All night long I search for you; earnestly I seek for God. Isaiah 26:9 NLT
After nine years of floundering around in the
work world, I became serious about an education and serious about serving.
From first to eighth grade, I was serious about school and enjoyed learning. Then the teenage-don’t-care bug bit. Joining in the movements of the time, I found myself rebelling against society and education. Why did I need it? Jobs were plentiful.
After quitting my senior year and then returning six months later, I finally graduated a semester later than my peers and entered the workforce. The first few years went well, but then the economy turned sour, and so did my employment. After being laid off from the plant where I had worked since graduation, I found myself holding a string of unfulfilling jobs. Nine years after graduation, I finally succumbed to God’s earlier direction and went to college, but now as a married man with a small child. Doing so after graduation would have been easier, but I wasn’t serious at the time.
In the prophet Isaiah’s song of praise to the Lord, he expresses his sincere devotion to serving God. Though I doubt he actually stayed up all night every night seeking God, his word choice relates how much he needed God in his life.
Perhaps there was a time when Isaiah, too, wasn’t serious about serving God. After all, it took a hot experience to set him on fire for God (Isaiah 6). While God didn’t have to touch my lips with live coals to convince me I needed to get serious about serving him, he did use a series of disappointments to get me pointed in the right direction.
Through the payment Jesus made on Calvary’s cross, God demonstrated how serious he was about humanity’s salvation. He wasn’t under obligation to deliver us from our sins, but he didn’t want us to be a lost cause. Christ went all the way for us, and we should do no less for him.
Getting serious about serving God is a decision we can make through an act of our free will. God desires this decision and gives everyone the power to make it.
Decide today
to be serious about serving God.
Father, focus my heart, mind, and will on serving you to the best of my ability.
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