The Inner Man Is A Real Address

Warm night and every door and window in the building is open, and the sound goes out into the street and comes back off the wall opposite.

Full room. People standing at the back who could have got a seat forty minutes ago.

She is forty-seven.

She keeps a list. Not on paper. In her head, and it has an order, and she can recite it: driving at night, the choir, the stairs at her sister's, the job in June, cooking for more than four, the walk to this building, which is now a ride from a woman she does not know well enough to be a burden to.

Six things in about eighteen months. It is a straight line and everybody can see the direction of it.

She is in the room and she is singing and she means it.

And underneath it, in the part of the evening where the music does its work, there is a question she has never put to anybody: is anything at all being built. Because she can measure the losing precisely. She has six data points and a straight line and a rate. And if something is going the other way, she has no instrument for it, no evidence of it, and no idea where it would even be happening.

If you have a list like that in your head, you know it has an order, and you know nobody has ever asked to hear it.

He prays for a place, and the place has a name

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 six things, although six things in eighteen months is a straight line and you are the one who has to live at the end of it. It is the asymmetry. It costs you the ability to see any movement except the movement downward, which is a specific torture for a person who thinks clearly. It costs the choir, which was Tuesdays. It costs the walk, which has become a ride from a woman you are careful with. And it costs you a question you have never put to a soul, in a full room where everybody would want to answer it.

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 eighteen months 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 straight line has taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking this room would be lighter without another ride to arrange, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the woman who drives 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 nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who arrange a ride and never mention it.

Now, Ephesians 3, and read what Paul actually asks for and where he asks it to land.

That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.Ephesians 3:16

Strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.

Paul is praying and he is being precise. He names the resource: the riches of His glory. He names the agent: His Spirit. And he names the location: the inner man.

That last phrase is not a poetic gesture at somebody's feelings. In that letter it is a real place in a person, as real as the outward one, and Paul prays about it in the same way you would pray about a body, with a request for strength and a named source of it.

You are being prayed for at an address you cannot see and did not know had a name. Ephesians 3:16 puts the strengthening in the inner man by the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the one named in the verse as the one doing it.

Now, the thing your question was actually about: is anything happening. Look at the grammar. To be strengthened. Passive again, as it almost always is with this subject. Paul does not ask that they would strengthen themselves and he does not ask them to detect it. He asks that God would do it, by the Spirit, in a place they cannot inspect.

So the absence of an instrument is not evidence. You have a rate for the losing because the losing is in the part of you that can be measured. The other work is being done in the part that has no dial on it, by somebody who was never going to install one.

You have never been able to measure it, and being unable to measure it was always the case. That is written into Ephesians 3:16, and His Spirit in you is the one the verse names as the strength being supplied.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eighteen months of good things have already been said in that room.

It does not tell you the list stops at six. It makes no promise about your body or about item seven, and I am not going to make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it is not compensation. Nothing in Ephesians offers an inner strengthening in exchange for an outward loss. It is not a trade, it is not a consolation, and if anybody has offered it to you as a swap they were wrong and this site does not do it. Paul prays for the inner man in a letter to people who mostly had their health, because it is a good thing in itself and not a payment for anything.

You were never handed an inside instead of a life. Scripture prays for strength in the inner man on its own terms, and the same Spirit who is named as the agent is the one who carries that into a full room with the doors open.