Growing Old Reaching High

“The righteous flourish like the palm tree….They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green, to declare that the Lord is upright.” Psalm 92:12, 14

I turn fifty-nine in a few days and I’m asking some of the same questions I asked as a young man. What am I going to do next? What do I need to know? Who will I learn from? What if I fail?

On the one hand, I see the sands in the hourglass piling at the bottom. If there is a holy sense of carpe diem, I feel it. Time is running out. What can I do today to love God and others better? How can I seize the opportunities and make each day count?

On the other hand, I see that more and more people are living to 90, even 100 years in good health. Perhaps I should be contemplating the possibility of quite a long life. And such a life will most certainly include some aches and pains and diminished capacities.

We naturally associate aging with frailty. But the Bible depicts old age as both a time of frailty and potential. Attitude makes a difference. J. Oswald Sanders said, “It’s attitude, not arteries, that determines the vitality of our maturing years.”

Moses thought to deliver his people from Egypt when he was 40, but he was 80 when God finally made it happen. Abram was 100 years old before God fulfilled the promise of a son he gave to Abram long before. Caleb was young when he spied out the Promised Land and saw a mountain he wanted for himself, but not until he was 85 years old, after enduring 40 years of testing in the wilderness, did God give Caleb a second chance to take that mountain. And at 85 Caleb was still eager to get after it:

And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. So now give me this hill country of which the LORD spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the LORD will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the LORD said.”  Joshua 14:10-12

Caleb had a vision that waited a long time, but finally God brought him back and he conquered the sons of Anak in the fortified cities of the hill country.

What’s your vision? Mine was always to become a faithful man of God--a person who reflects the character of Jesus and bears spiritual fruit in the lives of others. For me, mountain-taking is the daily overcoming of the world, the flesh and the devil through faith in Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. When I was younger I did not realize how very difficult it is to do these things and do them consistently. And then after many setbacks I doubted that I would ever become a man of God.

So it has been strengthening for my faith to consider how Abraham, Moses and Caleb experienced fresh grace and blessing from the “God of the Second Chance” late in their lives. So also Job, “And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (Job 42:12).

For all we know the Sovereign Lord has ordered our lives in just such a way that only in our last years, after many failures and adversities have softened our hearts and humbled us and caused us to feel weak and dependent on God, are we able at last to move forward with the dreams of our youth and begin claiming the high country.