A Good Work Begun In You

It is finished and it is on the table and he has been looking at it for about twenty minutes.

Four years. Not continuously, but it has been the thing in the background of four years, and now it is done and it is sitting there and it is good and he is not sure what he feels.

He knows what he wanted to feel. He wanted the thing to be permanent. That was the private hope underneath four years: that this one would be the one that outlasts, that in fifty years somebody would still be using it, that it would be the exception.

He knows it will not be.

He is thirty seven and he has done enough now to have watched several of his own things go, and he has a fairly accurate sense of the lifespan of the kind of work he does, and this one is not different.

So there is a finished thing on a table and a hope that quietly did not survive the four years it took, and he is sitting in the late afternoon with both.

And there is one other thing he has noticed, and it is the reason he is still sitting here rather than getting up. He is not the same man who started it. That is not sentimental: there are specific things he does differently now, and specific things he no longer does, and he could list them.

He does not know what to do with that observation, but he cannot stop having it.

You may know that table. A finished thing, a hope about permanence that did not survive the making, and an observation about yourself you have not worked out what to do with.

Which work gets finished

Here is a promise, and the thing worth noticing is what is being completed.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

A good work in you.

Not a good work through you, which is what most people hear. In you. The work being described is not the output. It is the person.

And what is promised about it is completion. He which hath begun it will perform it, which means finish it, carry it through to its end.

So there are two works running in your life. One is the thing on the table, which is finished and which has a lifespan you can estimate fairly accurately. The other is in you, and it is unfinished, and it is the one with a guarantee attached to it.

You are the work with the completion promised, and the thing on the table is not. Philippians 1:6 puts the good work in you and promises it will be performed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man looking at four years of finished work in the late afternoon.

Now let me take your observation seriously, because it is the most important thing in this and you did not know what to do with it.

You noticed that you are not the same man who started. That is not sentiment and you were right to distrust the sentimental version of it. Specific things are different in you, and you could list them, and the list is evidence.

That change is the good work. It has been happening while you were making the object, using the object as the material, and it does not have the lifespan the object has.

You are being finished by Someone who does not stop at the end of a project. The written word promises the completion of a work in you rather than a work by you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing that through four years you thought were about something else.

The honest half. The thing on the table will still go. I am not going to promise you that this one is the exception, because you already know it is not and you would stop listening.

And I am not going to tell you the four years were really about you and not about the work, because that is a diminishment of a real object that people will use, and it is not true either. Both were happening.

There is a part only you can do and it is an act of attention. You look at the finished thing. And then you name the work in yourself that is still going on.