Create Is a Word for Making Something Out of Nothing

My father had a phrase for what he was doing when he confessed something, and I did not notice how much theology was in it until I was about forty.

He would say he was going to go and get himself straightened out.

I loved him and he was a serious man and he meant every word of it. But listen to who is doing the work in that sentence. He is going to go. He is going to straighten. The heart in question is his, and the repair is his, and God is somewhere in the arrangement as the one who approves the result.

He carried that for his whole life. He was not lazy about his own faults, and I would say he was harder on himself than anybody else ever was, and he never once got himself straightened out to his own satisfaction.

And there is a psalm where a man in far worse trouble than my father was ever in asks for something completely different, and the verb he uses is one that almost nobody notices.

The verb he chooses

The fifty-first psalm is the one everybody knows the situation of, and the request in the middle of it is worth reading as a request rather than as a lyric.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. (Psalm 51:10, King James Version)

Create. That is not a repair word. In Hebrew it is the verb from the first sentence of the Bible.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)

The same word. And in Scripture that verb has only one subject. It is never used of a person. Nobody in the Bible creates anything, in that specific sense, except God.

So David, who has done something very serious and knows exactly what he has done, does not ask to be helped, or assisted, or cleaned up, or supported in getting himself straightened out.

He asks for a making. He is asking for something to exist that does not currently exist, by the same verb that made the heavens, and he is asking it about his own interior.

And he asks it in the middle of the worst week of his life, which is worth noticing. He is not asking from a position of recovery. He is asking from the floor.

You are able to ask for this from exactly where you are, and David asked it before anything in his situation had improved at all (Genesis 1:1), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who takes a request made from the floor as seriously as one made from anywhere else.

You have a request available that is not repair, and the verb in that psalm is the one from the first line of Genesis (Psalm 51:10). That work is the Spirit's, and He does the making rather than a person assisting with it.

Why repair was not on the table

I want to be fair to my father and to everybody like him, because the instinct behind the scrubbing is a good instinct.

It is the instinct that says a person should take responsibility for themselves. That is not a bad thing to believe. In almost every area of life it is exactly right, and a man who does not believe it is a man nobody wants to work with.

The trouble is that it is the wrong tool for this one job. A person can change their behavior, and that is real and it matters, and nothing here is against effort. What a person cannot do is make themselves want differently at the root, and everybody who has tried knows the exact place where the effort stops working.

God says as much through Ezekiel, and He puts it in the first person.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

Four verbs, all of them His. Give, put, take away, give.

You are not being asked to do a job that was never assigned to you, and every verb in that promise belongs to Him (Ezekiel 36:26), and the Holy Spirit is the one who is the one described elsewhere as the giver of that new life.

What changes when the request changes

Here is the practical difference, and it shows up in what a person does the day after.

If a person is asking for help with a repair, then the day after is theirs. They have been assisted and now they must perform, and the performing is measured, and when it fails they are back where they started with an additional failure on the account.

If a person has asked for a making, the day after belongs to the one who was asked. There is still obedience and there is still effort and neither of those disappears. But the root of the thing is not on their shoulders, and a bad Tuesday is not evidence that the request was refused.

You are not the guarantor of your own change, and that was never a demotion, it is the only arrangement that has ever worked (2 Corinthians 5:17). The same Spirit is the one who makes a person new rather than a person renewing themselves with His approval.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

New creature. The same family of words again, and again it is done to somebody rather than by them.

And I will say the thing that has to be said in this category. If what you carry has taken you past effort and past shame into somewhere darker, where being here at all has come into question, that is not for an article to hold. Tell somebody tonight: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.