He Finishes What He Starts

The barn door is open onto the field and the sun is going down at the end of it, which happens about four evenings a year at exactly the right angle and everybody in the family knows the date range.

Three of them out there and a boy who has been given a job to keep him busy and is doing it properly, which nobody expected.

He is seventy-five.

And it is a good evening and he is glad, and there is a sentence sitting in him that has been getting louder for about a year.

The yard is full of things he did not finish. A fence line that stops. Two roofs he was going to do. A wall he took down in order to rebuild and did not rebuild, which is now just a wall that used to be there. And in the house there is a letter he never wrote and a conversation he never had with a man who is now dead.

He is not tormented by it. He is seventy-five and he is realistic about what a life looks like from this end of it.

But the sentence has got louder, and the sentence is: I am one of them. Not just a man with unfinished things in his yard. An unfinished thing, in somebody's yard, and there is not enough time or strength left to get to it, and that is simply how it is going to be.

If you have looked at your own yard and put yourself in it, you know it is not despair, and you know it arrives on good evenings rather than bad ones.

Read who the subject of the verb is

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the fence line or the roofs, which are wood and weather and do not care. It is the category you put yourself in. It costs you the last stretch of your life, which is now being lived by a man who has classified himself as a job nobody will get to. It costs the letter and the conversation, which are the two on that list that actually hurt. It costs the good evenings, because that is when the sentence arrives. And it costs you a realism that is genuinely realism about your yard and has quietly been extended to cover you.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your seventy-five years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the sentence has moved somewhere darker, as far as thinking the family would have less to sort out sooner rather than later, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two out there with you, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who give a boy a job and let him do it properly.

Now, Philippians 1, and read the subject of both verbs 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

He which hath begun. Will perform it.

Both verbs have the same subject and the subject is not you. He began it. He performs it. There is no clause in that sentence in which the person it is written to does anything at all, and Paul was perfectly capable of writing an imperative when he wanted one.

You are the yard rather than the workman in that verse. Philippians 1:6 makes God the subject of the beginning and the finishing, and the Holy Spirit is the one named through that letter as the supply.

Now, the word perform, because in older English it is stronger than it sounds. It means to carry through to completion, to finish off, to bring to its end. It is a builder's word and a craftsman's word, and the reason the King James translators chose it is that the Greek is a compound about bringing something all the way to its finish.

And then the deadline, which is the only date in the sentence: until the day of Jesus Christ. Not until you get your strength back. Not within your working life. The finishing is dated to His day and not to yours, which means running out of time is not a category that applies to it.

You have a completion with a date on it and the date is not in your calendar. That is written into Philippians 1:6, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the work has an owner who is not you.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a year of good evenings has already produced a lot of true talk in that yard.

It does not say the fence gets finished. It does not say the roofs get done and it does not say the wall goes back up, and I am not going to tell you that God tidies a yard, because He does not promise that and it would be a foolish thing to sell you at seventy-five.

And it does not make the finishing a reward. Nothing in that verse turns your endurance into a qualification or grades you on the years. He began it, which was not your doing, and He performs it, which is not your doing either, and there is no standard in that sentence you are behind on.

You were never the one responsible for the completion of the work. Scripture names the same subject for the beginning and the end, and the same Spirit who supplies is the one who carries that into a barn door open onto a field.