The Right Thing, Nothing

"...having begun by the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by the flesh?" - Galatians 3:3

Something happened in you yesterday that you've been trying to treat as nothing. You did the right thing, the one that cost you, and in the half-second right after, a small stirring moved through you that did not come from you. Not a feeling about what you had just done. Something else, a lift under the arms, a warmth with no source you could name. You noticed it for maybe a second, then your mind called it adrenaline, or relief, or a good mood, and it passed.

But it came back. Maybe later that afternoon, maybe this morning when you weren't thinking about it. The second time, the explanation did not fit as cleanly. You can tell the difference between a feeling you brought on yourself and one that arrived on its own, and this one arrived. Scripture names the source, "...it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose," Philippians 2:13.

Paul saw people going through exactly this and was almost amused at how hard they were working to miss it. "Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by the flesh?" Galatians 3:3. He wasn't scolding them for trying. He was pointing at a life alive in them and asking why they kept crediting their own effort for what was clearly coming from somewhere else. God had said it plainly long before, "...I will put my Spirit in you and move you...," Ezekiel 36:27. They thought they were producing it, when in truth they were only the ground it was moving through, and so are you.

That small stirring is not your mood. It is the first pressure of a life forming in you, beginning to push up into the places you can feel. Jesus called it, "...a spring of water welling up to eternal life," John 4:14. A real movement with a source that is not you. And now you are awake to it, which means you are holding something now, because you cannot honestly go back to pretending it was nothing.

Paul put it this way, "...the hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber...," Romans 13:11. There is a way to hold this awareness through the day without pressing it down. The next time you feel it, let it be there a moment before your mind reaches for an explanation, and let the credit fall wherever it falls. It does not need to land on you. That noticing is enough for this morning. Stay with this.

Prayer

Father, something is moving in us that we did not put there. Keep us from explaining it away, and from trying to own it. Amen.