Daily Manna · Day 56 · February 25
Wholly Preserved
“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.”
The objection writes itself. Preserved blameless, spirit and soul and body: nobody who has lived with themselves for forty years reads that without an inward flinch, because we each keep a private list of the parts we consider past saving.
So take one word and stay with it. Wholly. The Greek is holoteles, and it is built from two pieces: whole, and end or completion. Paul then immediately breaks the whole into its parts, spirit and soul and body, which is not a technical anthropology so much as a way of saying every square inch. He is not asking God to sanctify the promising areas. He is asking for the temper the family sees, the habit restarted eleven times, and the body you resent for ageing or failing or wanting what it wants.
And notice this is a prayer, not a command. Paul has just finished commanding, seven of them in a row: rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing, in every thing give thanks, quench not the Spirit, despise not prophesyings, prove all things, 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 the warning, and it is the one people take badly. If the finishing is God's work, the one thing you can do is obstruct it. Quench is Paul's own word, four verses earlier, and it is what you do to a fire. You do not have to fight God to quench something; you only have to keep one part of the whole permanently off the table, and go on calling it the part that cannot be helped.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 56 is Counted Worthy (Acts 5:41).