Readings:
Is. 40: 21-31
I Cor. 9: 16-27
Mark 1: 29-39

Passage for Meditation: 
“Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”  Isaiah 40:30-31 

Devotion:  
As I write this e-devo, I am running on about 2 hours of sleep and am feeling very tired and weary.  The constant care of a newborn can drain your strength and expose your weakness very effectively, and it seems to happen between the hours of 12 and 5am.  Frustration, anger, lack of patients all well up from the depths of the old Adam which clings tenaciously to my soul and is expressed in my body.  Young men stumble and fall.

It doesn’t need to be the care of a new born.  It may be the care of aging parents or a ailing spouse.  It may the demands of our jobs and the pressures of our culture.  It is always in the responsibilities of our various vocations that the limits of our natural self are tested and exposed.  Young men stumble and fall.

I must confess, I need strength and it cannot come from within me.  The strength that comes from the LORD is the strength that rests in Jesus.  “Come to me all you who are weak and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”(Matt. 11:28)  Rest in Christ is trust in His work for us.  Our strength is in the one who made heaven and earth and then came down for us.  He entered into our world, and was tested and temped in his vocations as a friend, a brother, a son, an Israelite, and a Messiah.  In all his testing, he never tired or grew weary of living perfectly within his vocations.  He never stumbled and fell in living rightly with us and his Heavenly Father.  He lived to be the perfect sacrifice for all our sin, which weighs down the soul and body into the depths of the grave.  Jesus only  stumbled and fell under the burden of his cross as he carried it to the place of the skull for us.  There he took our weakness, picked up our fall and died our death and carried it from the cross the grave.

The strength that the Lord gives us comes not only from His cross, but from his empty tomb, where the weight of sin and death remain.  He raises us out of the tomb in his resurrection, severing the everlasting grip of our old Adam and joining us to Him by faith.  Through our baptism, he brings us up out from under sins weight and carries us along by the Holy Spirit as on wings like an eagle.  He gives us strength to confess and kill our old Adam and to run after  and walk with Christ both now and for all eternity.

“Do you not know?  Have you not heard?  Has it not been told you from the beginning?  Have you not understood since the earth was founded?...The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.  He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” (Is. 40:21,28-29).