Finish your outdoor work and get your fields ready; after that, build your house.
Outdoor work---that labor one performs outside his home. Or, better yet, that labor one performs outside the COMFORT of his home. The first sentence above is from the book of Proverbs. The next two "I" made up. But I did so in order to discuss a related topic to The Fayetteville Church’s devotional for today, "Finish Just Like You Started".
The author of that document didn’t mean, for example, if you started out with a New Year’s Resolution to lose 20 pounds, that you should finish your resolution by gaining back that 20 to return to your original weight. No, it means to stay focused the same throughout your endeavor as you were when you first made your vow. The writer of that particular proverb (24:27) had a similar moral in mind. Put every effort you had when you started your work, focusing on the more important things, throughout the task, then when you have completed all you planned/promised to do, move onto the lesser important ones.
It is the same as putting God first, your family and others next, then worrying about yourself. Probably a lot of you made some awesome vows (to God) at the beginning of the year. You may have promised to read the entire Bible this year. You may have vowed to reach out to the poor with a lot of your riches. You may have decided to finally give up that one or two ‘pet sin’ you have hanging around your house. Whatever you declared on the 1st of January, God would want you to maintain the same fervor and excitement all the way through to completion as you had on that warm day a week ago. That’s correct! Today is the seventh day of your undertaking, and if you had heeded my advice the other day, you are at least one seventh of the way to making your resolution a habit for the rest of your life.
One of my resolutions, which I started at Thanksgiving, was to use this coming year to become more physically fit. I weighed in at 205 pounds seven weeks ago, this morning I was at 186.2….1.2 pounds short of my goal. I have made it a habit to eat better (and less) and to exercise a whole lot more than I had in the past five or so years. Even though I am close to my (first) goal, I have extended it to a new one for the next seven weeks to get to 180 pounds, lose another two inches off my waist, and build up some leg and arm muscle. All of this takes a certain amount of dedication (and a WHOLE LOT of will power), and it requires me to work at it with the same fervor every day. I want to finish this resolution before I concentrate on my next one, and that is to do more for God’s Kingdom here in North Carolina than I did in 2011. We will have been here one year when I finish the next seven weeks of dieting and exercise, so I chose that time frame to try to tackle another ‘outdoor’ job.
How are you doing after your first week of working on some sort of improvement in your life? Do you still have the same passion and eagerness as you did when you made your promise a few days ago? Unless we think about our vow daily, get some help from God by praying regularly, we might tend to lose our strength as the days wane by. My favorite Biblical author, Paul, wrote (and you all know this), "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." He didn’t taper off, even though beaten, flogged, stoned and imprisoned…he kept focus on his outdoor work before even considering improving his own home life. I hope each of you are doing well on your New Year’s resolution. I hope your passion for getting it done is as good as it was when you started. If not, reach out to others for some strength to get going again. Finish this work, get ready for the next, and please, stay away from them doughnuts!