It is God who is at work in you, causing you to want to do his will and enabling you to do his will* (paraphrase)
Young Benjamin Solomon Carson heard his mother’s admonitions often. Choosing to heed her counsel, Ben took up the practice of reading, of intentional study. He figured out that most anyone could do at least this much. He chose to apply himself. His mother, Sonya Carson – a praying woman, a single mom – anchored her life and security in God. She invoked his blessing over her two young sons as she labored at multiple jobs through their growing-up years.
“She never made excuses”, retired Neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson recalls, “and she never accepted an excuse from us.
“If we ever came up with an excuse, she always said, ‘Do you have a brain?’ And if the answer was yes, then she said, “Then you could have thought your way out of it.”
The pathway to flourishing in Christ is not a venture in teeth-gritting self-help. Yet, each of Jesus’ disciples does invest his or her own measure of effort into the enterprise. They have skin in the game as did Sonya Carson in the raising of her children.
Jesus did not stir passion among his audiences by churning out motivational slogans. What did he offer that sparked in his followers the passion and the resolve for living well?
By his own purposeful, routine actions he supplied them with a pattern. Today, as then, Jesus’ own day-by-day personal practices serve as a kind of template for entering into and living from “the good life”.
In his humble reliance upon God the Father, Christ modeled for his followers the best kind of living available to humans everywhere. Such living comes through embracing and routinely nurturing common habits that were practiced by Jesus. So that we his disciples may enter the un-anxious rhythms of our Lord’s own whole and beautiful life.
“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure”*
©2023 Jerry Lout * Philippians 2:13