Turning Point

Guest (Male): Welcome to Turning Point. Have you noticed how much energy it takes to live with stress? It's exhausting. And it's usually when we are at our weakest that the enemy attacks. Today, Dr. David Jeremiah begins the series Making Sense of It All with some practical, biblical advice he's titled, "Courage When Fatigue Drains You." Listen now as David introduces today's timely message.

Dr. David Jeremiah: And thank you for joining us today. There is an old saying that says fatigue makes cowards of us all. When you get tired, things get different. Today, we're going to talk about what to do when fatigue drains you from an incredible passage in Isaiah chapter 40. Get your Bibles. If you have a study guide, get your study guide. We will begin in just a moment as we start this new month with this new series called Making Sense of It All: Seeing the World with a Biblical Perspective.

During this month when you help us with the ministry that we're doing here on the radio, we want to send you a very special resource. I just got my copy yesterday and it is by my friend Rob Morgan, and it's called *100 Bible Verses That Made America Great*. These verses have a history behind them, and there are really a hundred of them. As you go through this book, you are amazed at the research Rob has done to help us understand how the Bible has been interwoven into the fabric of our nation.

We would like to send you this book. It's our way of saying thank you for your July gift in keeping with the 250th anniversary of our nation. This book is 359 pages long. It's a good read and it's a good book to have. When you send a gift of any size, ask for your copy of the book *100 Bible Verses That Made America Great*, and it will be on its way to you before you know it. Let's get started with the lesson today. This is "Courage When Fatigue Drains You."

America is becoming a nation of angry, short-tempered people. From road rage to airplane rage, grocery store rage, and violence at sports events, the media has been reporting these emotional outbursts with unprecedented frequency. How in the world do we overcome the temptation to join in the rat race and become part of the problem instead of part of the solution? If you will listen carefully and prayerfully, I believe that God's word can help today. I know that the passage we are sharing has been a wonderful blessing in my own life and I trust that it will be so for you as well.

Isaiah is going to help us understand an important spiritual discipline, a discipline that can transform the way that we do life. As we unpack this passage, we will find a symbol of courageous strength to help us in times of stress. So let's begin by looking at this passage backwards, if you will, from the bottom up. Our first principle is this: the symbol of courageous strength is soaring.

Notice what it says in Isaiah chapter 40, verse 31: "They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint." Isaiah is using this symbolic picture from ornithology, from the study of birds, to help us understand how a person who is walking with the Lord is supposed to cope during times of pressure. I read an article that described three different ways that birds fly. Listen carefully.

First of all, some birds fly by simply flapping. Ornithologists say that the first method of flying is flapping, keeping their wings in constant motion to counteract gravity. For instance, hummingbirds can flap up to 70 times per second. But flapping is an awkward, clumsy business. I don't know about the rest of you, but taking my life in this metaphor, I've spent a lot of time flapping. Do you do that? I am supposed to be like an eagle and I am flapping around like a hummingbird. The problem with flapping is that it makes a lot of commotion but it doesn't get you anywhere.

The second way of flying, according to the scholars, is by gliding. The second kind of flying works like this: the bird builds up enough speed and he goes up high and he settles into a downward flight, gliding. It is much more graceful than flapping, but unfortunately, it doesn't get the bird very far because a reality in the form of gravity sets in pretty quickly. A gliding bird, if he is not arrested in his glide, will glide ultimately right into the ground.

The third way is what we would call soaring. Only a few birds, like the eagle, are capable of doing this. Eagles' wings are so strong that they are capable of catching rising currents of warm air, thermal winds that go straight up from the earth, and without moving a feather, they can soar to great heights. In fact, some eagles have been clocked at up to 80 miles per hour without flapping at all. They just soar on the invisible columns of air.

Listen to Isaiah again: "They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall soar." Now, if you want to go through your whole life just flapping, just doing your own thing and just flapping around, you can do that. You won't get anywhere, you will make a lot of commotion, and you will wear yourself out pretty quickly.

Or you can have one little moment of glory and grace and glide right into the earth. Or you can let God teach you to soar like an eagle. Then you get the updrafts of His Spirit and you get the energy that comes from Him, and you soar in His strength. When we face a crisis, then we soar. When we are going through the ups and downs of life, we learn to run without weariness, and when sometimes we are called just to plod along day after day, we walk without fainting.

So here is a promise that works for every age and for every stage of life. We are called upon in this passage of scripture in the imagery Isaiah presents to be God's eagles, flying and soaring above the issues of life. But how do we do that? How do we stop flapping and start soaring? The symbol of courageous strength is soaring, but if you read the Bible carefully, you will notice that the secret of courageous strength is waiting. Isaiah 40:30 and 31: "The young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength." The secret of courageous strength is waiting.

Now, what does that mean? The Bible has a lot to say about waiting. To wait means to pause, to soberly consider our own inadequacies and the Lord's all-sufficiency, and to seek counsel and help from the Lord and to find hope in Him. Waiting involves submission to the word of God and the will of God and the ways of God. Waiting is saying, "I'm not going to do this on my own. I'm going to do this in the strength that God provides." Lord, I am going to let you be the updraft under my wings that causes me to be who you want me to be.

I want to show you five benefits that will happen to you as a believer if you learn how to wait. Then I'm going to talk a little bit more about what it means to wait. I need to tell you before I go any further that this is a very hard discipline for me. I was built more for speed than for comfort, and waiting is not an easy thing for a type A person to accomplish. And yet, in the measure that I have been able to get around this discipline in my own heart and make it my practice, I have found the strength that God promises in Isaiah.

When I first moved to California from the Midwest, I did not know anything about waiting. I lived in a town where when you went to the bank, you were always first or second in line. You never waited. You went to the grocery store, and there was always a checkout open for you. I came to Southern California, and what an introduction to a new way of life. Everywhere you went, you waited.

You waited at the ATM, you waited at the stores, you waited to get your driver's license, you waited for everything. Most of all, you waited in restaurants. I remember during that time someone gave me a little piece of advice that went like this: when you go to a restaurant, you wait to get in. After you get in, you wait to be seated. After you're seated, you wait for the menu. After you get the menu, you wait for the person to come and take your order.

After they take your order, you wait for your food. Then you wait for the dessert menu and then you wait for your dessert. Then you wait for your check. Then you wait to check out. And they have the audacity to call the person who presides over all of this "the waiter." He is not the waiter, I'm the waiter. You see where I'm going with this? Waiting is hard, isn't it? And yet, listen to how the word of God teaches us the benefits of waiting.

I am going to give you these five things. I can't spend much time on any of them, but they're so evident in these verses of scripture. First of all, waiting results in perception. Psalm 25:4 and 5: notice what this says. "Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths, lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; on you I will wait all the day." Go back up to the top of that and notice what it says: show me your ways, teach me your paths, lead me in your truth, and teach me. If you want God to show you His ways and lead you in truth and teach you, you have to learn to wait because waiting is the key to perception.

Secondly, waiting results in protection. "Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield; for our heart shall rejoice in Him because we have trusted in His holy name." Waiting results in protection. It calls upon us to wait in order that we might have the protection of the Lord. It refers to the Lord in this passage of scripture as our shield. How many of you know that when you wait before the Lord, He helps to protect you from all the things that could come into your life and destroy your peace and keep you from being who He wants you to be?

Thirdly, waiting results in perspective. Psalm 37:7. This is an interesting verse. "Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him; do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass." Do you know how to get over being all bent out of shape because of the people who are doing things wrong and seem to be profiting? Just wait on the Lord. Just get before the Lord and put it all in His hands, and He will help you to get perspective on life. You will see that not everything that seems to be important at the present is ultimately important.

Waiting will give you perspective. Notice fourthly, waiting results in provision. What a great verse in Lamentations. "The Lord is good to those who wait for Him." Do you want to go any further? I want to tell you something: when you learn how to wait on the Lord, His goodness becomes so evident in your lives. Finally, we're back to where we were at the beginning. Isaiah 40:31: waiting results in power. "But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength and they shall mount up with wings like eagles." These are five reasons for us to learn the discipline of waiting. It gives us perception, protection, perspective, provision, and power. Are you with me?

How do we go about doing this? How do we learn how to wait on the Lord? Daniel Goleman wrote a very popular, highly influential book in which he suggests that effectiveness in life is based less on cognitive intelligence than emotional intelligence. In fact, the book is called *Emotional Intelligence*. He explains how people with amazingly high IQs can live basically unproductive and unsatisfied lives while some people with emotional intelligence, relational intelligence, usually thrive. He continues by saying that at the heart of emotional intelligence is the ability to delay gratification and not live at the mercy of impulse.

The most celebrated example of what has become known as the Marshmallow Test is included in his book. A four-year-old is in a room with some marshmallows and he is told that the experimenter has to run an errand. But if the four-year-old can wait until the person returns, he can have two marshmallows. If he wants to eat right now, he can, but he only gets one. That dilemma will try the soul of any four-year-old kid and it will probably try the soul of many adults you and I know.

In this experiment, kids developed all kinds of strategies to enable them to wait. They would sing songs, they would tell themselves stories, they would play with their fingers, and one of the kids actually bent down and started licking the table. A Stanford University research team tracked these children for many years. Those four-year-olds who were better able to wait grew up to be more socially competent, better able to cope with stress, and less likely to give up under pressure than those who could not wait.

On the other hand, the marshmallow grabbers grew up to be more stubborn and indecisive, more easily upset and frustrated, and more resentful about not getting enough in life. No wonder Goleman summarized his study by calling the ability to wait the "master aptitude" in life. The ability to wait. This is a message that sounds really strange to us today. We are a generation of fast food, instant gratification, buy now, pay later people. Waiting for anything doesn't sell well in today's society. We want it all and we want it now.

But it might serve us well to stop for just a moment and examine what is happening to us. The Bible, both by precept and personal illustration, points us in a different direction. It is a direction that slows us down so that we can arrive at our destination and actually enjoy the journey. When we are in a big hurry, we need to find a way to slow down. When we feel the sense of panic growing within us, we need to transform our panic by a pause for strength. When we wonder how we will ever do it all, we need to wait just long enough for God's peace to reclaim our hearts.

Sue Monk Kidd tells the story of taking a personal spiritual retreat at a monastery, going out by the water and trying to be still. Trying to just be there and wait and listen and be present. She said it only lasted for a few seconds before everything in her rose up in rebellion. The need to get moving, get something done, read a book, act, solve something. It overpowered her and she got up and walked away. On her way back to her room, she noticed a monk, ski cap pulled over his ears, sitting perfectly still beneath a tree.

He sat there for long minutes, as much as an hour, perfectly still and tranquil. Later she sought him out and she said, "How in the world can you be so still, just waiting there? I can't get used to the idea of doing nothing." He just laughed and he said, "That's because you've bought into the cultural myth that when you're waiting you're doing nothing." Then he looked her in the eye and he said, "When you're waiting you're actually doing the most important something there is. You're allowing your soul to grow up. If you can't be still and wait, you can't become what God created you to be."

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. Waiting, unfortunately, has to be done in silence, which is another problem for most of us. We are uncomfortable with anything that causes everything to be totally still, and I've had to examine my own heart in this. I like to hear music. I play it in my car and I play it in my office. I am beginning to realize that that can become a distraction sometimes from just being alone. Isaiah 30:15 puts it this way: "For thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: in returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength."

In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength. This is God's formula. It is definitely not the world's formula. And the psalmist in Psalm 46:10 puts it this way: "Be still and know that I am God." Wayne Oates has written these words: "Silence is not native to my world. Silence more than likely is a stranger to you and to your world too. If you and I ever have silence in our noisy hearts, we're going to have to grow it. You can nurture silence in your noisy heart if you value it, if you cherish it, and if you are eager to nurture silence."

Silence is hard to come by these days, is it not? But without silence, we can't have the discipline of waiting. And we wait before God and we are certain that God is in what we do and we follow Him and we find peace. We've looked at the symbol of courageous strength which is soaring like an eagle. And we've looked at the secret to it which is waiting. Now I want you to notice the source of it, and the source of strength is God.

Going all the way back up to the beginning of our text, notice: "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." My friend, if you're going to wait on somebody, here is somebody pretty good to wait on. Amen?

In this little verse you have a compendium of theological truth. The attributes of God scream out at us from every line in the text. He is eternal, the everlasting God. He is sovereign, the Lord. He is omnipotent, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He is immutable, He never faints or is weary. He is omniscient, His understanding is unsearchable. He is merciful, He gives power to the weak. And He is gracious, He increases strength to those who already have might.

So my friend, what Isaiah is saying is this: if you will just cool your jets a little bit, kick back, get alone, be silent, and wait on the eternal, sovereign, omnipotent, immutable, omniscient, merciful, gracious God, He will get you where you need to go without all your flapping. Amen? That's what Isaiah wants us to understand. We are flappers by nature. God wants us to soar like eagles.

The way we learn to soar is by waiting before Almighty God, listening to His voice through His word and having silence in our heart so that we can separate all of the noise and the static and hear God and we get centered on Him. Pick out some time, some place, somewhere, every day, and get silent before God. Just read something from His word and let it soak into your heart. Push everything else out of the way and just sit quietly before the Lord.

The first day you do it, the first two minutes will seem like you've been there for 30 minutes. But as you get more accustomed to it and you begin to sense the peace that floods over your heart, you will discover that it will start to transform into tranquility what has before been stress that is so debilitating to all of us. So are you soaring? Do you want to? That is the lesson God has been teaching me and teaching some of you. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

Are you willing to find some silence and some quietness to wait upon God? To put your hope in Him and your trust in Him? To reject the frenzied alternative of the culture in which we live? I can find peace in my heart when everything is crazy all around me because I know the God who is everlasting. The God who is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, whose wisdom is unsearchable. And through my waiting upon Him and my relationship with Him, He has put a quiet center in my life that gives me peace in the midst of the frenzy. Wow. It works. But you gotta try it. And that's my challenge to you today.

I hope you're encouraged today, and that if you are suffering from overwhelmingly difficult stress and fatigue, your eyes are looking up and you're realizing there is an answer to this problem. The Bible has some great principles to help you. You can get this series that we are preaching during this month, and it is all on CD. There is a beautiful study guide that coordinates all the information. This is the summer series. I think you'd be blessed by having it.

It would encourage you and many of you as your teacher face these issues that go on in our life. Here's a biblical perspective on all of them. Making Sense of It All is the title of the series. I hope you will be able to stay with us through these difficult days of scheduling in the summer as we study these principles together. Tomorrow we're going to talk about going up by going down from Philippians chapter two. I hope you'll join us then. Until then, this is David Jeremiah. Thank you for being with us today on Turning Point.

Guest (Male): For more information about Dr. Jeremiah's series Making Sense of It All, please visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine *Turning Points* and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of Robert J. Morgan's inspiring book, *100 Bible Verses That Made America Great*. It's yours for a gift of any amount.

You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James versions, available in your choice of handsome and durable cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website davidjeremiah.org/radio.

David Michael Jeremiah: This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series Making Sense of It All on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.