“He will ignite the Kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He’s going to clean house – make a clean sweep of your lives. He’ll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he’ll put out with the trash to be burned.” -Luke 3:16-17 (msg)

In the end or perhaps better put, when we move past the title page and into our Real story, everything that is not True and Good will be burned up. All of our striving for self, everything we did for our own glory will disappear, will vanish as if it never was. Boy does this cause me to pause… and it rhymes. What are we doing? All of our toiling for nothing. The perfect Gift offered us, but we refuse to receive it. Life, Freedom, Goodness, Truth, Grace, Peace – all that is Lovely and Beautiful and True is ours for the taking. Will we receive it?

“But tell me, gentlemen, ye who understand sacred things,” he resumed, “can a man be far out of the way so long as, with full heart and no withholding, he saith, Thy will be done – and that after no private interpretation, but Father in heaven.”

“That, my lord, I also strive to say with all my heart,” said Dr. Bayly.

“Mayhap, doctor,” returned the marquis, “when thou art as old as I, and has learned to see how good it is, how all-good, thou wilt be able to say it without any striving. There was a time in my life when I too had to strive, for the thought that he was a hard master would come, and come again. But now that I have learned a little more of what he meaneth with me, what he would have of me and do for me, how he would make me pure of sin, clean from the very bottom of my heart to the crest of my soul, from spur to plume a stainless knight, verily I am no more content to submit to his will: I cry in the night time, ‘Thy will be done: Lord, let it be done, I entreat thee:’ and in the daytime I cry, ‘Thy kingdom come: Lord, let it come, I pray thee.’” -George MacDonald

Lord, through the power of Your Spirit, let us not strive, but receive so that our lives, here and now, are built on the eternal – on Who is Good. You mean us no harm, instead to free us. Thy will be done, Father in Heaven!