8 Jun 2011

Philippians 1:6

Posted by joncooper

Philippians 1:6: “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:”

This is a very comforting verse! Jesus has “begun a good work” in me: He has started the process of turning me into someone like Him – a holy, blameless, perfect person. The best part is that Jesus is going to finish what He has started.

I am a truly terrible Christian. I fall short all the time; I try and fail and try again, only to fail once more. I am constantly coming up short, and at times it is easy to start thinking that I will always come up short – that there is no real hope of ever being the sort of person God wants me to be. I know that I’ve been declared righteous by virtue of Christ’s sacrifice, and that is a wonderful gift, but I long to truly be free from sin – to cast all of it off and never go back. I don’t want to keep falling into evil over and over again.

Paul echoed this very same sentiment when he said that he found himself continuing to do the very things that he despised, and unable to do the good things that he wanted to do. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Paul then answered his own question, and it is an answer worth remembering: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

What I do know is that I won’t always be the person I am now. Nor is there any chance that I will utterly fail. The Lord will finish what He started. He has begun a good work, and He will complete it. Jesus is the one that will ultimately turn me into something I am not – a person remade in His image.

And that is an encouraging thought. It’s not up to me to make it happen. I’m not going to be made perfect by my own efforts, nor will I be abandoned if I’m somehow not “good enough”. God will accomplish it in His time. I may fail regularly, but God never fails.

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