Having Begun in the Spirit, Are You Now Made Perfect by the Flesh

He can tell you exactly how it started and he cannot tell you when it changed.

The start was not complicated. He was twenty-six and something happened and he did not do anything to bring it about. He was not trying. He was, if anything, in the middle of doing the opposite. He has told the story maybe nine times in his life and it takes about two minutes and there is nothing in it he did.

That is the whole point of the story when he tells it. Nothing in it he did.

And what he is now is a man with a system. A morning block. A tracker. A set of things he does and a set he has stopped, and a running internal ledger of how the week is going, and a low grade sense on any given Thursday that he is either slightly up or slightly down.

If you asked him whether he is saved by works he would say no, immediately, and mean it, and be a little offended by the question.

But nobody lives out of what they would say in an argument. They live out of what they check when they wake up, and there is a letter that asks about exactly that gap.

Two questions, and the second one is the point

Here it is, in the King James Version:

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? (Galatians 3:2-3)

Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

He asks it as a matter of fact, not of theory. He is not asking what they believe about it. He is asking them to remember what actually happened, because they were there and they know.

And then the second question, which lands on the gap: having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?

Begun one way. Continuing another. He does not accuse them of abandoning anything. They have not left. They are, if anything, working harder than ever, and that is precisely the thing he is pointing at.

This is not a letter to people who went cold. It is a letter to people who got serious, and got serious in a direction that quietly reversed how the whole thing works.

You have not left anything and you were never accused of walking away. Galatians 3:3 names a change of method rather than a change of loyalty, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a firmer intention who is named in that same verse as how the thing began.

Why nobody can name the day it changed

It is worth being honest about the mechanism, because if a man cannot see how it happened he will assume it happened because of something wrong with him.

Nothing turned over in a moment. What happens is that a man receives something freely, and then, quite properly, wants to keep it. And keeping is an activity. So he starts doing things, and the things are good things, and they help.

And then, somewhere in the fourth or fifth year, the doing quietly becomes the supply rather than the response. Nobody announces the switch. The behavior looks identical from outside and from inside for a long time. The only tell is what a man feels on the day he misses.

If missing produces regret, the doing is still a response. If missing produces a sense that something has been withdrawn, the switch has already happened.

You are able to tell where you actually stand and you were never left without a way to check. Galatians 3:2 sends people back to what happened at the start as the test, and it is His Spirit who makes an honest look at your own week a place where God is present rather than a place a man gets caught.

What he says is being supplied right now

And then the verse most people skip over on the way to the argument, which is the one with the present tense in it.

He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? (Galatians 3:5)

He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit. Present tense. Ongoing. There is somebody supplying, right now, while the letter is being read.

And the question about that supply is the same question as before: by works, or by hearing.

Which means the entire arrangement, beginning and middle both, runs on one mechanism, and the man with the tracker has not been disqualified from it. He has been trying to run a second engine alongside it that was never going to turn over.

Paul says it in one line to a different church:

As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him. (Colossians 2:6)

As ye have received, so walk. Same manner. The continuing is done the way the beginning was done, and the beginning was done by receiving.

You have somebody ministering the Spirit to you right now and you were never switched over to a different supply. Galatians 3:5 puts that in the present tense and asks the same question about it as about the start, and Colossians 2:6 says walk in Him the way you received Him.

Who finishes it

And the sentence that puts the weight where it belongs, which is not on the man with the tracker.

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)

He which hath begun. The beginning is credited. Will perform it. The middle is credited. Both clauses have the same subject and it is not the reader.

That is not a license to stop doing anything. Paul is not writing to men who need to be talked out of effort, and the same letters are full of instruction. It is a statement about who is responsible for the outcome, and it is the difference between working from something and working for it.

A man with a system can keep the whole system. Nothing here says the morning block has to go. What changes is what the block is for, and that change is invisible to everybody except the man himself.

You have a work in you that somebody else finishes and you were never carrying the outcome. Philippians 1:6 puts the beginning and the performing on the same side of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named all through these letters as the one at work in the middle of it.