Anxious Age

If you’re anxious about growing older, I’d like to encourage you to ask the Lord for a specific promise to reassure you during this period of golden tears.  In his autobiography, the popular Bible teacher Warren W. Wiersbe describes feeling troubled one drizzly day when he was suffering the pangs of arthritis.  Somehow it reminded him of the creeping consequences of getting old.  During his devotions that day, he asked the Lord to give him a promise to sustain him through his “declining” years, as he put it.  In the course of his regular reading that morning, he came to Isaiah 58:22.  Wiersbe read it and said, “That’s it!  Thank You, Lord!”

Isaiah 58:11 says this:

            The Lord will guide you continually,

            And satisfy your soul in drought,

            And strengthen your bones;

            You shall be like a watered garden,

            And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.

Then Wiersbe wrote this:

            After I’ve attended my last meeting and preached my last sermon, written my last book and answered my last letter, told my last joke and said my last good-bye, and I wake up in the presence of my Lord, I want to be able to say to Him what Jesus said when He came to the end of His earthly ministry: ‘I have glorified You on the earth.  I have finished the work which You have given me to do’ (John 17:4).

David Jeremiah, Signs of Life, p. 207