When Your Voice Joins

"...I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me." - Colossians 1:29 (NIV)

You came in after the conversation had already started, when the others were already talking. For a while you only listened, following what they meant, who was worried about what, and what had first brought them together. Nobody stopped to go back and explain the start of it for you. Then a question passed from person to person, and you heard your own voice answer it, easy and unforced, already part of something you had only just walked into. You did not start the conversation. Somewhere in the listening, it had become yours too.

Life with God often begins the same way. You find yourself taking part in something that was well underway before you arrived. Paul knew both of those things could be true, and writing to a church in a city he had never visited, he named both sides of it: "...I strenuously contend with all the energy Christ so powerfully works in me" (Colossians 1:29). He contends. The effort is real, because it is his own, and it is costly. And the strength for it is not his. The same hand that first stirred our desire for Him, and opened our eyes, and set us moving, is at work in this too. Each of those felt like our own, and each was His.

The hard part is that we keep trying to decide how much of the work is ours and how much is His. We want a clear line between the two, so we know what to carry. But no such line can be drawn. God will "...work in us what is pleasing to him" (Hebrews 13:21). What we do and what He does in us are not two separate efforts laid side by side. They belong together, His becoming ours, and no one can finally separate the two.

So what does our part look like, if our strength comes from God and not from ourselves? Our part is humbler and more ordinary than we would guess. Our part looks like agreeing, again and again, with the good He has already started in us. We serve, Peter wrote, "...with the strength God provides," so that in everything God is the one praised (1 Peter 4:11). We're not the source of the power. We are the ones who say yes to it, one ordinary yes at a time, while the energy holding it up keeps coming from Him.

So today, you don't have to prepare for something large and demanding or judge your part by how hard the work feels. Look instead for the next small agreement in front of you, the one thing He has already started and is asking you to say yes to. You answered that conversation without straining for it. You can answer Him the same way. You are joining a life already given, and the strength to live it was His before you were ever asked. Stay in Him. Move with Him.

Prayer

Father, thank You for the strength we did not summon, and for the work You began before we arrived. Teach us to bring You our small agreements today, and to trust the energy is Yours. Amen.