Mount Up with Wings: Renew Your Strength

By John Zehring

“Mount Up with Wings: Renew Your Strength” from Isaiah 40 describes one of the most beautifully poetic metaphors in the bible. Author John Zehring embraces this and other metaphors from the bible to inspire and to teach you to build your trust in God so that you renew your strength and mount up with wings to soar. We all need more strength. The work includes contemporary illustrations to help relate the bible to your everyday need.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Zehring
• Release date: Aug 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311724632

John Zehring

John Zehring has served United Church of Christ congregations as Senior Pastor in Massachusetts (Andover), Rhode Island (Kingston), and Maine (Augusta) and as an Interim Pastor in Massachusetts (Arlington, Harvard). Prior to parish ministry, he served in higher education, primarily in development and institutional advancement. He worked as a dean of students, director of career planning and placement, adjunct professor of public speaking and as a vice president at a seminary and at a college. He is the author of more than sixty books and is a regular writer for The Christian Citizen, an American Baptist social justice publication. He has taught Public Speaking, Creative Writing, Educational Psychology and Church Administration. John was the founding editor of the publication Seminary Development News, a publication for seminary presidents, vice presidents and trustees (published by the Association of Theological Schools, funded by a grant from Lilly Endowment). He graduated from Eastern University and holds graduate degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary, Rider University, and the Earlham School of Religion. He is listed in Marquis' WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA and is a recipient of their Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. John and his wife Donna live in two places, in central Massachusetts and by the sea in Maine.

Book preview

Mount Up with Wings

Renew Your Strength

John Zehring

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 John Zehring

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this eBook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Introduction

Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,

they shall mount up with wings like eagles

Isaiah 40 contains some of the most beautifully poetic and encouraging verses in the bible. Christians, Jews, Muslims and other faiths share an affection for these verses and the truths they contain.

Renew your strength. That is something we all need. You possess deep reserves of strength within. When tested, you may be surprised to discover that your strength within is greater than you thought. The person of faith also discovers strength from beyond the inner reserves which comes from God. This work will explore ingredients of both sources of your strength.

Wait for the Lord. The word wait in the bible is a good substitution word. When you come to the word wait, substitute the word trust. The Contemporary English Version translates the verse Those who trust the Lord will find new strength. This work will consider ways to build your trust so that you can mount up with wings and soar.

To mount up with wings like eagles is a metaphor for strength that comes from trusting in God. The bible is rich with metaphors for strength, hope, and trust such as a yoke, anchor, hand or robe. And so, this eBook is organized mostly by some of the bible’s most beautiful and encouraging metaphors.

A FEW NOTES ABOUT THIS BOOK

All scriptures in this work come from the New Revised Standard unless otherwise noted.

I have attempted to use inclusive language wherever possible in the words I have written, although I have not altered the author’s reference to God as he. I recognize that the Divine has no gender and for many it may be just as appropriate and accurate to acknowledge God as Mother or Father. Whichever pronoun we use, I consider God as a loving parent.

Parts of Mount Up with Wings are drawn from other eBooks I have written. Information is available at the end of this work in the biography section which lists my eBooks. My website can be found by searching online for John Zehring books.

May God bless you as you seek to grow in your trust in God and may your relationship with the Divine lead you to soar.

John Zehring

Eagles

Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,

they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary,

they shall walk and not faint.

(Isaiah 40:31)

At my cottage on the coast of Maine, I have an eagle tree where the majestic American Bald Eagle lands and sits for a while, keeping a watchful eye over the bay which is dotted with five pairs of nesting eagles. Even as I write these words in my writing shed, the eagle is calling from the tree. Mine is not the tree where they live but they visit it all the time, swooping down to land on one of the tall pine's bare branches.

I have been watching the eagles land and take off for a quarter century. My wife and I can be sitting right next to the tree and the eagle will come and go as if we were not even there. We have watched them raise their young. We have heard their cry echo across the bay. We have been awakened by a family of eagles at five in the morning when they land in our tree.

The eagle lands in the tree with a flappy flutter. Then it sits there as it prunes and primps itself. And then... you can see it coming... it starts to get restless, it moves about a bit, and with a ceremonial HARUMPH, it mounts up with wings, jumps out of the tree away from the branches, and leaps heavenward as it climbs to the heights where it will soar.

Isaiah must have had an eagle tree too, because he described the behavior perfectly and used it as a metaphor for one of the greatest truths about God and about you: Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles.

Consider four soaring lessons for how to mount up with wings like eagles and to allow this verse to lead you to renew your strength.

The First is, reject rejection.

If you are old enough you might remember radio commentator Paul Harvey… he had this program where he would tell a fascinating story and conclude: And now you know the rest of the story. Paul Harvey said: Someday, I hope to enjoy enough of what the world calls success so that if somebody asks me, What's the secret of it? I shall say this: I get up when I fall down.

You fall down. You make mistakes. You try things and fail. You get rejected. Everybody does. One of the keys to getting up when you fall down is to learn how to reject rejection. Many of people’s success stories come from those who tried something, got rejected, and rejected their rejection:

The poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly returned a sheaf of poems to a twenty-eight year old poet with this curt note: Our magazine has no room for your vigorous verse. The poet was Robert Frost, who rejected the rejection.

The University of Bern turned down a Ph.D. dissertation as being irrelevant and fanciful. The young physics student who wrote the dissertation was Albert Einstein, who rejected the rejection.

A rhetoric teacher at Harrow in England wrote on the sixteen-year-old's report card, a conspicuous