I Know What The Word Renewed Means

He taught it on a Wednesday and he taught it well.

Second Corinthians four, verse sixteen. Twenty minutes, and good ones: the outer man, the inner man, the present tense of the verb, the day by day, what Paul had already been through by the time he wrote it, why the sentence begins with therefore.

A woman came up afterwards and said it was the most helpful thing she had heard in a year. She meant it, and she was right, and the teaching was accurate.

And he drove home and sat in the car in the drive for eleven minutes before he could make himself go in, which is a thing he has been doing since about February.

That is the shape of it. He can hold the verse in his hands. He can tell you what anakainoo carries that the English does not. He can trace the renewal language back through the letter and forward into Ephesians and tell you exactly what Paul is and is not promising.

And he has felt nothing that he would call renewal in about seven months.

And being the man he is, he did not conclude that he is tired. He concluded something much worse and much more elegant. He concluded that the gap is the finding. That a man who teaches a promise accurately and does not experience it is demonstrating something about his own standing, or his own honesty, or the sincerity of the twenty minutes.

He has not told anybody. What he would have to say is: I taught that well and I do not have it. And he has heard that sentence used about other men, and he knows what a room does with it.

And that is you in your own car in your own drive, or you would not still be reading.

Read your own verse again, slower

You know the text. Let me put it down anyway, because I want to point at something inside it that a man in your position reads past every single time.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Though. Not and then. Not until.

Paul is not describing a sequence in which the wasting stops and the renewal begins. He is describing two things happening in the same man at the same time, and the though is doing the whole job: it exists precisely to hold a wasting and a renewing together in one sentence without either one canceling the other.

You are being renewed in the same body that is wasting, and Paul wrote the conjunction that holds them together. It is written that though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16). The Holy Spirit is doing the renewing in a man sitting in a car in his own drive for eleven minutes.

Now the passive, which you have taught and have not applied.

Is being renewed. Not renews himself. The subject of that verb is not the tired man. He is the one it is happening to, and he is not the agent, and nowhere in the sentence is he given a role in it.

You are not the one performing the renewal, so your exhaustion is not evidence that it stalled. It is written that our inner self is being renewed (2 Corinthians 4:16), in the passive, with the work assigned to Somebody else. The Holy Spirit does not require your felt participation to keep doing what the verb says He is doing.

And now the inference, which is the actual thing hurting you.

You reasoned that a gap between the promise and the experience is a finding about the man in the middle. But that is only true if the verse promised the experience, and read it again: it promises a renewal of the inner man, day by day, in a body that is going the other way. It does not promise that the man will feel it, and it does not offer the feeling as the confirmation. You have been holding yourself to a clause that Paul did not write.

You are not disqualified by a gap between a text and a Wednesday. It is written that we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us (2 Corinthians 4:7), four verses earlier, in the same argument, and the clay is not the failure in that image. It is the point of it. The Holy Spirit put a treasure in a tired man on purpose.

And let me say the plain thing, since precision is what you value. Seven months of that, with eleven minutes in a car before you can go into your own house, is worth saying out loud to your doctor and to one person who knows you. If it has gone further than tired, if there have been thoughts about not being here, tell somebody today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local line, and a human being with your name in their phone. That is not a concession about the verse. It is obedience to what your own body is reporting.