Some days you can feel the wear on your body, your schedule, or your emotions—and it can be tempting to interpret that fatigue as failure. But God invites you to see a different story: even when life is pressing in outwardly, He is doing real, steady, renewing work inwardly.

Inner Renewal Is Not Wishful Thinking—It’s God’s Daily Work

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer man is wasting away, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16). That means the Christian life isn’t measured only by how strong you feel, how smooth the week goes, or how quickly problems resolve. The Lord is building something deeper than comfort: a steady heart that can stand, repent quickly, love well, and hope boldly.

And this renewal is “day by day”—not occasionally, not only after big breakthroughs. “Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!” (Lamentations 3:22–23). Today’s mercy is enough for today’s need, and today’s renewal is enough for today’s obedience.

Don’t Confuse Weakness With Defeat

God never asks you to pretend you’re fine. He names reality: the “outer man” is wasting away. But weakness is not the end of the story when Jesus is Lord over it. Paul learned to hear God clearly in the middle of limitation: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9). If you feel fragile, you’re not disqualified—you’re positioned to rely on strength that isn’t yours.

So talk to God honestly about what feels thin: your patience, your energy, your courage. Then anchor your heart where Scripture anchors it: “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26). Your portion isn’t a pain-free day; your portion is God Himself.

Live by What Is Coming, Not Only by What Is Crumbling

The outer world is loud: symptoms, bills, misunderstandings, setbacks, aging. But the Spirit trains you to weigh today by eternity. “I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18). When you remember what God is preparing, you stop treating temporary trouble like permanent truth.

And God doesn’t just promise future glory—He supplies present strength to keep walking. “But those who wait upon the LORD will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31). Waiting isn’t passive; it’s staying near Him, listening, obeying, and drawing life from Christ: “If you remain in Me and I in you, you will bear much fruit… apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5).

Lord, thank You for Your faithful mercies and Your renewing power; strengthen my inner life today, and help me obey You with steady hope, refusing to lose heart. Amen.

Excerpted from Of God and Men

A prophet is one who knows his times and what God is trying to say to the people of his times.

What God says to His church at any given period depends altogether upon her moral and spiritual condition and upon the spiritual need of the hour. Religious leaders who continue mechanically to expound the Scriptures without regard to the current religious situation are no better than the scribes and lawyers of Jesus' day who faithfully parroted the Law without the remotest notion of what was going on around them spiritually. They fed the same diet to all and seemed wholly unaware that there was such a thing as meat in due season. The prophets never made that mistake nor wasted their efforts in that manner. They invariably spoke to the condition of the people of their times.

Today we need prophetic preachers; not preachers of prophecy merely, but preachers with a gift of prophecy. The word of wisdom is missing. We need the gift of discernment again in our pulpits. It is not ability to predict that we need, but the anointed eye, the power of spiritual penetration and interpretation, the ability to appraise the religious scene as viewed from God's position, and to tell us what is actually going on.

There has probably never been another time in the history of the world when so many people knew so much about religious happenings as they do today. The newspapers are eager to print religious news; the secular news magazines devote several pages of each issue to the doings of the church and the synagogue; a number of press associations gather church news and make it available to the religious journals at a small cost. Even the hiring of professional publicity men to plug one or another preacher or religious movement is no longer uncommon; the mails are stuffed with circulars and releases, while radio and television join to tell the listening public what religious people are doing throughout the world.

Greater publicity for religion may be well and I have no fault to find with it. Surely religion should be the most newsworthy thing on earth, and there may be some small encouragement in the thought that vast numbers of persons want to read about it. What disturbs me is that amidst all the religious hubbub hardly a voice is raised to tell us what God thinks about the whole thing.

Where is the man who can see through the ticker tape and confetti to discover which way the parade is headed, why it started in the first place and, particularly, who is riding up front in the seat of honor?

Not the fact that the churches are unusually active these days, not what religious people are doing, should engage our attention, but why these things are so. The big question is Why? And no one seems to have an answer for it. Not only is there no answer, but scarcely is there anyone to ask the question. It just never occurs to us that such a question remains to be asked. Christian people continue to gossip religious shoptalk with scarcely as much as a puzzled look. The soundness of current Christianity is assumed by the religious masses as was the soundness of Judaism when Christ appeared. People know they are seeing certain activity, but just what it means they do not know, nor have they the faintest idea of where God is or what relation He has toward the whole thing.

What is needed desperately today is prophetic insight. Scholars can interpret the past; it takes prophets to interpret the present. Learning will enable a man to pass judgment on our yesterdays, but it requires a gift of clear seeing to pass sentence on our own day. One hundred years from now historians will know what was taking place religiously in this year of our Lord; but that will be too late for us. We should know right now.

If Christianity is to receive a rejuvenation it must be by other means than any now being used. If the church in the second half of this century is to recover from the injuries she suffered in the first half, there must appear a new type of preacher. The proper, ruler-of-the-synagogue type will never do. Neither will the priestly type of man who carries out his duties, takes his pay and asks no questions, nor the smooth-talking pastoral type who knows how to make the Christian religion acceptable to everyone. All these have been tried and found wanting.

Another kind of religious leader must arise among us. He must be of the old prophet type, a man who has seen visions of God and has heard a voice from the Throne. When he comes (and I pray God there will be not one but many) he will stand in flat contradiction to everything our smirking, smooth civilization holds dear. He will contradict, denounce and protest in the name of God and will earn the hatred and opposition of a large segment of Christendom. Such a man is likely to be lean, rugged, blunt-spoken and a little bit angry with the world. He will love Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the one and the salvation of the other. But he will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.

We need to have the gifts of the Spirit restored again to the church, and it is my belief that the one gift we need most now is the gift of prophecy.

Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth. - Hebrews 12:6

The earthly parent trains his son, or her daughter, for earthly occupations. These last a little while. God trains us for an eternal end. Holiness, likeness to God, is the only end which it is worthy of a man, being what he is, to propose to himself as the issue of his earthly experience. If I fail in that, whatever else I have accomplished, I fail in everything. I may have made myself rich, cultured, learned, famous, refined, prosperous; but if I have not at least begun to be like God in purity, in will, in heart, then my whole career has missed the purpose for which I was made, and for which all the discipline of life has been lavished upon me. Fail there, and wherever you succeed you are a failure. Succeed there, and wherever you fail you are a success.

That great and only worthy end may be reached by the ministration of circumstances and the discipline through which God passes us. These are not the only ways by which He makes us partakers of His holiness, as we well know. There is the work of that Divine Spirit who is granted to every believer to breathe into him the holy breath of an immortal and incorruptible life. To work along with these there is the influence that is brought to bear upon us by the circumstances in which we are placed and the duties which we have to perform. These may all help us to be nearer and liker to God.

That is the intention of our sorrows. They will wean us; they wall refine us; they will blow us to His breast, as a strong wind might sweep a man into some refuge from itself. I am sure there are some who can thankfully attest that they were brought nearer to God by some short, sharp sorrow than by many long days of prosperity.

But the sorrow that is meant to bring us nearer to Him may be in vain. The same circumstances may produce opposite effects. I daresay there are people who will read these words who have been made hard and sullen and bitter and paralyzed for good work because they have some heavy burden to carry, or some wound or ache that life can never heal. Ah! brother, we are often like shipwrecked crews, of whom some are driven by the danger to their knees, and some are driven to the spirit casks. Take care that you do not waste your sorrows; that you do not let the precious gifts of disappointment, pain, loss, loneliness, ill-health, or similar afflictions that come in your daily life, mar you instead of mending you. See that they send you nearer to God, and not that they drive you further from Him. See that they make you more anxious to have the durable riches and righteousness which no man can take from you, than to grasp at what may yet remain of fleeting earthly joys. So let us try to school ourselves into the habitual and operative conviction that life is discipline. Let us beware of getting no good from what is charged to the brim with good. May it never have to be said of any of us that we wasted the mercies which were judgments, too, and found no good in the things that our tortured hearts felt to be also evils, lest God should have to wail over any of us, " In vain have I smitten your children; they have received no correction."