Daily Manna · Day 365 · December 31
He Will Finish the Work
“He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
What would you have to be able to report before you would call it a good year?
The last week of one invites an audit, and yours is not flattering. The same temper. The habit sworn off in January and resumed by March. A prayer life that started well and thinned out without any decision being made. You would like to report growth and can mostly report survival.
Paul writes this from custody, and the two verbs he chooses are a matched pair: begun and perform, words used of a rite properly started and properly completed. He is not saying God will probably get round to it. He is saying that leaving it half done is not a thing that happens to work of this kind. And notice he does not set the deadline where you would set it. Not this year, not this decade. Until the day of Jesus Christ.
His confidence is not a mood either, which is worth knowing before you dismiss it as encouragement. He gives his evidence in the verse before: your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now. He is looking at people who kept showing up and sending help while he was in prison, and reasoning backwards from that to who must be at work in them. Survival, in other words, was the evidence.
So the work in you is meant to look unfinished tonight, because it is unfinished, and the one assessing it is the one who started it and has not walked off the job.
He is not behind schedule. You were reading the wrong calendar.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 365 is All the Days (Matthew 28:20).