Diligence

"Do you see a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before unknown men."  
                            - Proverbs 22:29

In my own human nature I am not a diligent person, but God sure is.  My wife can testify to the fact that when she first met me I was one of the most undisciplined people around.  I still loved Jesus, I was still a good missionary, but I was lacking so much in the area of diligence that I am ashamed to even talk about it now.  I am going to though!

There are two things God spoke to me about for years, and although they are relatively simple they took me an embarrassingly long time to do.  Sadly I feel like I was like the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years.  The Promised Land was so close, but because of disobedience they spent a generation wandering aimlessly.  Praise be to our wonderful Lord He didn't let me do that!

These two things were constantly on my heart and mind:

1.  To wake up before dawn consistently to pray.
2.  To do a forty day fast.

During our first years of being married my wife must have heard me declare I was going to do that forty day fast, and then decide not to after a few days a thousand times.  You wouldn't believe how often I did that.  The best I did was I believe in 2009 when I did a twenty one day fast.  I was going so well, and then for some reason I can't even remember at 21 days I decided I was done.  It is just so embarrassing.

The reason for waking up before dawn is because you can see consistently through Scripture that the people of God, including Jesus had that as a regular practice.  Read through the book of Jeremiah and try counting how many times God says something similar to: "I have spoken to you, rising early and speaking. But you have not listened,"  Jeremiah 25:3.

For some reason God likes it when people wake up early.  I don't know why, but that doesn't really matter.  When I was taking a biology class several years ago, my teacher (who was also my youth pastor) used to say, "If you want good grades, find out what your teacher likes and give it to him."  We need to approach God that way.  You may never know why your teachers likes things a certain way, but you do it anyway if you want and A!

You can decide to follow God in your own way and you might get by, but I want good grades with Him, so I want to do things His way.

It took me a long to start doing that though.  I knew it was right, I knew it was a good thing to do, but for the life of me I couldn't get my body to obey me!

Spiritual me against my hairier physical me.

I wanted to be like Jesus, I wanted so badly to be able to do those things, but it took a long, slow journey for me to get there.  It sounds ironic but you have to sow diligence in order to receive diligence.  You may be as undisciplined or worse than I was, but we all have a certain amount of diligence God has given us, and we need to exercise what we have in order to grow.

Nobody starts out disciplined, and nobody starts out as a might man or woman of God, we all go through the fiery baptism of the Holy Spirit to get there.  Some of us walk through that fire with total abandon and it seems like immediately after their salvation they are the Elijah of their community.  Others, like myself, end up making the same mistake over and over again until we finally start to get a hang of it and learn from our mistakes.

The important thing is that we are making some kind of progress, and when we do conquer one of the mountains in our lives, God will always point out some new, bigger mountain to overcome on the other side.

Wahaha!  Finally!  I made it!  IN YOUR FA--Oh...

The benefits to diligence are incredible though, and I can testify to that in my own life.  My wife now can't even understand how I can be as diligent as I am.  I usually go to bed after her, and I am awake way before she or anyone else in my family is.  I have gone from being what I would call a borderline sluggard to analyzing and hammering out the tiniest details on everything I do.  Quality in every moment of life is my goal now, rather than just getting through it.

Take the new intro video I have created for this blog.  Back in the day I wouldn't have even bothered making one, and if I did I would have just chunked something together and uploaded whatever came out.  But I filmed just the light turning on over a dozen times.  I changed all the colors to make them richer, and even added the sound effects, which is a tedious job to be frank.  I am impressed with people who make two or three hour movies, it is a long process to put something decent out there.

Proverbs 22 tells us that the diligent will stand before kings, they will be blessed.  They aren't blessed because diligence makes you holy or special, but because diligent people don't create sloppy work.  They are dependable, they are trustworthy, they are faithful, all godly qualities every Christian should have.