Perfecting What Concerns You

There is a sentence of Paul's, written centuries downstream, about God finishing the good work he has begun in a person, and it is usually the sentence people are really quoting when they quote this psalm.

So be careful what you take from David here, because the verse is smaller than it is often made and stronger than people notice. It does not say the half-painted wall gets painted. It does not promise that your projects reach completion, or that the course gets finished, or that the friendship you meant to repair in March repairs itself. It gives no timetable at all. And it does not describe a general law about unfinished things. The phrase is that which concerneth me: what God has undertaken on his behalf, in his own life and calling.

Then look at what he leans the promise on, because he does not leave it standing on its own. Thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever. That is the load-bearing half. The reason a work of God does not get abandoned halfway is not momentum; it is that the patience behind it does not expire. A God who quit would be a God whose mercy had a term limit.

And here is the detail that keeps the verse honest. Read the rest of it. David finishes the psalm by asking: forsake not the works of thine own hands. He states the promise and then prays it anyway. He does not treat it as automatic, and neither should anyone who quotes it.

What is settled is not the schedule. It is that the one who began the work is still at it, and there is no point at which his mercy runs out and lets him put it down.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 286 is The Third and Fourth (Exodus 34:6-7).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna