Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 280 · October 7
Finish My Course
“But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God.”
We have all wanted a sentence like this one to get us through a hard week. Where it was first said is worth knowing.
He is on a beach at Miletus. Paul will not go into Ephesus, so he sends up the coast and the elders come down to him, and this is a farewell with a boat waiting. He has already told them what is ahead: bonds and afflictions abide me, reported by the Holy Ghost in every city he passes through. He tells them they will see his face no more. Days later a prophet takes Paul's belt, ties his own hands and feet with it, and says the man who owns this will be bound in Jerusalem, and the whole company, Luke included, begs him not to go.
That is the room in which he says neither count I my life dear unto myself. He has just been told what it will cost.
What he wants is worded as a job with a length. That I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus. Course is a track word, a measured distance with somebody else's markers on it, and the ministry is described as received, handed over. Years later, in the last letter anybody has from him, he writes it in the past tense: I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.
A course has a length, an owner and an end, and none of the three is set by the person running it. That is the honest shape of a Christian life. Joy in Paul's sentence waits at the far end of the distance.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 280 is Abiding in the Vine (John 15:5).