“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
    the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The Lord is my strength and my song,
    and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
    my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Exodus 15:1b-2; Ephesians 3:14-19

When the going gets tough, the tough get going, or so the saying goes. That leaves out a lot of people who don’t qualify as “tough.” I suppose that would include me. Oh, I am persistent, but I’m not sure I would be considered tough.

Since I am now working on my eighth decade of life, I have the advantage of perspective. I have been around for a while; longer than most people who will read these words. I recently realized that I now understand something about strength that I didn’t understand as a younger man. The term most often in Scripture and elsewhere refers to physical strength. God strengthens Israel’s armies to fight their enemies. The strength of Israel is in her God, not in the weight room at the gym.

In the passage above in Ephesians, Paul writes that we also need strength in order to comprehend the realities of the gospel in our lives. This strength is obviously a different strength than physical strength. It is strength in our inner man. It takes strength to grasp God’s love and experience the fullness of God. I have come to believe it is this same strength that produces longevity in Christ, the ability to carry on through thick and thin and continue to walk with Jesus as my ultimate treasure. The truth is, the longer I walk with him, the greater value he holds in my heart. He is indeed the pearl of great price.

I recommend we imitate Paul in this prayer and pray both for ourselves and for those whom we love that they will be strengthened with power in the inner man so they can obtain the fullness of the love of God in Christ Jesus. As we experience that kind of inner strength imparted by the Holy Spirit, we will find ourselves singing like Moses:

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
    the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The Lord is my strength and my song,
    and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
    my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

Exodus 15:1b-2

Moses and Israel sang this song just after the greatest deliverance in Scripture up to that point in time only to be exceeded by the deliverance we find in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ who has delivered us from our captivity to our sins and is taking us to our promised land, the New Heavens and New Earth. Since Israel found God to be their strength in physical deliverance from slavery, how much more do we find him to be our strength in our eternal deliverance from sin and entrance into God’s kingdom? We have even greater motivation for singing the song of deliverance.