Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 15 August 2024, Thursday Message
TOPIC: Eagle-Men
“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 40:31
TODAY’S MESSAGE
Eagles are solitary birds. They never fly in flocks. At times God asks us to forego human companionship to experience divine fellowship, so later we have the strength to give to others. “God seeks eagle-men,” writes Mrs. Charles Cowman in Streams in the Desert. “No man ever comes into a realization of the best things of God, who does not, upon the Godward side of his life, learn to walk alone with God.”
Scripture is replete with such men: Abraham living in a tent, Moses herding sheep, Paul alone with God in Arabia. God then often takes those whom he has sheltered in solitude and thrusts them out to minister to others.
Author Caryll Houselander writes of these eagle-souls,
“There are those who must live, as it were, in other men’s hands; whose success, even if it be of a spiritual order, must be paid for in a suffering of poverty far more terrible than material poverty, a poverty of not having themselves, not having anything of their own—not time, or solitude, or their thoughts, or even their senses: their hearing filled always with other men’s troubles, their eyes with the face of other people’s sorrows.”
Many times you may feel there is no rest: hurting people call you on the phone or appear at your door; your children clamor for attention and love; your spouse wants to spend time with you when you have no time; your boss adds to the piles already on your desk. Only someone who has spent solitude with God can respond as an eagle, mounting up with a reserve of energy provided by the Almighty. Quiet time with him isn’t an option; it’s a necessity.
Father God, teach me to come to you for strength when I feel as though I have none. In this way I’ll have strength to dispense love and care to others.
Joni Eareckson Tada is an American evangelical Christian author, radio host, artist, and founder of Joni and Friends, an organization “accelerating Christian ministry in the disability community”