Finish the job

Finish it

And in this I give advice: It is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago; but now you also must complete the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have. – 2 Corinthians 8.10-11

It is a wonderful thing to plan on giving to meet someone's needs. It is easy to have our hearts stirred and think how nice it would be to give. It is good to be planning how we are going to do it and making preparations. But that is not enough - there must be a completion of the task.

The particular context here is for the folks at Corinth to carry through and give what they have promised to give. For a full year they had been planning on doing something. Now it was time to do it.

There is however a general principle here. In everything we do there needs to be a carrying through on what we start.

I think we need to ask ourselves if there are projects or tasks or anything else that we have been talking about and planning on doing for a long time but have never quite got around to it.

There is a song we used to sing with our kids that I haven’t thought about in years. I can’t even remember all of it, but part of it put this concept pretty simple – ‘When you have a job to do, stick with it until it's through. Finish the job, finish the job. get it done.’

Are there areas where we need to heed that charge?