The Verse She Wants Read At The End

She wrote it down about two years ago and put it in the folder with the insurance and the will.

Not morbid. Practical. She has organized everything else in that house for forty years and she was not going to leave the one thing to a committee of her own children arguing in a corridor.

Hymns, two. No flowers, donations to the place that helped her sister. And the reading.

She chose Philippians one, verse six. She who began a good work in you will bring it to completion. She has loved that line since she was thirty.

Here is what she did not expect.

Ever since she wrote it down, she cannot stop testing it.

She catches herself in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday wondering whether it is still going to be true. Whether she is still the sort of woman that verse could be read over without anybody in the pews thinking, well, in the end, not quite.

She is seventy three. She is well. There is a great deal of life left and everybody says so.

And she has quietly turned the whole of it into a qualification. Every year from here is now a year in which she either holds up her end of that sentence or does not.

She has told nobody, and she would find it very hard to say out loud, because the whole thing sounds like vanity and it is not vanity at all. It is the opposite of vanity, which is why it is so heavy.

If you have started auditioning for your own funeral reading, come and sit by the fire. There is no warning here and nobody is assessing you.

Read the subject of that sentence

Let me put the verse you chose back in front of you, because you have been reading it as a description of yourself and it is not one.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Find the subject. He who began. He is the one who acts, in both halves of the sentence, and the person the work is happening in appears only as the location.

You are not the one being assessed in that verse. You are the site.

And notice the confidence Paul attaches to it. He does not say I hope. He says I am sure of this, and the certainty is entirely about somebody else's reliability, which is the only sort of certainty a person can actually rest on.

You are being brought to completion, and the completing was never yours to secure. Philippians 1:6 puts both verbs on God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of the inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, which means the verse you chose is a statement about His faithfulness and not a standard you have to meet by the time somebody reads it.

Nobody has to deserve the reading

Now let me say the second thing carefully, because a woman who has been quietly auditioning is not going to be talked out of it by cheerfulness.

You have imagined somebody in a pew thinking, well, in the end, not quite.

Notice who that person is. That is not God. God is not in that image at all. That is an audience, and an audience has been doing the assessing in your head for two years while the One the verse is actually about has been standing outside the picture entirely.

And here is what He says about the end.

Jude finishes his letter with: to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Able to keep. Able to present. Blameless is not something you arrive with. It is something you are presented as, and the presenting belongs to somebody else.

You are not going to be assessed at the end of this, and there is nobody in the room whose verdict counts against you. Jude 24 puts the presenting on God's side and the destination as joy rather than judgement, and it is His Spirit who is the seal on all of it, so the audience you have been rehearsing for does not exist.

And I am not going to tell you how the next twenty years will go. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody handing you a prediction about your own character is selling you something.

But there is no alarm here. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held this afternoon. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not faint or grow weary and His understanding is unsearchable, and it is His Spirit within you who keeps a person going long past the point where their own effort ran out.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you, and that is why you can put a verse in a folder and then stop thinking about it.