Weary Souls
It’s February, folks. The bustling and simmering excitement of Christmas is over, and the anticipation, goal-setting and convictions of January and the New Year are thirty-three days old. We are hunkered down, bracing for the remaining dreary days of winter, and COVID-19 is… still here.
Read these words, friends, and take heart.
“For I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish.” - Jeremiah 31:25
So many of us are tired. We see our lost world and our very souls are sickened by the wages of sin and cry out for salvation. We feel a sort of desperate exhaustion, as if we have been “together through ages of the world [and] have fought the long defeat.”* Our world is literally in a season of significant disquiet and sorrow, and body and mind feel the weary trudge to the depth of our souls.
Believers long for Heaven, even as we strive our way through this world, battling and reconciling our sinful human natures with our rebirth in Christ. We acknowledge the absolute truth of Christ’s resurrection as the ultimate salvation for weary hearts and still, Jeremiah 31:25 is rather stunning because it summarizes the human state so simply, and so well.
Our souls will be tested, wearied, exhausted…
Our souls will be weakened, and enfeebled, neglected and ignored…
Our souls will pine…
And. BUT!
Our souls will be satisfied! They will be contented!
Our souls have been paid for in full! And our souls will be made full!
We will be completed and renewed, by His blood and His Grace, for His glory and our good.
Consider, readers, that the Lord acknowledges, nay-warns! us that we will be wearied, down to the very fiber of our beings, and the very beat of our exhausted hearts and incoherent minds. The steady drumbeat of life and all its cares and woe will wear us down. But we can find blissful comfort in the simple acknowledgment that even though life is arduous, that grief lays us low, and gray days are melancholy, Jesus will satisfy and replenish us. He will grant us rest. Weariness does shape us, but more so will our refreshment in Christ - in His word and encouragement- by choosing to enter His quiet presence, which overflows with the blessings of peace and absolutely perfect, sacrificial love. Through and because of the Lord, our souls will be refreshed. He will cause our sorrows to soften the hardest planes of our hearts, the gray days of winter bring the joy of healing spring, and we can rest. We can rest and glory that in His presence we are fully known, unconditionally accepted, and wondrously loved. Despite our weary trudging, His faithfulness brings us to Himself: the true Home of ultimate satisfaction and complete replenishment.
God will always give Himself and He can never be empty.
Dia Murphy Farquhar
*J.R.R. Tolkein, The Fellowship fo the Ring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 372.