Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 349 · December 15
The Spirit Is Willing
“Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
This line has spent centuries being used as a cover note. Somebody has already decided how the evening is going to go, and the sentence arrives in advance to explain it, and the objection to that is fair enough: a verse that accounts for the failure before it happens will get used to license it. We have used it that way, more than once and not in ignorance, and the tell is that we reach for it beforehand and never afterwards.
Weigh who says it, and to whom. It is not the failing party's excuse for himself. Jesus says it, in the middle of the night, about three men who could not stay awake for the single hour he asked them for, on the worst night of his life, having just told them my soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. He goes away and prays the same prayer three times, and each time he comes back they are asleep. Luke, writing the same scene, records the reason nobody would have thought to invent: he found them sleeping for sorrow. Grief had put them under. And out of the middle of his own agony he supplies the mitigation on their behalf. The spirit indeed is willing.
Which is the difficulty and not the comfort. He is the one who gets to say it. We have been saying it for him, about ourselves, in advance, over evenings that had no sorrow in them.
Lord, you told them to watch and pray before you excused them for failing to, and both halves of that were mercy. We have taken the second and left the first. Say the true thing about us tonight, whichever of the two it is, and let it be you who says it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 349 is Rock, Salvation, Defense (Psalm 62:2).