My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Psalm 73:26

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:26

For those who walk by faith there is an ongoing tension between two kinds of life. One is visible and external, the other invisible and eternal. The external is fading; it is impermanent. But there is something inside every believer that is eternal—something from God that is linked directly to Him, something that does not fade or wither.

Paul writes on this tension from his own experience: “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. . . . For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:16, 18 NASB).

These words always remind me of my first wife, Lydia. Toward the end of her life she suffered from a weak heart, yet she was an amazingly strong and active woman and continued so almost to her last week on earth. At times she would feel her physical heart failing, but she would always say: “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” From her I learned the lesson that we must not let the external dictate to the internal. Within the life committed to God, there is an inner source of strength not subject to the weaknesses and fluctuations of our physical body.

Eventually God called Lydia home in tremendous victory, after fifty years of active and fruitful Christian service. She left behind the testimony of a life that had demonstrated the supremacy of the internal over the external. She had learned how to keep her inner being linked to God, the real source of strength.