Daily Affirmations - Day 1- Health and Happiness: Strengthen Your Frame

This week's Theme: Health and Happiness

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Day 1: Strengthen your frame

“And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones; and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not”  (Isaiah 58:11 - King James Version).

The Lord will guide you always; He will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame… (Isaiah 58:11 – New International Version).

III. The next blessing is, SPIRITUAL HEALTH AND HAPPINESS.

“And make fat thy bones.” Note the figure. It is not “make fat thy flesh.” I am anything but sure that that would be a blessing in any sense....

Sometimes abundance in earthly things makes poverty in heavenly things... But fatness here is to be upon [the believers'] hardest and most necessary part of [their] frame... Vigour has been put into [their] constitution where it was most required. [Their] bones have been renovated and made strong. Oh! it is a grand thing when the soul is thus in spiritual health, when the bones are made fat.

Do you know what it means, Christian? It is when you take a promise and it is applied with power, and you can feed on it; when you take a precept and feel the strength vouchsafed to go and fulfil it; when you turn to God’s purpose and decree, and rejoice in them, seeing that you have a fair portion therein; or turning to God’s testimonies concerning your daily walk, you find just as much comfort in these as you did in those, and can bless God for ability given you to serve as well as for power to enjoy.

I have lately read in the newspaper — I am sure I do not know whether to believe that it is true — an account of a youth in France, twenty years of age, who has been laying sleeping for a fortnight, nourished only upon a little gruel (thin porridge) given with a spoon, and that he was in the same state a year ago for nearly a month.

Whether this has actually occurred to anybody or not, I have known many cases of Christians who have hid like that spiritually, not for a fortnight only, but for a whole year; nay, and not for a year only, but it is their general state. They come on Sunday, and we have to feed them on a little gruel with a spoon, and this lasts them till the next time there is service.

They live on nothing but thin liquid, and as might be expected, they have no strength. If you listen to them, you will hear them saying such words as these —

“’Tis a point I long to know,

Oft it causes anxious thought:

Do I love the Lord or no,

Am I His, or am I not?”

They have no more health than that! Oh! that they could get strong! Oh! that God would make fat their bones, and then they would be able to sing Toplady’s hymn —

“My name from the palm of His hands,

Eternity cannot erase;

Impressed on His heart it remains,

In marks of indelible grace.

Yes, I to the end shall endure,

As sure as the earnest is given;

More happy, but not more secure,

Are the glorified spirits in heaven.”

May we get out of a state of spiritual sickness, and may our bones grow fat, so that we may be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might! (Ephesians 6:10).

The figure seems to me to indicate two or three things in one. There is health here, the soul is purged from its vices, sicknesses, and unbelief, pride, sloth, and such like. There is vigour here, no lukewarmness, being neither cold nor hot, no laxity nor indifference. There is growth: the man is not stunted; he does not think that he has come to perfection, and may therefore stop where he is.

His bones grow fat. Inward satisfaction seems to be couched in the figure; the man is happy, perfectly happy; he is always rejoicing; he is not lean with fretting, but fattened with the oil of joy.

Now, dear Christian brethren and sisters, I would earnestly ask you not to be content without the enjoyment of this blessing; for the more one looks upon the world, the more one is convinced that Christian joy is, after all, Christian strength: doubting and fearing cut the very foundations of Christian power.

Strong faith is that which wins the victory (1 John 5:4), while unbelief deprives us of all hope of conquest, and lays us grovelling in the mire beneath the feet of our own very weakest foe. Oh, for more of this holy joy!