Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 354 · December 20
That Ye May Prove
“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
"Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould." J. B. Phillips put the first half of this verse that way in his paraphrase of the letters, and it has outlived his translation because it names a pressure everybody has felt. Squeezing is passive. It happens while you are asleep.
Everyone stops there, though, and the sentence has a destination. Prove is the word it ends on, and it is a workshop term: to test something in order to find out what it is, the way you test a coin or a weld. Its relatives are all over the letters. One of them means approved, having been through the test. Another, with a negative on the front, is what the KJV renders reprobate, the piece that failed. What Paul asks for is a faculty of discrimination, and he says what it is for: that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. The renewed mind is a thing that can tell.
Hence the verse before, which puts a body on the altar and calls it your reasonable service, and the verse after, which tells you to think soberly about yourself. Nothing mystical is being described here. It is the difference between a person who has to ask somebody else whether a thing is right, and a person who can look at it and know. That capacity is grown, slowly, in an ordinary head, by a God who is doing the renewing while you are getting on with your week. You will notice it first as an opinion you did not used to be able to form, probably some while before you feel anything at all.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 354 is Worshippers the Father Seeks (John 4:23).