Begun in the Spirit, Finished by Hand

It happened in a kitchen at somebody's housewarming, which is not where these things are supposed to happen.

She was twenty five. She had gone to be polite. A woman she barely knew said something in passing about God not being disappointed with her, and it was not a sermon and it was not aimed at her particularly, and something in her chest opened like a window opening.

She stood in a kitchen with a paper cup in her hand and knew, without one argument in her head, that she was loved. There was no effort in it anywhere. She had not read anything, decided anything, repented of anything specific, or cleaned anything up. It arrived. She went home and could not sleep and was not upset.

Eleven years.

And she has spent, she worked out on the drive home last Sunday, essentially every week of the eleven years trying to get back into that kitchen.

Not that she would put it that way. She would say she has grown. And she has: she knows her Bible now, properly, she can hold a room in a study, she has read the hard books and she gives real answers to real questions. She is the person people ask.

She is also, and this is what she has never said to anybody, exhausted in a specific way that has nothing to do with being busy. It is the tiredness of a person who is running a system to reproduce a thing that was given for free in a kitchen when she was twenty five with a paper cup in her hand.

Last Sunday somebody asked her, in front of others, how she stays so consistent, and she gave a good answer, and drove home, and about four miles out she said out loud in the car: I have been trying to earn it back.

She is thirty six. The hall this afternoon is full of light coming through the high windows and there is a pot of tea and half a cake and six people she loves standing around a table, and she is standing slightly outside it holding a mug, thinking about a kitchen eleven years ago.

You have driven that road. Maybe there was a kitchen, maybe a car, maybe a night when you were nineteen. Something arrived without effort and you have been working ever since. And there is a letter in the New Testament written to an entire church that did exactly this, and the question in it is the sharpest question Paul ever asked anybody.

The sharpest question in the letter

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that hands a tired teacher a better discipline and calls it maturity. It is not maturity. Reading more, or reading less, or a new plan, is another hand made attempt to reproduce a kitchen, and she will be back on that road in another eleven years. So there is no discipline coming out of this.

Paul writes to a church that started the same way she did, in the Spirit, without earning anything, and that has since gone back to a system. And he does not soothe them. He says: Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3).

Read the two halves. Begun in the Spirit. That part is settled and he grants it to them without argument. Made perfect by the flesh. The word he uses for made perfect means brought to completion, finished off, carried the rest of the way. That is exactly what she has been doing for eleven years, and she has been doing it well, and it was never possible.

You were begun by the Spirit, and the same Spirit has never once handed you the rest of the job. That is not me smoothing the verse; Galatians 3:3 is a question with an edge on it and it exposes an impossibility rather than a laziness, and the Holy Spirit who carried it into the letter did it for people who are working hard rather than for people who are not.

And notice what Paul does not say. He does not tell them to stop studying, stop gathering, stop serving. The Galatians' problem was never activity. It was what the activity was being asked to accomplish.

Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?Galatians 3:3

Abiding cannot be reproduced

Now John 15, because it is the ground under everything on this site.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me (John 15:4). A branch does not reproduce anything. It cannot make sap and it cannot make more sap by trying, and it has no memory of a good spring that it is attempting to get back to.

Which is why eleven years of excellent work has not returned her to a kitchen, and why it was never going to, and why that is not a report on her effort.

You have been attached through every one of the eleven years, including the ones that felt like machinery. John 15:4 makes abiding a place rather than an experience to be recreated, and the Spirit is the sap; a branch is not more attached in the week it feels something.

And that is the guardrail on this, said plainly: a woman who cannot get back to the kitchen is not a woman who has fallen away. She is a woman who has been trying to manufacture something that was handed to her, and those are not the same condition and should never be spoken of as if they were.

This is yours right now, standing at the edge of that room: the same free thing you were given in a kitchen, on the same free terms. Galatians 3:5 asks whether God supplies the Spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith, and Paul asks it in the present tense about ongoing supply; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is not running an account.

What the system is protecting

Let me name what is actually under eleven years of good work, because it is not ambition and it is not pride.

It sounds like this: if I stop, I will find out that the kitchen was a feeling and not a fact, and I have not been willing to test that. That is the sentence. It is why she gave a good answer on Sunday instead of the true one, and it has never been said in that hall.

You were given a fact in that kitchen and the feeling was the smaller part of it. Ephesians 1:13 says that after you believed you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, and a seal is a legal act rather than a mood; the Holy Spirit named in that verse is the seal Himself, and He has not been renewed weekly for eleven years.

Fruit is not output, and a church hall is a good place to see the difference. Output is the study she can hold, the books she has read, the answers she gives. Fruit is what has grown on a woman who kept turning up for eleven years while privately exhausted, and Galatians 5:22 calls that longsuffering and faithfulness, and neither of them can be produced on purpose.