Wholly Preserved

Read Paul's prayer slowly and you may wince at it: "your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless." Nobody who has lived with themselves for forty years reads that without some doubt. Each of us keeps a private list of the parts of ourselves we think are past saving.

So take one word and stay with it: "wholly." The Greek word is holoteles, and it is built from two pieces that mean "whole" and "finished." Then Paul at once breaks the whole into its parts: "spirit and soul and body." This is his way of saying every square inch of you. He prays for the parts you would leave off the list as well as the promising ones: the temper your family sees, the habit you have restarted eleven times, and the body you resent for growing old, or failing, or wanting what it wants.

Notice also that this is a prayer. Just before it, Paul gives seven verses of short commands in a row, from "Rejoice evermore" and "Pray without ceasing" to "Abstain from all appearance of evil." Then he stops instructing and starts praying, and the reason is in the last line: "Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it." The doing is God's.

Now comes the warning, which people often take badly. If the finishing is God's work, the one thing you can do is get in its way. Paul's word for that comes four verses earlier: "Quench not the Spirit." To quench is what you do to a fire. You do not have to fight God to quench His work; you only have to keep one part of yourself off the table for good and go on calling it the part that cannot be helped. So bring Him that part too. The God who called you "also will do it," and He means to finish the whole of you.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 56 is Counted Worthy (Acts 5:41).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna