A Faint Spirit but a Strong God

“When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way” (Psalm 142:3)

Our hearts become overwhelmed frequently, so frequently, in fact, that we cannot walk down a city street, or pass by shoppers, without seeing several with overwhelmed, faint and troubled hearts. We are, of course, good at pretending, quite skilled at putting a smile on that our soul does not feel, or shoving our fears aside and truding on anyway.

Spirit is that unique thing that makes us human. Even the animals have souls, not immortal souls, but souls nonetheless. They have minds, emotions, and wills, but they do not have spirits, at least not like humans do. It is the spirit in man that connects with God. This is what the new birth is all about, to bring that spirit inside us back to live, the spirit that has laid dead due to the fallenness of this world and to the existence of this spiritual death in each of us. But in Christ we come alive truly. Yet our spirits can grow weak, faint, feeble, and overwhelmed.

Clear the junk out: some have compared the spirit of a Christian to an inner room in our lives that is indwelt by the Spirit of God. That room before Christ was dark and locked, but in Christ it was thrown open and His Spirit came in. It now is the brightest room in our lives, or should be. But we let our inner life get cluttered with things and thoughts and fears and unholy desires. We resist temptation in action but bring the thought into our inner lives and have it stand in the hallway right next to the door to our spirits. We often can’t hear the Spirit because we have so much inner clutter, and clutter means compromise.

We have to throw the clutter out. You cannot clean a house really without throwing something away. And we cannot clean our innermost life without casting out the impurities. In speaking about what belongs to our fallen earthly nature, the Bible says, “But now you must rid yourselves of all such things” (Col. 3:8). And we must let the Spirit fill up the space with good things, especially with himself. And the filling with the good is as important as the throwing out the bad.

When you feel overwhelmed, re-focus on God. Set your thoughts on Him. Set your mind on Him. The Christian life is not one of standing still, but one of moving forward with God, following Christ as He leads. Simplify your life to one of merely being obedient to God, to merely following Christ, which is another way of saying, “When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way.”