It Started as Joy and Somewhere It Turned Into Effort

Nobody can name the year.

That is what makes this one hard to catch. If you ask somebody in their late twenties when it stopped being joy and started being effort, they will look at the ceiling for a while and then say something vague about being busier now, and neither of you will be satisfied with that answer.

But they know it happened. They can remember the other thing. They can remember being seventeen and wanting to be at the building, and reading in the car because they did not want to stop, and the specific quality of a Tuesday when something had actually happened on the Sunday.

And they can describe this year accurately too. This year, the same activities, done well, on time, at cost, and the whole thing running on a completely different fuel, and the fuel is willpower, and willpower has a bottom to it and they are getting near.

Paul writes to a whole congregation in that condition and does not comfort them for a single verse. He asks them four questions in a row.

The first question is about how it started

Before he diagnoses anything, he makes them remember the beginning, and he makes them say it themselves.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? (Galatians 3:2, King James Version)

He is not asking them to reason about it. He is asking them to remember. There was a day. Something happened. And on that day, what were they doing?

They were listening. That is the answer and everybody in the room knows it. Nobody in Galatia received the Spirit by completing a program, because there had not been time and there had not been a program.

That question is worth answering honestly by anybody who is tired. Not: what should have happened. What actually happened, on the day it started, in the actual room, with the actual person you were.

You have received by hearing, and Scripture makes a point of asking which it was. Galatians 3:2 sets the two against each other and expects an obvious answer, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself, named in that verse as what was received, who is the subject of the whole question.

The second question names the swap

Then the sentence, and it is one of the few places in Scripture where the diagnosis is put entirely as a question.

Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3)

Having begun in the Spirit. He grants the beginning completely. There is no suggestion that the start was fake or shallow or emotional. It was real and it was the Spirit.

Are ye now made perfect by the flesh. The swap is not in the starting, it is in the continuing. Same people, same convictions, same building, and a different engine.

And notice that made perfect here means completed, brought to maturity. So this is not people abandoning anything. It is people trying to grow up in a faith by a means that had nothing to do with how they were born into it, which is a very sincere mistake made by very serious people.

You have not lost the beginning, and the beginning was real. Galatians 3:3 grants that they began in the Spirit without qualifying it, and it is that same Spirit, Philippians 1:6, by whom the one who began a good work is described as the one who performs it.

The third question is in the present tense

The fourth verse asks whether all the suffering was for nothing, and then verse 5 does something people skip.

He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? (Galatians 3:5)

Ministereth. Present tense. Ongoing. He is not asking about the past any more; he is asking about the supply that is happening now, this week, in that congregation.

And the answer is the same as it was for the beginning. The supply arrives the same way it always arrived, by hearing rather than by earning, and it has not changed its terms because a person has been at this eleven years.

That is the thing a tired person needs most and is least likely to believe. They usually think the beginning was free and the maintenance is billed. Verse 5 says the maintenance runs on exactly the same account.

You are supplied on the same terms today as on the first day. Galatians 3:5 puts the ministering of the Spirit in the present tense and asks the same question about it, and it is the Spirit being ministered, in that verse, who is the supply rather than the reward.

The instruction is one sentence and it is a repetition

Paul gives the corrective elsewhere in a single line, and the shape of it is worth memorizing.

As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him. (Colossians 2:6)

As ye have received, so walk. The manner of the receiving is the manner of the walking. Whatever a person did on the day it started is what they keep doing, for forty years, without upgrading the method.

Which is unglamorous and it is why almost nobody does it. Everybody wants the walking to be an advance on the receiving, something more adult, something with more effort in it, because effort feels like respect. And the instruction is that the way in is the way on.

I find that a rebuke and a relief in the same second, and I have needed it about once a year since I was twenty.

You are told to walk the same way you came in, and no upgrade was ever required. Colossians 2:6 says as ye have received, so walk ye in him, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:25, that a person is told to walk if they live in Him.

The picture He gives is a branch, not an engine

If the argument stays abstract it does not help, so here is the image Jesus uses for the same thing.

I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (John 15:5)

A branch does not produce fruit by effort. It produces fruit by connection, and the fruit is heavy and real and takes a whole season, and the branch does not strain once.

Without me ye can do nothing. That is a total statement and He says it to men who were about to do a great deal.

And notice that the alternative He names is not laziness. Nobody in John 15 is being warned against sloth. The warning is about doing the whole thing detached, which produces a large amount of activity and nothing that lasts, and it is possible to do that for years while everybody around you is grateful.

You are a branch and not an engine, and the fruit was never yours to manufacture. John 15:5 says without me ye can do nothing, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, that the fruit is named as His rather than as an achievement.