Ecclesiastes 9:10
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
God calls us to let Him enable us and help us to be our best. Whatever we do in life, God wants us to do our best. We may not be the best, but we can all do our best and we should do our best in all the things we do. Children should do their best in family life, school work, sports teams, and whatever they do. Adults need to do their best in their work, paying bills, taking care of responsibilities and relationships, which includes their family. Pastors and church families need to be part of their church family at their best. Citizens in each community need to be their best at helping their community be its best. I am not speaking of being tense and judgmental of performance trying to please and impress each other. I am actually speaking of quality. In sports, I had some coaches who would stress our quality of play more than performance at play. He would critique the quality of execution of the fundamentals. He would say that if you focus on how well we do something the performance of it would improve by itself, which would result in success. This is true not only in sports, but in every facet of life itself. The great professional football coach of the Green Bay Packers would start off every training camp with the same phrase stressing the fundamentals of the game of football. He would say, “Men, this is a football,” and then he would go on explaining the fundamentals of the game of football. The verse above in the Old Testament speaks to the same matter. Everything that we do should be done with the best quality we are able to do it. Be our best -quality, and we will do our best- result. There are many other Scriptures that speak to this same dynamic in our lives. One is found in the New Testament and it is a Scripture that the Lord challenged me with in High School when I started getting serious about my personal walk with the Lord. Colossians 3:23 says, “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord, and not unto men;” which is the same sentiment as Ecclesiastes 9:10. Another Scripture that needs to be considered in this thought is I Corinthians 10:31 that we sing in our worship services. The phrase in that verse that speaks to this matter specifically is “whatsoever ye do, do it all to the glory of God.” Doing what we do to the glory of God speaks to the quality of our doing, not the performance of what we are doing. If we seek to bring glory to God in who we are before God, then we will do our best in the things we do. If we focus on the quality of bringing glory to God, we will be our best with His help. We stress too much over performance when we should be focusing on the quality of being our best, then doing our best will be the result of being our best in doing whatever it is we are doing.