The Wanting Came First

He is not fighting anything. That is what he cannot get anyone to understand.

People assume he is struggling. They use that word and they are kind about it and they say things about how hard it is and how it takes time, and all of it is aimed at a man who is straining against something, and Gareth is not straining. There is nothing to strain against. He would have to want it first.

He is fifty-three and he has been a believer for six years and the honest report is this: he does not particularly want to change, in any area, and he has not for at least four of the six. He is not defiant about it. He would like to want to. If you offered him a pill that made him want to be a better man he would take it, and that is roughly where his desire currently sits: at the level of wishing he had different insides.

So he sits in that armchair on a Sunday afternoon with a mug going cold and he thinks the thing he has thought for years, which is that whatever happened at the beginning must not have taken, because a person in whom something took would at least want it. The evidence is not his behavior. His behavior is decent. The evidence is his flatness.

And he has never once said this to anybody, because the two or three people who would take it seriously would take it far too seriously, and the rest would tell him to try harder, which is a suggestion aimed at a man who has a lever.

If you are flat, hear the question. You cannot even want it. What if the wanting was never the part you were supposed to bring?

Read where the willing comes from

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

Read the two verbs He is working, because the first one is the one nobody expects.

Both to will. The willing. The wanting. The appetite itself. Paul says God is the one at work producing that in a person, which means the desire to change is not the raw material a man brings to God, it is part of what God produces in him.

And to do. The doing as well. Both ends of it.

And of his good pleasure, which is a phrase about God's own delight in the matter, not about a duty He is discharging reluctantly.

Now put Gareth's report next to that verse. His report is: I cannot generate the wanting. The verse says the wanting is God's department.

He has spent four years failing at a job that was never assigned to him and then reading the failure as evidence about his salvation.

You are not the source of your own wanting, and it is already God at work in you at that exact level, and He is named as the one producing both halves. I am not comforting a flat man in an armchair. It is written in Philippians 2:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a verse about willing and lays it on somebody who has decided his flatness is the verdict.

What a flat man actually does have

Now let me point at something in the room, because Gareth is dismissive about evidence and there is evidence.

He is still here. Six years, four of them flat. He still goes. He still sits in that chair on a Sunday afternoon and thinks about God, which is a strange way to spend an afternoon for a man in whom nothing is happening. He has not walked away, and he could have, easily, with no cost and nobody to answer to.

A man with no appetite whatsoever does not stay at the table for four years.

That is not enthusiasm and I am not going to inflate it into enthusiasm. But staying is a form of wanting, and it is the form that survives when the felt kind has gone, and it is the one that a flat man has been performing without counting it.

You have been wanting it in the only way available to you, and it is already showing, and it has been showing for four years in a chair on a Sunday afternoon. Scripture says it is God who works in you both to will and to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man in a room where nothing seems to be happening.

The good pleasure part

And there is one more thing in that verse that is aimed at a man like this and it is the last three words.

Of his good pleasure. God is not working on Gareth as an obligation. He is not repairing a unit that came back under warranty. The verse locates the whole operation inside God's own pleasure, which means the flat years have not exhausted anybody's patience and there is no sigh anywhere in this.

That matters because a flat man assumes he is a disappointment, and disappointment is the emotion he projects onto God every Sunday at about half past three.

You are being worked on by somebody who is glad about it, and it is already His good pleasure, and no flat year has changed the disposition of the one doing the work. It is written that He works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries God's actual mood into a room where a man has assumed the worst of it.