WHEN some one needed encouragement, when some one needed to be roused or put upon his mettle, the call of the Jews was: “Be strong,” or as in the original tongue: Chazak.
They did not call out Achtung, like the Germans, neither: Attention, like the French, nor: Look out, like the Dutch.
A man in Israel felt differently from us, and therefore did not think of being on guard, or of paying attention, or of giving heed, but of the vital strength that was required.
Be strong; muster your powers; fit yourself to the task, as we might put it. And the art, of making oneself able to meet the requirement, came up to the high level of this rule of piety: “Be strong and He shall strengthen thine heart, yea, wait, I say, on the Lord.”
So it reads at the end of Psalm 27; and in connection herewith this same song begins with the glorious witness: “The Lord is the strength of my life.”
Far more than we incline of ourselves, the Scripture binds us to keep count with the strength, with the power, with the might to live and to persevere. “Thou hast strengthened me with strength in my soul” (Ps. 138), is taken as exclamation from the world of Scripture thought. In Psalm 31 it reads likewise: “He shall strengthen your heart.” Of the Messiah it reads in Psalm 89: “Mine arm also shall strengthen him.” And with the Old Testament in the lead, like this, the New Testament follows on, for there also we read the prayer: “That he might strengthen you with might in the inner man” (Eph. 3, 16).
Thus Scripture is an enemy to slackness. She antagonizes lassitude and barrenness. She makes no peace with emotionalism and speculation.
Her demand is that there be strength in the children of God and that strength shall go out from them, since strength flows out toward us from the Source of all strength and the Fountain of all mightinesses.
“THE Lord is the strength of my life,” jubilates the Sionite.
He does not presume, therefore, that he is here merely to think of his understanding and his will, but before all things else, he counts with what lies back of his understanding and his will, that is to say, with his being, with his existence, with his life, and with the power, by which that life originated and is maintained and shall endure.
Superficiality Scripture hates. She goes deep. No, it is not a matter of course, that you are and have life. The very fact that you are and received life and were kept in life, is the first miracle, that must address you. For you it is the miracle closest by. The miracle that touches you personally.
It is not enough, along this line, that you go back to your father and your mother, because your father has generated and your mother has borne you. See it in verse 10: also father and mother die and leave you, but though you are left behind lonesome and desolate, in the root of your life you are not cut off, for that root of your being, whence springs the life-sap of your strength, is your God.
“The strength of my life” is therefore nothing else nor anything less than the direct working of God’s almightiness in my own body and in my own soul, and in the combination of both.
Now it may be that you are hale and hearty and strong, that that mightiness of the Lord God potently operates in you, and yet that you are godless, godless because you feel that you yourself are strong, and thus derive that hale and hearty strength of life not from your God, but attribute it to yourself.
You the strong one, if needs be, able to get along without your God, yea, in haughtiness and overboldness at length to place yourself over against your God.
For such is the fierce character of sin in us.
When we feel ourselves weak, and sink in, and observe that the strength of our life wears out and succumbs, then the song: “The Lord is the strength of my life” begins to become dear to us.
But so long as that “strength of life” operates soundly and undisturbedly in us, we take it to be our own strength, and forget the Lord Whose handiwork we are.
EVEN when God’s child is spiritually enlightened, it goes frequently so faulty with respect to this.
Then you observe again and again, that he truly thinks of grace received, that he realizes it and feels that without this grace he can for no single moment keep his path straight. But, O, so many have no thought, that before all things else this rule of faith must be applied to their existence, to their being, to the strength whereby they live and are.
The psalmist always begins with the natural. What the apostle teaches, “that the natural is first, after that the spiritual,” he puts in practice in every psalm.
He always goes out from the fact of his own life, from his existence as man among men, from his needs and wants, from the dangers that threaten him, from the enemies that lay snares for him, and from the strength that keeps him standing amidst it all; only from the natural to ascend to the spiritual, to the higher, to the eternal.
You can say briefly: In Scripture it always goes out from God’s almightiness, and only after that almightiness is confessed and worshiped, it ascends from this to the holiness, the righteousness and the compassions of the Lord.
No onesided counting with the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Son, but always back of both the work of the Father in the confession of His almightiness.
Even as in the twelve articles of Faith the church begins, first: “I believe in God the Father, the Almighty,” and after that: “I believe in the Holy Ghost.”
ONLY so comes unity in the life of God’s child.
Not on one side an inanimate and deadening life in his body and in his home and in his business, and alongside of this a highly attuned life in the soul and in the circle of believers; and these two placed side by side as circles, which do not touch each other.
Such doubleness of life Scripture knows nothing of, and our Reformed confession abhors it.
Both circles must have one and the selfsame center, and for both this center must lie in the Lord our God. From Him every outpouring of strength in our daily life; and from that selfsame Covenant-God every outpouring in our spiritual life; and both these outpourings of strength from one and the selfsame source and in one selfsame person, disposed to one another, the one supporting the other, because one selfsame Divine wisdom unites both.
The Lord is the strength of my life, is the blessed utterance of soul, which coincides with the Pray without ceasing.
For, if you truly live in that sacred consciousness, that, from moment to moment, the strength of your life, by which you live and from which you live, is not in yourself, does not flow toward you from the world, but comes to you from the living God, then every breath, every heart-throb, every pulse-beat is to you a sign from the side of God, that at that very moment He maintains you, carries you by His strength and operates in you.
Your own life in you is then a witness of God’s omnipresence and of God’s almightiness, and every evening, that you kneel down before Him and lose yourself in the worship of the Eternal, is then to you a receiving anew of your own existence from the hand of your God.
To take food and drink, is then no longer a mere feeding of your blood, as cattle do by eating grass, but a conscious and devout placing yourself under the care of your God, Who, by what is provided on your table, comes to increase the strength of your life; and the blessing which you invoke is then nothing less, than desiring from your God, that by it He will renew and refresh the strength of your life.
Thus devoutness is not, of every sixty minutes in an hour to live fifty-nine without God, and then for a single minute to think of your God, but a constant, steady, continuous resting in the faithfulness, in the majesty and in the almightiness of your God.
IF then there come days of trouble, when care and anxiety well-nigh strangle the heart, or sudden danger overtakes you, or the strength for labor falls short, or sickness or the approach of death makes you pine away in yourself, then such a devout practical life in the fellowship of the Lord bears its choicest fruit.
You then went up and down with your God. You became more and more accustomed to Him. Yea, even in your minutest interests and least significant difficulties of life you have then learned to lean upon your God, and that constant practice has given your soul the bent for it, has made it a second nature to you, so that it would be difficult for you to exist otherwise.
The strength of your life is no longer in you, but in the Lord, and now in days of trouble or distress of soul there comes to you of itself from that rich, deep conviction of soul the grace of a perfectly sufficing consolation.
For if the Lord withdraws His strength from you, all your anxiety and all your exertion will avail you nothing. And when He continues to grant you this strength of life, there is then no power in heaven or on earth, that can break His might.
Does a difficult task await you, He Who imposed that task upon you, is Himself the strength of your life, Who at that very moment from His almightiness shall pour the strength in you.
And does sickness overtake you, or the hour draw near when you must die, even then there is nothing gone, because you lie down in weakness, or presently depart from the earth.
For He is the strength of your life, and that strength which maintains you in existence, operates likewise in and beyond the grave, and continues forever in the heavens.
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