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How to Work Better — Part 7 of 9: First Plan the Work, Then WORK the Plan (Day 5)

finish your plansMany people in the Western world have financial problems because of bad work habits. They are struggling with basic skills. It’s time we all went back and learned from our Creator. This is our seventh lesson on improving our personal productivity based on the Bible. In Genesis chapter one, God gave us a day by day account of how He made everything. Do you remember what God did on day two of seven? He made two large “arenas.” At the end of Day Two, unlike the ending of all the other days, there was nothing “good” to see. There were just two large empty spaces: The sky above and the waters below. God prepared the spaces on Day Two, and then on Day Five, God filled them with living creatures.

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Rome was not built in a day and neither was the earth! On Day Five, God finished a task he started on Day Two. From our human perspective, it was a busy day. Almighty God spoke things into existence, but when we make things, we must add perspiration to our inspiration. The great inventor Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Like our Creator we should finish what we start. It feels good to finish. “Desire realized is sweet to the soul,” Proverbs 13:19.

This truth is reinforced often in the Bible. “The end of a matter is better than the beginning of a matter,” Eccl. 7:8a. I could not find out who first said it, but it is universally recognized as true that: “A job well begun is a job half done.” This pithy maxim assumes the “job” is defined before the physical work starts. In the creation process, the scope of God's work was probably delineated as the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Remember the Spirit of God is “the spirit of wisdom and understanding; the spirit of counsel and strength; the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD,” Isaiah 11:2. When God does things, He uses his incredible (infinite) intelligence. God doesn’t make junk. He doesn’t use the trial and error method. He alone gets it right the first time. That’s what David described in Psalm 104:24, “O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all.” To suggest that God used an evolutionary process is to insult God’s intelligence.

Rather than believing in theistic evolution (which in my mind is an oxymoron), we need to copy the work style of the Creator. He likes to see all things done in a proper and orderly manner (1 Cor. 14:40). Orderly work is not easy. Distractions abound. Weariness sets in, especially in the middle of the race. But as in a race, the greatest prize comes at the end. So keep going. Plan the work and work the plan. Remember Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. We need to identify the jobs we have and then FINISH them. The apostle Paul finished the race. Jesus said at the end of his life “It is finished.” As I recall, my dad’s last word on his deathbed was “fertig,” which is German for “finished.” For more guidance, check out the character Steady Eddy.

Tom Lipp

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