Weary to My Bones

Do you ever get tired?  I mean, “weary to your bones”?  Time and again in our church, we’ve seen leaders pour their hearts out as a drink sacrifice, tipping the cup of all their heart, mind, soul and strength out until the last drop is spent.  Invariably, it seems, those few will then say, “I’ve done my part.  I can’t do this anymore.  I’m out.  It’s up to someone else now.”  Oftentimes, that is where I find myself, these days.  And yet, I have not learned to say “no”.  

What is the remedy?  Is it simply to cut back? I think the Biblical answer is something else.  I read, “my strength is made perfect in weakness” and “come to me for my yoke is easy and my burden light” and “take up your cross and follow me”.  And on and on.

I know that in all this, my striving for perfection is futile, yet commanded.  “Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).”  It is my estimation that that is only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The practice of so many “spiritual giants” like Bonhoeffer and Lewis and Luther was to come every morning in prayer to God for enough Manna to get through the day.  For Luther, the more daunting his day seemed, the earlier he would rise, the longer to pray.  

What do we pray?  It has to start with a humble and contrite heart, does it not?  That is how the Sermon on the Mount begins.  And every single beatitude begins, “Blessed are you”!  That is in the passive tense: “You are blessed by God Almighty!  You are blessed when you recognize your own fallibility and limitations, when you mourn for your sins and when you ask the Holy Spirit to fill your sails, in quiet strength joyfully going where His Holy Wind will take you!”  I will not reiterate here every blessing He pours out on us.  But blessing follows blessing upon blessing!  

What is my response to these blessings, these undeserved gifts from God Almighty?!?  What else can it be, except to express my gratitude.  And my humble amazement and awe at His Majesty!  

And here, I come back to the start of this posting.  This is where my own exhaustion rears its ugly head and says, “I’m too tired to do all that again today.”  And this is where my Covenant with Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior has to remind me of what He has done.  Dare I “survey the wondrous Cross”?  Dare I even consider how He poured his very life out … for me?  

And then I can get up and face the demands of today.  Family, job, friends, church and so forth.  But the rest of the world is quite insistent, with its pain, war, disease, famine, and natural disasters.  Let’s come back next week and look at how Jesus wants us to interact with the world around us.