God and we don’t realize the miracle that is in process.

In the noise and in the confusion we don’t sense the restoration. It’s then and it is there we must understand the heart of God. The heart of our Father, God. 

When the pressure of life is applied, we must know that what Jesus did for a woman with an issue of blood; what He did for a lame man and a blind man, and a young, dead girl, He does for people today.

He restores us to a place of acceptance and blessing in the family. He renews our hope and gives us a future. He guarantees a time to come when death will be no more; a time and a place when crying and suffering and every pain will be forever erased.

We look into God’s heart and find there love and life and restoration. We discover passion and possibility. And only when we see God’s heart can we begin to understand what He meant when He revealed that David had a heart after His own heart.

The Key to finding the heart of God is to find the things God cares about and to find ourselves caring about those things. 

Jesus was asked by taunting Scribes “what is the first commandment?” The learned men who asked were not surprised when He answered, “The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment.” These Scribes knew very well the proper response, but none could have imagined His next words, “And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

The Lord of life put in context in four, brief sentences the heart and the crux of all the Law and in the same moment, revealed for all who would hear, and for all who would see, the very heart of His Father God. And it is “love.” “. . . Love the Lord your God with all your heart. . .”

The heart first; not the soul or the mind or strength, but the heart. The issue, the heart of the matter, is the heart.

It was said of David “he will do all My will,” because he was “a man after God’s own heart,” God’s broken heart. 

He, Jesus is our peace, Who has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances so as to create in Himself one new man from the two; thus making peace and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. Oh, what an incredible, incomparable heart.

This incredible heart. This incomparable heart. The heart of God is pressed into us, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Hearts of stone are impregnable, impenetrable, they are resistant to wounding by sword or spear or speech. Hearts of stone neither embrace nor notice when injury or despair or loneliness are present. Hearts of flesh are vulnerable, easily pierced, frequently wounded, repeatedly healed.

What heaven desires, what God is asking is for the divine-human exchange to take place, “Old hearts for new,” broken hearts for His broken heart. Hearts of stone replaced with hearts of flesh so that the world that surrounds us, the people who pass by our homes and who fill our streets and who buy their groceries alongside and all about us will know the heart of God through the pulse of our lives, because we, like David, King of Israel have hearts, have fleshy, vulnerable, loving “hearts after God’s own heart.”

The Good Fight

02 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Encouragement, Pastoral

≈ 1 Comment

(For context, the following was written on Tuesday, March 28, 2016).

As the sun rises at the start of a new and untainted day I find myself sitting in the old chair on the front porch, facing the East and a new day’s sun. No cloud obscures that warming orb, and memories come floating up like delicate and tender butterflies, newly freed from their caterpillar imprisonment.

It was only yesterday that we laid to rest a precious Saint, a man of God and a true and dear husband, father and friend. On Monday, the day following Resurrection Sunday we gathered, we stood silently and alone together, encapsulated in our own memories and thoughts on a hillside surrounded by the sublime beauty that is Appalachia in Southwest Virginia.

Like so many before us, we could not have imagined or considered that this day would arrive; not, at least so soon. We are conditioned to believe that death is reserved for the elderly or the very weak: We believe death to be the mysterious domain of the ancient and the feeble and the diminished among us. Death is somehow more palatable when it calls at 95 or 80 or even 75 years of life, or before personality and disposition and ‘person-hood’ develop.

We are not conditioned, we are ill-prepared to accept the departure of the strong and the healthy and the animated among us; we are not ready to say farewell to our spouses or our fathers or our mothers or our dearest and most cherished friends in the midst of their most productive and significant years. Death does not knock at the door, it does not ring a bell of inquiry but is an unwelcome intruder that advances, unbidden and unwanted into our homes and snatches away our friends without reason or permission or respect.

And we despise this inescapable part of life. We know it will come, eventually. Thousands of generations of humans, people, families have taught us the inevitability of death: If we are born, we will die: But not so soon, not this soon.

Our lives are encircled by inviolable boundaries. We may desire to lift ourselves, to rise into the stratosphere, to dance among clouds and to skip from sun ray to mountaintop by the sheer effort of will, but gravitational law forbids such frolic. We may lean towards tomorrow, seek a porthole into the future, we may consult the prophet and peer intently into the slightest crack in time’s forward door, but we soon discover as have all those who have gone before us, there is no gift of reliably forecasting the future.

And so, when our friend weakened and withered and when the moment arrived when we knew that barring a miracle of God he would not recover, we pressed ourselves against every line and verse and paragraph of hope that God’s word might provide us, might enable us to see and to witness and to experience a resurrection from the unavoidable.

But the resurrection we celebrated on Sunday had not been made material on the previous Thursday, the day that will forever mark the conclusion of our friend’s earthly lifespan.

We stood beside him on that Maundy Thursday morning. We waited for a miracle. We ached to witness a wonder. We talked to our Friend, encouraging Him to raise our friend. And He did not.

Something we cannot see, someplace we cannot yet go, Someone we cannot yet behold encompassed and captivated and completed our friend. He had gone beyond; beyond what we know, what we understand, beyond where we may walk. As our friend had encouraged others when their friends departed, so we encourage and are encouraged as our friend departs.

Tears are a gift from heaven. They are provided to facilitate the out-pour without which we would be overwhelmed, inundated, drowned in our sorrows and sunk in our aching. And with our gift torn open, exposed and employed we weep, because we have been given the capacity to pour out, as our heavenly Friend was poured out for us. We cry, in the most inopportune moments and in the least appropriate places. Some memory loosens and breaks away from the walls or our life-flow and enters into the bloodstream of our love and we weep; hot, salty tears flow from a well, made full by love for our friend.

Soul-pain is afforded by a loving Father. It is necessary to validate our love and to authenticate our affection. If our hearts did not ache, if our very frames did not protest the passing of our friends, what evidence would we provide of our love and affection and devotion to those who pass from among us to among “them?”

And with the tears and with the pain there is promise of rejoicing yet to come. A perfect Father promises to wipe away every tear from our eyes. He informs us of a place where “there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Our friend has passed through the “valley of the shadow of death.” In his passing, he feared no evil, because He was with him. The promise made and delivered to countless millions of souls who were carried through The Great Transition before him, has now been made real to our friend. And he has now crossed over, he has entered in; he has found his reward.

Our Great Friend assured us, so our hearts need not be troubled; we believe in God and we believe also in Jesus. In His Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, He would have told us. He has gone to prepare a place for us, and if He has gone to prepare a place for us, He will return and receive us to Himself, that where He is, there we may be also.

Our weeping must endure for a night, but joy surely comes in the morning. A joy that is unspeakable and full of glory awaits those who have suffered the dark hours of weeping and who have agonized in the embrace of the stinging, callous arms of sorrow.

Jesus promised; the one Who cannot lie nor distort nor deceive has pledged and now comforts us, “to him who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.”

Jeff Williams, our dear friend has fought a good fight, he has finished his course, he has kept the faith. He has overcome the world and has entered into His rest. The gift of eternal life given to a young and zealous man has now been fully received and experienced by a mature, learned and still-zealous man. We will no more hear his gifted voice lift the splendorous melodies of God’s astonishing symphony of grace. His laughter will no longer ring loud and uproarious in our gatherings. Another world holds our friend, captivates him in its glories, and provides to you and me motivation to follow him as he followed his Christ and now worships and triumphs before his King.

He Has, We Shall

17 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Encouragement

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No futurist could conceive the things God has prepared for them that love Him. No romanticist could adequately describe the love story of the ages, played out by the divine cast of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No historian could discover a more expansive and majestic story than the one told by the Word Himself, Who Himself and within Himself and without need of any other entity “fills all in all.”

To consider that the pure, holy and singular God of creation would invite mere man into the royal courts of His presence, let alone invite His creation to approach His glorious throne begs the wildest, most colorful imagination among us. And such imagination falls hopelessly short of comprehending or of conveying the depth of love, the degree of grace involved in the invitation to stand, to rest, to walk by His side.
He has called us to His throne but more; He has called us to rule with His own Son. He makes us to be His children, “and if children, then heirs – heirs with God and joint-heirs with Christ,” for Scripture articulates the promise, “If we endure, We shall also reign with Him.”
Excerpted from “Royal Priesthood, The Pathway to Kingdom Authority,” Greg Austin, Don Atkin, Steve Crosby.

 

When I Am Weak . . .

19 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Encouragement

≈ 3 Comments

The inevitable, universal process we call “aging” is both hated and unavoidable. But as many have wryly observed, aging beats the alternative. As we age – when a man grows old, his body manifests the effects of maturation. Years and miles and stresses and the calamities that occur in an imperfect world ultimately take their necessary toll on the strongest among us.

couplewalk

And so the hearing is eventually impaired. We reach for reading glasses, glasses for driving, assistance to give us a semblance of the sight we once took for granted.

As we age, we tire more easily. Stamina is reduced. Breathing becomes labored at the slightest incline. Legs that once carried us cheerfully begin to protest the strain of activity. The strength made available by the muscle of youth retracts and retreats ever so slowly but inevitably.

A man views these as weaknesses and as impairments. Woman sees the deficiencies; she notices the wrinkle, the sag, the line, the fold and the furrow, and she weeps.

And try as we might through the investment of money and of time and of effort, the hearing and the sight and the strength of youth will not return and is finally gone forever.

We are tempted towards sorrow and distress. We wonder when, we wonder where the process of decay will conclude. It all is such a sad and unhappy condition.

But perhaps God in His infinite and perfect wisdom has arranged, and through the introduction of man’s sin into the world, has caused the human DNA to be effected by that sin in such as way that scripture is confirmed when it asserts, “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned.”

Perhaps “effected” should more accurately be rendered “infected.” and that by the disease of sin death becomes the eventual conclusion of the aging process.

But God is more gracious, and so with time the hearing fades that man might better hear the still, small voice of God’s Holy Spirit. The sight dims that we might more clearly see God and God’s purposes.

Physical strength is abated so that we might lean more heavily upon the God Who never fails and whose joy is our strength.

Do not view the passing of years and the perishing of physical abilities as curse or as undesirable: God is preparing you to see, to perceive and to appreciate the King in all His might and majesty, in His greatness and all His glory.

God is detuning your ear from the sounds of a temporal life to the frequency of eternity. God is preparing to fill you with the power of the ages through the fuller dwelling of His Spirit in you.

The corruption of the physical body eventuates in death, but death, to the follower of Christ leads only to life. Deafness concludes in hearing, and blindness in seeing.

The process of deterioration, as is true in all of the mysteries of God is in reality a process of restoration, of renovation, of re-creation. We must decrease that He might in us, increase.

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