GET BACK UP

Running on Empty | Day 16 

"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be  discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." — Joshua 1:9  (NIV) 

We are glad you are here this morning, and we are glad you did not stay down.  

The Shoes Nobody Volunteers to Fill 

Moses was gone. Forty years in the wilderness, the burning bush, the plagues, the  parted sea, the manna, the law carved in stone, and the man through whom God had  done all of it was buried on a mountain his people were not permitted to cross. And into  that silence, God spoke directly to Joshua. Not with sympathy. Not with a plan to ease  the transition gradually. With a command: “Be strong and courageous, because you will  lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.” (Joshua  1:6, NIV). The land was still waiting. The work was still ahead. And the man now  standing at the edge of it had watched Moses do this for decades and knew, better than  anyone, exactly how much the calling was going to require.  

Most of us will never lead a nation across a river into contested territory. But we know  what it is to stand at the edge of something that feels too large for us, to step into a role  or a season or a responsibility that carries the weight of everything that came before it  and demands more than what we currently feel we have. We know what it is to be  knocked back by a failure, a loss, a betrayal, or simply the accumulated weight of one  hard stretch following another, and to sit with the question that the enemy is very patient  about planting in the quiet: what if we just do not have what this takes? The quitter’s  impulse is not always dramatic. It rarely announces itself as giving up. It arrives as  reasonable doubt. It looks like wisdom. It sounds like honesty about our own limits. And  it tells us, in the kindest possible voice, that staying down is actually the more sensible  option.  

It is not. And God told Joshua as much, twice in the same paragraph, three times in the  same chapter. The repetition is not accidental. “Be strong and very courageous. Be  careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or  to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:7, NIV). The  command to get back up is not issued once to people who are still fresh and  undefeated. It is issued repeatedly, urgently, to people who already know how the  ground feels when the weight comes down.  

What Getting Back Up Actually Runs On 

Solomon observed something in the righteous that deserves more attention than it  usually receives. “Though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked  stumble when calamity strikes.” (Proverbs 24:16, NIV). Seven times is not a tidy  metaphor. It is a description of what real, faithful, long-term obedience actually looks like from the inside, marked not by an absence of falling but by the refusal to stay down.

The rising is not the proof that the falling did not hurt. It is the proof that something  underneath the fallen person is stronger than the fall.  

Micah understood this from the far side of a fall he did not deserve. “Do not gloat over  me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will  be my light.” (Micah 7:8, NIV). He is not pretending the darkness is not there. He is not  manufacturing confidence from thin air. He is simply refusing to let the enemy have the last word on whether he stays down, because he knows whose word actually governs  

the outcome. The sitting in darkness and the rising are not opposites. They are the  same sentence. The fallen person and the one who rises are the same person, held by  the same light, in the same moment. We do not have to be done with the darkness  before the rising begins.  

Paul knew this from every direction. He was hard pressed, perplexed, persecuted, and  struck down in ways that go well beyond anything most of us have endured, and yet he wrote with no apparent confusion about what that meant for his standing or his calling.  “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair;  

persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9,  NIV). Four times he names the weight. Four times he names what the weight did not  accomplish. Hard pressed: not crushed. Perplexed: not in despair. Persecuted: not  abandoned. Struck down: not destroyed. The pattern is not stoicism. It is theology. The  reason none of those things finished him is not that Paul was unusually resilient by  temperament. It is that the One holding him was stronger than everything pressing  against him.  

This matters deeply for the way resiliency is framed, because the world sells a version  of getting back up that is essentially about finding untapped reserves of our own  strength, digging deeper, discovering what we are made of. But that version eventually  runs out, because human reserves are finite and the hard seasons are not. The  resiliency this series has been building toward is not something we manufacture. It is  something we receive. “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They  will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not  be faint.” (Isaiah 40:31, NIV). Renewal. Not recovery of what we had before. Renewal, a  fresh supply from a source that does not deplete, available specifically to the ones who  have exhausted their own. The promise was never made to those who still had enough.  It was made to those who were down to nothing and looked to the Lord rather than to  the remaining reserves of their own effort.  

And this is where Philippians 4:13 needs to be rescued from the motivational posters  and returned to its actual meaning. “I can do all this through him who gives me  strength.” (Philippians 4:13, NIV). The strength is His. Every word in that sentence  points to a source outside Paul himself. The getting back up that this devotion is after is  not the triumph of a strong will over hard circumstances. It is a person on their knees  before a God whose strength flows precisely and specifically into the place where ours  has run out, and who commands us to rise not because we have recovered but  because He has not failed. And for anyone who wonders whether the rising is worth it,  whether the work ahead justifies the effort of getting back to our feet, Jesus answered  that directly: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the 

world.” (John 16:33, NIV). We do not rise into an uncertain outcome. We rise into a  victory already secured by the One who calls us forward. Jesus Christ did not rise from  the dead on the third day because the circumstances had improved. He rose because the Father’s power is not subject to the weight of any tomb, any defeat, any situation  that looks from the outside like a permanent ending. And the same risen Lord who told  Joshua to be strong and courageous, who held Paul through every hard pressing, is the  One who holds this moment today and says to every person sitting in the darkness of a  fall they did not plan: get back up. Not on your own. On Mine.  

Prayer 

Father, I confess that there are places in my life where I have been listening to the voice  that says staying down is the more honest option, the wiser choice, the realistic reading  of what I have left. I have dressed up the quitter’s impulse as self-awareness and called  it humility when it was closer to unbelief. Forgive me for the times I have treated my own  exhaustion as the final word on what is possible, rather than bringing that exhaustion to  the One who renews strength in the weary. 

Lord Jesus, thank You that You rose from the place that looked like the most permanent  ending in all of history, and that Your rising is the ground beneath every getting back up  that has happened since. Where I am down, be the strength that lifts me. Where the  enemy says stay, let Your command say rise. Carry me forward not on what I have left  but on what You have already secured. In Your name, Amen. 

The fall was real. So is the One who says rise. Go into this day on His strength rather  than the memory of your own, and trust that the ground underneath you is stronger than  whatever brought you down. Tomorrow we step into what a genuinely refueled spiritual  life actually looks like in practice, not as performance but as the real feeding of a soul  that has been hungry long enough. Stay with us.  

To God be the glory. 

Pray, praise, and give thanks, for God is good and His mercy endures forever.  

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