I am impressed, Lord, by the tenderness of Your care for Your overworked servants. How sharply You know the difference between laziness and fatigue! Your treatment of Your servant Elijah Is a revelation and a comfort to me.
After his tense confrontation with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, Elijah fled for his life, with the threats of Jezebel still ringing in his ears. “He was afraid” (1 Kings 19:3). His weariness and fatigue had invaded his spirit, and his faith fled. That led to depression: “Lord, take away my life” (v. 4, KJV). The intense, highly strung prophet was in the midst of an emotional collapse. He had overextended himself in God’s work.
How did God respond to his broken faith, his anxiety, his depression? “Arise and eat” (v. 5, KJV) Twice the Lord told him to partake of food, “or the journey will be too much for you” (v. 7, Berkeley). God began His ministry to Elijah by ministering to his body. How often it is my body, instead of my spirit, that needs help. I must look upon both—body and spirit—as an integral, closely knit team. When one of them suffers, so does the other; and when breakdown occurs. I must ask. Where did it begin? I must not, of course, let my body become my all-demanding king before which everything must bow. On the other hand, I must not neglect my body as if it were an inconsequential bundle of rags.
God began with Elijah’s both—with his spent energy, his strained nerves, and his weary muscles. Once the cup of physical strength began to fill, God could go on to minister to Elijah’s other needs. God the nursemaid! And why not? Is He not called El Shaddai, the “God with breasts” (Genesis 17:1, ASV margin)? How often I need the nursing ministry of God when body or spirit become tired in His service!
“So Jacob named the place Peniel, for he said, ‘I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved’” (Genesis 32:30).
Daily with the King 