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 cared less about something just because they were told to care less about it.
We have all tried anyway. We read, "Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth," and we hear a command to let go, so we try it for two weeks. What we produce is a guilty kind of distraction: we pray about the mortgage while thinking about the mortgage, and then a second failure piles on top of the first. If we are honest, something else was underneath it all. We wanted to look like people who wanted the house less. After a while we quietly file the verse under things other Christians manage, which protects our reputation and drops the verse.
The Greek word behind "set your affection" describes the whole direction of a person's mind: what we think about and what we want. The King James says "affection" here, where most modern Bibles say "mind," and both point to the way a person leans. The letter also has a fake version of this in view. Paul was writing against people who offered a higher kind of spirituality made of visions, angel worship, food rules and special days, summed up in the slogan "Touch not; taste not; handle not." He says such rules have "a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body." ("Shew" is the old spelling of show, and "will worship" means a religion people make up for themselves.) Yet those rules have no real power over the desires they were aimed at. Our two weeks of trying belong in that paragraph, because they were the same harsh self-denial on a smaller budget.
Under the command is a promise, and we usually read straight past it. The verse before says, "seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God." Notice the word "sitteth." The place we are told to lean toward is not empty, and it is not a mood. Someone is sitting there: a man who shares our human nature, seated the way someone sits when His work is finished.
He was already seated there while we were failing at letting go, and our letting go was never what put Him there. That is the good news underneath the command. Setting your mind on things above means turning toward a Person who is already there for you, and Paul says that "your life is hid with Christ in God."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 7 is The Measure (John 3:16).