The Apostle in Labor

Galatians 4:19 and the desire underneath everything Paul ever wrote.

What did Paul actually want?

I don't mean what he taught or what he argued. I mean what he wanted from the people he wrote to, prayed over, and wept for.

It is a fair question to put to anyone who has ever held spiritual authority over you.

Most of us have learned, some of us painfully, that what a leader teaches and what a leader wants are not always the same thing.

Some wanted our attendance. Some wanted our agreement. Some wanted our compliance and called it discipleship.

So what did Paul want?

He tells us once, in a single sentence, in the middle of the angriest letter he ever wrote.

A sentence that sounds like a delivery room

Galatians is not a gentle letter.

Paul skips his usual thanksgiving. He says he is astonished at them (1:6). He calls them foolish and asks who has bewitched them (3:1). He worries out loud that his labor over them was wasted (4:11).

And then the argument breaks.

My little children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. (Galatians 4:19)

The theologian stops arguing and a mother starts groaning.

He could have reached for a general with his troops or a teacher with his students. He reached for a woman in labor.

Read the sentence slowly and notice the order.

"My children" comes first. The anguish comes second.

He names them as family before he names what is unfinished in them.

That order matters. Belonging is not the prize at the end of formation. It is the ground formation grows in.

Then comes the desire itself: until Christ is formed in you.

Not until you agree with me. Not until you behave. Not until the churches of Galatia are large and admired.

Until Christ takes shape in you.

That is what Paul wanted. Everything else he wrote serves that sentence.

Conformity is not formation

Here is the tension, and it is as old as the church.

The Galatians had believed. They had begun by the Spirit (3:3). They had known a joy Paul could still remember (4:15).

Then other teachers arrived with an addition. Faith in Jesus was a fine start, they said, but real membership in God's family required the marks of the law. Circumcision. The calendar. The right observances.

Look at how Paul describes their method. They court you, he says, but not for your good. They want to shut you out so that you will chase after them (4:17).

That is belonging used as leverage.

Hold the door closed until the person performs. Make them feel outside so they will work to get in.

It gets results. It always has. People will change almost anything about their outward lives to end the ache of exclusion.

But what it produces is conformity, and conformity is not formation.

Conformity works from the outside in. It changes what can be seen and counted.

Formation works from the inside out. It changes the one doing the seeing.

Paul even names what those teachers were after: something in the Galatians' flesh they could boast about (6:13). A mark. A number. Proof of their own success.

Paul wanted nothing he could count.

Howard Thurman tells a story in Jesus and the Disinherited that I cannot read this verse without remembering.

His grandmother, Nancy Ambrose, was born into slavery on a plantation near Madison, Florida. She could not read, so as a boy Howard read the Bible aloud to her.

She would not let him read from Paul's letters. Only the love chapter in 1 Corinthians, now and then.

Years later, home from college, he worked up the nerve to ask why.

She told him that the master's minister preached to the enslaved from Paul, and several times a year from the same text about slaves obeying their masters. She had promised God that if freedom ever came, she would never read that part of the Bible.

That was Paul's name signed to a project Paul would not have recognized. A demand for compliance, wearing an apostle's authority.

But she carried another sermon too.

There was an enslaved preacher who gathered the people in secret when he could. He ended every message the same way, looking at them and telling them they were not slaves. They were God's children.

Thurman remembered that when his grandmother reached that line, her back would straighten.

The second preacher was the one actually preaching Galatians.

"So you are no longer a slave, but a child" (4:7).

One voice used Paul to keep people in their place. The other gave them a truer name and trusted that name to do its work.

Paul was in labor for the second thing.

Again. Formed. Until.

Three words in this verse carry more than they seem to.

Again.

Paul had already labored for these people once, when they first believed. Now he is doing it a second time.

He does not write them off. He does not announce that their drifting proves their faith was never real. He goes back into labor.

If you have drifted back into performance, back into fear, back into trying to earn what was given, hear this in his voice.

You are not a closed case.

Someone who loves you is willing to begin again.

Formed.

The Greek verb is morphoō, and this is the only place the New Testament uses it. It means to take shape, the way a child takes shape in the womb.

The verb is passive. Christ is formed. You do not manufacture this.

But passive does not mean uninvolved. A mother does not knit her child together, and no one is more involved than she is. She makes room. She nourishes. She rearranges her whole life around what is growing.

That is our part.

Dallas Willard put it in a line worth memorizing: "Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning."

We do not earn the life of Christ in us. We consent to it, cooperate with it, and make room.

Notice too that the "you" is plural. Christ is formed in you all.

Formation is not a private project. It happens among a people, which is why an attack on the Galatians' belonging was an attack on their formation.

Until.

"Until" admits it has not happened yet. It also refuses to say it won't.

Nothing grows more slowly than a person, and Paul knew it. Elsewhere he says we are changed "from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Degrees. Not leaps.

Becoming is slow, and slow is not failing.

If you are tired of how long it is taking, you are in the company of an apostle who was tired too and kept laboring anyway.

The invitation

So here is what I want to ask you, and I ask it gently.

What have you been settling for?

Some of us settled for information. We know a great deal about Jesus and look very little like him.

Some of us settled for conformity. We learned the behaviors that kept us inside, and somewhere along the way mistook being acceptable for being changed.

And some of us were hurt by people who wanted something from us and used God's name to get it.

If that is your story, I am not asking you to pretend it didn't happen. I am asking you to consider that what was done to you was never what Paul was in labor for. It was never what Jesus wanted from you either.

What he wants is his own life taking shape in yours.

His patience where your hurry is. His freedom where your fear is. His way of seeing people slowly becoming the way you see them.

And this is for everyone. Paul says he toils to present everyone mature in Christ (Colossians 1:28–29). No one is outside the reach of that sentence.

You do not have to arrive before you belong. Paul said "my children" first.

You do not have to hurry. The word is "until."

And you do not have to do it alone. There is someone willing to labor for you, and someone you are being asked to labor for.

Begin there this week. Take one honest question into prayer:

Jesus, what are you forming in me right now, and where am I resisting the shape?

Then let one trusted person hear your answer.

Believe deeply. Become slowly. Belong fully.

Paul wanted nothing less for the Galatians.

I want nothing less for you.