Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 7 · January 7
Things Above
“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”
Nobody has ever managed to care less about something by being instructed to care less about it.
We have all had a run at it anyway. We read set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth, hear a demand to detach, and try it for a fortnight. What we produce is a guilty sort of distraction: praying about the mortgage while thinking about the mortgage, and a second failure stacked on the first. And the honest thing underneath is not that we wanted the house too much. It is that we wanted the look of a person who wanted it less. After a while we file the verse under things other Christians manage, which keeps the reputation and drops the verse.
The word underneath is not asking us to feel less. It names the whole set of a person's mind, what we think about and what we want; the King James prints affection here where most modern Bibles print mind, and both are after the direction a person leans. The letter has a counterfeit in its sights, written against people selling a higher spirituality: visions, angel worship, a diet, a calendar, touch not; taste not; handle not. Paul calls that will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body, and denies it any power over the appetite it was aimed at. Our fortnight belongs in that paragraph. It was austerity on a smaller budget.
Underneath the instruction is a promise, and we read straight past it. Seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Sitteth. The place we are told to lean toward is not empty and is not a mood; it is occupied, by a man with our own nature on him, in the posture of somebody whose work is finished.
Where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God: he was seated already while we were failing at the detaching, and our detaching was never what put him there.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 7 is The Measure (John 3:16).