Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Carry It on to Completion
Carry It on to Completion
Apr 4, 2025 12:05 PM

  Carry It on to Completion

  By Michelle Lazurek

  “…being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” – Philippians 1:6

  As an author of fourteen years, I'm no stranger to editors who make suggestions or changes to my manuscript. As this was my 14th book, I saw the second round of edits enter my inbox. But I didn't know what would await me when I opened that manuscript—many words in red dotted almost every paragraph. Suggestions for changes lined each page’s column. There was hardly a line or paragraph that did not contain some form of correction. Although I've learned to take criticism throughout my years as an author and know that editors have my best interest in mind, I’ll admit it still stung when I saw all the red marks and corrections. I must admit that not only was my ego a little bit bruised, but I also thought about throwing in the towel when it came to my writing profession.

  But as I thought about God's calling on my life to become a writer, I realized it was a much bigger purpose than this. Writing wasn't about me; it was about proclaiming the gospel. Therefore, I can always make changes and improvements as a writer. I had to stop thinking about it as something to take personally but rather something that would make me better as a writer and a person. As someone who strives for excellence in her career, an editor does what she can to ensure my writing is as excellent as possible. When she made suggestions, it was not a personal sleight to my writing ability, but she asked for revisions for clarity so that every reader could grasp the paragraph’s point.

  In the moments when I first saw that marked-up manuscript, it was easy for me to want to quit and do something else. I believed the lie that life should be easy, and when that second round of edits came, and it wasn't as easy as I thought, I was tempted to quit altogether. The above verse reminds us that if God is in it, he’ll be faithful in helping us accomplish it. This verse rang true in the weeks following the subsequent rounds of the edits to the manuscript. The first round of edits took a week to complete. The second round of edits took three days to complete. The third and fourth edits took about a day, and the fifth round took only a few hours. Whenever I attempted to address the questions and concerns raised throughout the manuscript, I repeated to myself that this would improve me as a writer. Putting it in that perspective helped me realize that this project was not about making it easy for me, but it was there to help others take a step in their spiritual growth. When I flipped my perspective, it made tackling every edited paragraph more bearable.

  Is there an area in life with which you feel tempted to quit? Paul wrote this letter to the Philippian church after having gone through his own share of trials. Paul could attest that the Christian life was far from easy. He’d been jailed, persecuted, and beaten all because God had called him to proclaim the gospel message. Paul took on that challenge, knowing that it would not be easy, but he knew that in the end, it would all be worth it.

  Just as I needed to flip my perspective from making my job as easy as possible to one that would make me better not only as a person but also as a writer, it is the same with us. Being a Christian is far from easy. Proclaiming the message God wants us to proclaim is not about being easy; it is about the ultimate result—bringing people closer to himself.

  Father, bring whatever calling you have on our lives to completion. Life is not easy. We must yield our lives to God to proclaim the gospel to as many people as possible. Help us keep the proper perspective on life so we can complete your calling. Amen.

  Intersecting Faith Life:

  What does God want to carry onto completion in your life? What is your perspective on this area of your life?

  Further Reading:

  Romans 8:28

  Photo Credit: Unsplash/Green Chameleon

  Michelle S. Lazurekis a multi-genre award-winning author, speaker, pastor's wife, and mother. She is a literary agent for Wordwise Media Services and a certified writing coach. Her new children’s book Who God Wants Me to Be encourages girls to discover God’s plan for their careers. When not working, she enjoys sipping a Starbucks latte, collecting 80s memorabilia, and spending time with her family and her crazy dog. For more info, please visit her website www.michellelazurek.com.

  Check out fantastic resources on Faith, Family, and Fun at Crosswalk.com!

  Related Resource: Bold Prayers: Asking God to Reveal the Roots of Our AnxietySometimes, anxiety can hit without any recognizable provocation, or our anxiety can feel more intense than the situation warrants. When we find ourselves in that place, we can pray the prayer ancient Israel's second king, David, prayed at the end of Psalm 139, trusting that our God will and is leading us to increased freedom. Listen in to this episode of Faith Over Fear and have your mind and heart fixed on the truth you need for your day! If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe onApple orSpotify so you never miss an episode!

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Profit and Responsibility
The standard critique of woke capitalism is that woke ideas are ruining business. Instead of engaging in political panies should focus on turning a profit by creating superior goods and services. In his book, Woke Inc., Vivek Ramaswamy takes a different approach to the argument. He argues that “woke capitalism” isn’t wrong because it’s ruining business, but because woke business is ruining the foundations of our democracy. When businesses engage in political and social activism, they undermine the way...
Opening the Mind
It is rare to find in a single work a carefully documented intellectual history of Islam as well as a cri de coeur for contemporary reforms—or at least it is rare to find both tasks done well. Mustafa Akyol’s Reopening Muslim Minds, however, impressively achieves both feats with substance and elegance in a work that deserves to be acclaimed and widely read. Akyol, a Turkish journalist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has devoted his career to this...
Playing to Angels
The Honorable Henry Hyde, in a speech to the National Right to Life Committee, reminded the Committee of something I hope you will never forget. He said that we are not “playing to the gallery, but to the angels, and to Him who made the angels.” Ponder that for a moment. If there is one insidious idea that we have worked to inoculate you against during your time with us, it is this tendency, all too prevalent, to play...
The Church’s Overdue Reconciliation with Liberalism
In his social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), Leo XIII condemned socialism for rejecting private property and instigating class warfare. But the historical evolution of the concept made it necessary to nuance this view. Already by 1931, Pius XI distinguished between revolutionary socialism, which he continued to condemn outright, and reformist socialism that accepted participation in democratic life—though even the latter remained, in his judgment, patible with the Christian faith. A new distinction was introduced by John XXIII and John...
In the Liberal Tradition: Steven Horwitz
The classical liberal movement lost one of its strongest voices when economist Steven Horwitz passed away after a long fight with cancer on June 27, 2021. “I still believe the world is getting better and better and more awesome. I’m just not going to see as much of it as I thought I would.” When Horwitz spoke those words on the Free Thoughts podcast in 2019, he was about two years into his battle with multiple myeloma—a disease that...
An Awkward Alliance: Neo-Integralism and National Conservatism
Conservative Christian Americans currently face a challenge from an insurgent group of scholars and activists calling themselves “post-liberals” or “neo-integralists.” They are largely scholars. Some are theologians, like Chad Pecknold (Catholic University of America) and Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O. Cist. (Stift Heiligenkreuz, a Cistercian abbey in Austria). Others are political scientists, such as Gladden Pappin (University of Dallas) and Patrick Deneen (University of Notre Dame), or law professors like Adrian Vermeule (Harvard Law School). Others are popular authors like...
The Tower of Babel: The Problem of Devarim Achadim
In the 16th century, Belgian artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted one of the most famous renderings of the Bible’s Tower of Babel. He portrayed the tower as a gargantuan edifice of bricks and mortar, under construction, with its top above the clouds, reaching toward the heavens. The project’s royal leader is in the foreground with workmen at his feet feigning subservience. Within the painting itself, construction seems to be proceeding methodically, but pletion is noticeably in doubt—perhaps reflecting...
Thinking in an Age of Ideology
We live in an age of ideology. The world plex and hard to understand, so we look for a theory that can help make sense of things. This is understandable. Throughout history, people made sense of the world through cultural and religious traditions. But as the world has e simultaneously more connected and more secular, as our awareness plexity has increased while religious and cultural traditions have weakened, people now exist with a heightened sense of uncertainty. Many of...
On the Resilience of Ideology
Those of us who have a reached a certain age remember the time when a popular cliché declared the “end of ideology.” The idea was first formulated in 1960 in a book of the same title by Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell.1 For the next few decades, the idea that ideologies were a phenomenon of the past, and that they were fading away, remained popular among intellectuals. It seemed to find its final confirmation in the collapse of the Soviet...
What I Saw at the National Conservatism Conference
“So are you with that conference upstairs? Is it political? We’re both kind of into politics.” I had finally made my escape after my first full, long day at the National Conservatism Conference and was sitting just outside the Orlando Hilton beside an open fire pit with a drink, trying to wrap my mind around just what “National Conservatism” meant. In November of 2021, scores of speakers, activists, politicians, and just plain fans descended on the Orlando Hilton to...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved