Diligent About the Things of God

For many years our teacher, Mrs. Evans, would give short sermons during each Sunday service. One sermon she gave was on the importance of diligence. She described diligence as doing your very best every day. I remember this sermon so well because when she first started speaking, I thought, “I don’t need to pay attention to this sermon; I am about the most diligent person I know. I am always on time and finish things on time. I don’t need to listen to this.” Right after I thought that, I felt a mental club hit me over the head and tell me to listen, because this sermon was for me.

After the sermon, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I prayed, “God, what do you want me to get from this?” I started thinking again about how humanly diligent I was, and then it struck me that there were some things that were not quite right in my life. There were some instructions from this sermon for me. Then I realized I was not diligent at all about the things of God, and I needed to be. I needed to put everything in my life in God’s hands, to stop being so human about them and let God govern them.

So I began to put everything in my life in God’s hands, one at a time. As I began to be more diligent about the things of God, to put God in control of everything in my life, I found my life becoming more ordered. I found the important things getting done, and I did not have to push to be diligent about it because God was taking care of them. This was a big change for me and something I am extremely grateful for. I was headed down a road of human achievement that I know now was destined to be a train wreck. Instead, I have found myself growing in grace and I am very grateful as I see God more and more in control of every detail of my life.