Signs of Character

1 Chronicles 28:9 (NIV) ⁹“And you, my son Solomon, acknowledge the God of your father, and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever.

If you watch children play, you can see signs of character at a very early age. While my daughters were in their early formative years, that is, from one to four years, I would watch them solve problems. Unless the problem was entirely too difficult or the circumstance unsafe, I wouldn’t interfere. If the goal was important enough, they would find a way to achieve it. Often they gave up or turned to someone for help. Even asking for help is better than just giving up.

We enrolled them in gymnastics and they had a great coach. We watch as little girls strived to excel. They would try, fail, and try again to master a difficult task. The students either decided to pursue gymnastics with “wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind” or they lost interest and quit.

I have become a fan of our softball teams here at Minden Presbyterian. There is on those teams displayed that same “wholehearted devotion” to excellence that I witnessed in my daughters and from many other such persons. To try with all your might to do a thing is always inspiring.

David wants his son to become such a person. While we are not all meant to be athletes, we are each meant to follow God in Jesus Christ. To be a child of God is so easy – it requires only the surrender of our selves to God and the acceptance of the finished work of Christ on the cross, who died for our sins. We sing, “Jesus paid it all,” because he did. Yet to become a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ requires “wholehearted devotion and a willing mind.”

God wishes each of us to work as hard as we can, holding nothing back but giving ourselves to the utmost, and when we can do no more, that is the moment when the hand of divine providence is stretched out to us and takes over.

Don Orione (1872–1940)

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say: “Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)