for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.
Philippians 2:13 (NIV)
He Works the Wanting Too
For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. Paul wrote that to a church he was away from. He had already told them to continue to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.
I used to read those two as a division of labor, his part and mine, with a line drawn somewhere in the middle. I don’t read them that way now. God works in people to will and to act, and that work reaches the wanting as well as the hands.
The chef on the hot line yells. She yells at seven and she yells at ten, and the plates that leave her pass are why people drive across town on a Saturday. The kid working garde manger came in five months ago able to hold a knife. Now he can feel through the back of a spatula when the fish is done, and he couldn’t tell you which week that started.
Change tends to arrive in a life without a date on it. A man who used to put off a phone call all week finds one morning that he’s dialing before he’s decided to. A woman who could barely be in the same house as her mother-in-law catches herself wondering what the woman would like for her birthday. God is working in them, and the change isn’t from the person it happens to.
Working out your salvation with fear and trembling still means work, and it still feels like work. Paul doesn’t promise that the wanting shows up on any particular morning. He says it’s being worked in you, by God, toward something God is after.
All of it is aimed at his good purpose, and he’s willing to begin as far back in a person as the wanting.
A Prayer to Remember
I’ve been doing the right things for a while without wanting to, God, and I’d rather you heard that from me. Work on the wanting. I’ll keep doing them either way, and I’d like the doing to come from somewhere further in than my calendar.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
