Have you ever looked at the task in front of you and thought, it’s just not possible? Or maybe you’d think, ordinarily it is possible, but I’ve nothing left in the tank, I can’t see how I can get it done. I expect we all have. Maybe you are experiencing something like that right now.
God gave us a beautiful illustration from His creation to teach us something quite amazing, and maybe you and I need to hear it again today.
Have you ever watched an eagle in the sky? They are one of God’s awesome creatures. They just hover there, seemingly motionless, and yet before your very eyes, without seeming to move, they get carried on a current that we cannot see, we wouldn’t even know it is there. Before you know it, that eagle has elevated to a great height, 20 metres, 50 metres, 100 metres – they are now so far away that you can hardly see them.
That’s the illustration that God has chosen to give us for those moments when we feel like we have run out of energy and can go no further. Or that the task is beyond us and we’ll never get it done. In Isaiah 40 we read:
Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the Lord,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:28 – 31)
Wouldn’t it be amazing to think that whatever lies before you looking like an unscalable wall, could be cleared with no effort at all. Just hold out your wings (arms) and float above it. And yet it seems to me that is exactly what God is suggesting to us in His Word.
So what is the key?
Well, firstly it is faith. It takes faith to believe that God is the answer. It takes faith to believe that what God has given in His Word is true, not just true for others, true for you, true for me.
But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)
And secondly, we are told to wait on the Lord. To pause, to remember who created you and what He has created you for, to remember it is He that is our strength, and what we can achieve in His strength is so much more than we could ever achieve on our own, and to remember that it is He who creates the unseen currents that carry the eagle to heights beyond what we can see.
It makes me wonder, just how much more I could achieve, or how much easier it might have been, if the first thing I’d done was to wait on the Lord.
