By Scott Hilgendorff / Cowboys of the Cross
Not everything we do here leads to a winning moment or a paycheck but we’re still supposed to put our heart into everything and do the best that we can do.
At a rodeo recently, I watched a bull rider give everything he had, not just to get bucked off but to be spun into a cartwheel in the air before a hard landing. Thankfully, he was unhurt beyond the normal aches, pains and sprains a dismount like that will cause.
Many people make a career in rodeo and when you compete at that level, you have absolutely no choice but to put your best effort in. If you don’t and you compete on the rough stock side of the industry, you’re guaranteed to buck off, put yourself and others in harms way and waste your entry fees. On the timed event side, you’ve invested time and money in training and working a horse to compete alongside you and you aren’t going to shortchange yourself by putting a half-hearted barrel run together or an aimless toss of your rope. You’re going to push for the fastest time you and your horse and can achieve.
Colossians 3:23-24 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
From a Christian perspective, when we focus on just the rodeo example, we are competing for more than a paycheck. Yes we have to work hard to win, but our motivation should be to do our best because it is Him that we are representing. Paul is telling us that God wants us to work with best effort because we serve Him with an awareness that He has given us a perfect eternity in Heaven through our saving faith in Jesus.
When people know we take the Bible seriously and we don’t live our lives just for our own success, we can glorify God through doing our best. When they see and understand that it is our faith that motivates us, the attention is put on God and not our success or even our failures.
Parents will tell us it’s okay when we failed at something because we tried our best. God is glorified even if we fail when He knows we put our all into it and set that example for others.
How well we handle a win or loss can really show others how Jesus is at work transforming us.
Rodeo is just one example though. This applied to how we work any job we have even if we have the worst boss imaginable. God still expects us to put our best effort forward in every situation that involves work, from traditional employment to hobbies to helping a neighbor cut up a fallen tree.
No matter how much success we have from our efforts, when our hope is in Jesus, our real reward is a perfect eternity in Heaven.
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