Week One of Nine

There is a folder on her phone with four of the same app in it, downloaded in four different Januarys.

Each one has a little history attached. The first got to week three. The second, which was a better app, got to week two and then there was a bad fortnight at work. The third she deleted on day five without opening it, which she still thinks is the most honest thing she has ever done. The fourth is sitting there now, installed a fortnight ago, unopened, with a red dot on it.

She is not lazy. I want to say that clearly, because a person with four abandoned starts on their phone has usually been told they are and has started believing it. She works hard at things she does not enjoy for the benefit of people who do not thank her. She simply has a track record on this particular kind of thing, and she has read her own record and drawn a conclusion.

The conclusion is: starting is the humiliating part.

Because if you never start, you have not failed. You have simply not begun, which is a much more dignified position. But if you start and stop, that is another entry on the record, and the record is what she uses to decide whether to start, so every stop makes the next start less likely.

Now here is why I am telling you about a fitness app in an article about turning back to God.

She has the same folder in her head about the thing that actually matters. She has turned before. More than once. And each of those turns went a certain distance and then something happened and it stopped, and she counted it as a failed attempt, and the count is now high enough that she will not begin again, because beginning is what precedes the entry on the record.

That is you with your thumb over the icon.

You're not refusing to turn because you do not want to. You're refusing because you have read your own history and concluded that you are somebody who starts things, and you would rather not add another line to a document you already cannot bear to read.

The finishing is on God's side of the sentence

Paul writes a line to a congregation he loves and it has been read at a lot of beginnings, and almost nobody notices who does what in it.

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

Two verbs, and both of them have the same subject.

He which hath begun. God started it. Past tense, already done, and Paul is telling them it happened rather than asking them to make it happen.

Will perform it. Perform, in that older English, means carry through to completion. God finishes it. Also His.

Now look at what is left for the person being written about. There is no third clause. There is nothing in that sentence where the reader supplies the persistence, and Paul, who had watched more people fall away than most, chose to put his confidence somewhere other than in their record.

You are inside a work that was begun by God and will be carried through by God, and neither end of it was ever assigned to your consistency, and I am not making the standard soft: Philippians 1:6 puts both verbs in His hands, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that past a folder full of abandoned starts.

Here is what your record actually shows, read fairly. Not that you fail. That you keep beginning. Four Januarys is four times a person got up and tried, and the only reason it reads as a shameful document is that you have been counting the stops rather than the starts.

You have begun again more times than most people manage once, and the beginning is the part that was yours to do, which is written into that verse rather than into my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to reach a place where reading your own history has only made things worse.

And notice the timescale Paul gives. Until the day of Jesus Christ. That is the whole of a life and then some. He is not describing a nine week program with a completion certificate. He is describing something that will still be being carried through long after you have stopped keeping a folder.

Which means week one is not week one of nine. It is week one of a work already in progress that has an end date nobody in this room will see.

This has been going on in you since before the first January, and none of the stops interrupted it, because Scripture puts the beginning and the performing in the same hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a morning where a red dot is still sitting there.