My Flesh and My Heart Faileth

He was the man who did things and now he is the man in the chair, and it happened over about four years.

He drove people. He was at every working party. He was the one who went round after a storm and checked on the older ones, which he finds funny now in a way that is not funny.

Two operations and a heart that is doing something the doctors are managing rather than fixing, and he is seventy four, and the difference is not gradual any more.

And here is what has happened underneath, which he has told nobody.

He measures his love for God by what he can still do, and it has been going down for four years, and by his own accounting he now loves God about a fifth as much as he did in 2019.

He would not put it like that if you asked him. He would say the right things about grace. But at four in the afternoon in the chair, when he cannot do the thing he can see needs doing, the arithmetic runs on its own.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He thinks he is worth less to God than he was, and he is fairly sure that is not true doctrine, and it has not made the slightest difference to the feeling.

Read a psalm that admits it

There is a line in the seventy third psalm that does not pretend, and the honesty of the first half is what makes the second half worth anything.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

My flesh and my heart faileth.

He says it flatly. No qualification, no sometimes, no bracing tone. The body gives out and the inner strength gives out with it, and that is admitted in a song that was written to be sung in public worship.

And then the but. God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. The second half does not undo the first. Nothing here says the failing is imaginary or that a spiritual man would not experience it. Two things are true in one sentence, and the second one is not conditional on the first improving.

Portion is the word to sit with. A portion is what is allotted to you and set aside as yours. It is not earned by output and it does not shrink when your capacity does, and a man in a chair holds exactly the same portion he held on a ladder.

Your portion is unchanged rather than reduced with your strength, and Psalm 73:26 names the failing out loud and keeps the portion in the same sentence. That is what the word actually holds together, not comfort I am adding, and the Holy Spirit is the One who says that to a man at four in the afternoon.

The yardstick came from the work

Now the plain thing, and it is about where your measure came from.

You measured love by doing for fifty years and it worked, because for fifty years the doing was there and the love was there and nobody had to separate them.

They are separating now, and the yardstick you built in the good years is the only one you've got, and it is giving you a false reading. Not because the decline is imagined. The decline is real. Because the instrument was never calibrated for this.

And there is a cruelty in it that I want named. You built that measure by being generous. The men who never did anything for anybody are not sitting in chairs at seventy four grading themselves.

And nothing about four hard years has ever made you worth less to Him. Scripture puts the failing and the portion in one line without making either cancel the other, and the Holy Spirit is not weighing a man's remaining capacity.

Say it in the chair

Here is the practical piece, and the location is the point.

Say the second half of that verse out loud, in the chair, at the hour when the arithmetic runs.

Not in the morning when you feel decent. Not at church. In the chair, at four, when you can see the thing that needs doing through the window and cannot go and do it.

God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.

Say it there because that is where the false reading is generated, and a true sentence has to be spoken in the room where the lie lives or it does not touch it.

You are able to hold this while your strength keeps going, and the two were never linked. Psalm 73:26 says God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever in the same breath as the failing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a chair by a window.