Heart Tracks - The Exchange

     Isaiah 40:31 is a much memorized and claimed promise.  It begins, Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.  Beautiful.  Yet, in our claiming of this promise, I think we fail to realize what God is promising through His prophet Isaiah.  We think that it's our strength that the Father is promising to renew, that as He renews it, we'll again be at our full strength.  If we think this through, then we have to ask the question, just what can we hope to accomplish in our own strength, whether it is full or not?  The problem lies in how we have come to understand the word renew.  A more proper understanding of the Hebrew would render this word to mean exchange.  God is promising that those who wait upon and in the Lord, will exchange their very limited, finite strength, for His unlimited and infinite strength.  Can we dare to dwell on just what such an exchange will really mean to us?  I believe that exchange will involve much more than His strength.  In the exchange we discover anew His promise that He is able to do far more than we could ever ask or think.

    Three of the most beautiful words that Jesus ever spoke were Come unto Me.  Oswald Chambers writes that His word "come" means "transact."  An exchange takes place.  Chambers writes, "The last thing we do is come, but everyone who does come knows that that second the supernatural life of God invades him instantly.  The dominating power of the world, the flesh and the devil is paralyzed, not by your act, but because your act has linked you on to God and His redemptive power."  For me, the three key words of the two scriptures I've quoted are Come, Wait, and Him.  We come to Him and we wait in Him.  In this, a transaction, and exchange takes place.  Our life receives His life.  We don't stop having our life, but it is absorbed into His.  Along with this exchange, we exchange our pain for His healing, our despair for His hope.  Our brokenness for His wholeness.  Our emptiness for His fullness.  Our poverty for His riches.  Our lostness for His salvation.  It doesn't matter what we come with, or how useless we believe what we have or are to be, He receives it all, and gives to us His all.  The question for us is, will we receive it?
    Wherever you are today, in Him, or without Him, He calls you to come to Him, wait upon Him, to transact spiritual business with Him, to exchange that which is sinking sand for that which is the rock of His life.  Are you ready for the transaction?  Are you ready for the exchange?  Are you ready to receive.  Then come.

Blessings,

Pastor O