Whose Wanting Is This

My grandmother made a stew that took six hours and she would not let anybody watch the first hour of it.

Not out of secrecy. She simply did not want you there while she was doing the beginning, the part where the onions go in and nothing looks like anything and the whole thing smells wrong for about twenty minutes. Come at four, she would say. And by four the kitchen smelled like the best thing in the world and everybody stood around saying how good it smelled, and she would wave her hand as though the smell had arrived by itself.

Now I want to tell you about a man in that family who has been standing in his own kitchen at one in the afternoon trying to work out who started the cooking.

He has a matter. He has had it a long time. And about eight months ago something in him began wanting to be free of it, genuinely wanting, in a way he had not wanted before.

And instead of following the wanting, he began interrogating it.

Because here is what he cannot settle. Is this me? Is this actually me wanting to be different, which would mean something, or is this just the situation getting uncomfortable enough that anybody would want out? And if it is the second one, then the wanting is worthless, and coming to God on the back of it would be a kind of fraud.

So he stands in the kitchen at one in the afternoon, in the twenty minutes where it smells wrong, trying to establish the provenance of his own desire.

Eight months of that. And the wanting is still there, which he has not counted as evidence, because he has decided in advance that only a certain kind of wanting counts and he cannot verify which kind he has.

That is you at one in the afternoon.

You're being asked, by nobody but yourself, to certify the origin of your own desire before you act on it. And you cannot, because there is no way to stand outside your own wanting and inspect where it came from, and eight months of trying has not produced one usable result.

Paul puts the willing on God's side of the work

Paul writes a sentence about how change happens in a person, and the striking thing is where he puts the wanting.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.Philippians 2:13

Both to will and to do. Read that twice. Not just the doing. The willing as well. The wanting itself is named as part of what God is working in a person, which means that the very desire you have spent eight months trying to establish the ownership of is, by Paul's account, already something He is doing. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in it, which is precisely why you cannot tell it apart from your own.

That does not make it less yours. This is the thing people get wrong. It is exactly like a mother's cooking: the smell that fills the house at four o'clock is entirely real, and it is also entirely something she started at ten. Both things are true, and nobody standing in that kitchen at four would say the smell was not really there because somebody else lit the stove.

You are wanting this because God has been working in you to want it, and it is genuinely your wanting at the same time, and I am not making it soft: Philippians 2:13 says both to will and to do, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying it who can settle that in a man at one in the afternoon.

Then look at the last phrase, which is where the tenderness sits. Of his good pleasure. This is not God grimly repairing a defective thing. It is what He likes doing. The working in you is a pleasure to Him, and the sentence says so before it says anything about results.

You have been the site of something God enjoys doing, for the whole eight months you spent interrogating it, which is written into that verse rather than into my affection for you, with the Spirit of God able to make it real where the questioning has only made it louder.

Now let me name the trap plainly, because it is a good one and it catches serious people. The question is this really mine? assumes that a desire only counts if it originated entirely with you, unassisted. But nothing in your life works that way and you would not want it to. Every good thing in you came from somewhere. A man who refused to eat until he could prove he had grown the wheat would starve in a house full of bread.

This wanting is enough to move on, and its origin was never yours to establish, because Scripture puts the willing on God's side and calls it His good pleasure, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a kitchen where the onions are still going.