Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
Have you ever noticed that your energy level changes depending on your excitement for what you're doing? When I was in college, I was leading a youth group with my wife, and she can attest to this that there were two versions of me as soon as night hit. There was college Chris, who got really sleepy at about 9:30 at night if he had a paper due the next morning that he really didn't want to work on. Then there was youth group Chris, and this Chris could stay up for six days straight with no sleep during camp, staying up doing late night worship and the bonfires and the dance parties, who could then wake up the next morning on six minutes of sleep and just crush it in competition games.
It seemed like my energy would never run out. Now what was the difference? It wasn't the amount of sleep I was getting or how much caffeine I could pump into my veins before my vision started to go fuzzy. The difference was how excited I was about the work that I was doing.
The Real Source of Energy
That's what we're going to read about today in our verse from Galatians chapter 6, verse 9. The apostle Paul writes this: So let's not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don't give up.
Think about that exhortation. Let's never grow tired of doing what is good. I don't know about you, but when I'm tired, it doesn't help when somebody just tells me to stop being tired. If I'm being honest, if you told me to just stop being tired, it would probably make me more tired, and I would just want to go crawl into a corner and wrap myself in a blanket until you left. That doesn't change how much energy we have.
Planting Seeds, Not Just Working
What I believe Paul is doing is he's not just encouraging us to not grow tired in the work, but he's actually giving us the reason to be excited for the work so that we won't be tired in doing good. He reminds us that every act of good is not a fruitless effort, but rather it's the planting of a seed.
When you do a good deed, when you say a kind word, when you serve somebody else, when you help someone in need, those are all planting seeds, and every good deed after that is just watering that seed until the time that God causes it to grow and to bear good fruit. As we do that, we're waiting to reap this harvest of blessings as we watch the world transform before our very eyes.
I don't know about you, but that sounds really exciting. When I get excited, I have more energy to do the work at hand. Don't look at God calling us to do good works for the sake of doing good works. He's calling us to do good works because it's bringing about an immense amount of good, and it is glorifying His name in every act. Let's get excited about the work at hand, and never grow tired in doing what is good.
