Pay close attention, because the verse above holds the key to achieving ANY kind of change you want to see in your life.  Because the key to success is CONSISTENCY.

There have been many times in my life where I was so excited to start a new venture that had the prospect of bringing about major changes in my life. For instance, I might decide to start a new weight-loss program or some new business project or plan to read my Bible through in a year. I would be so excited to start and so gung-ho about my new “project” for the first few days. But then after I had been doing it for a few days, if I didn’t see any immediate results from my efforts, I would start to get discouraged and lose sight of the reason I even started it! After that point, sticking to the program would seem harder and harder and eventually I would just quit because this project that I thought was sure to make a big change in my life didn’t really work after all. Have you ever been there?

Well, I’m starting to realize now that the program wasn’t the issue. Because honestly, there are no “magic” formulas when it comes to success in any area of life. Oh yeah, many things are advertised as quick solutions, but in reality, the truly successful have usually done much hard work to get where they are and you just don’t know about their journey because you didn’t know them before they became successful. And this is true whether it’s someone who has a successful career, has a nice, organized home, has gotten out of debt, or has lost a lot of weight. Whatever the case may be, they’ve worked at it, usually daily or at least weekly and they continue working at it regularly in order to maintain their results. Once I noticed this I began to understand that many times it’s not so much that the new program I started didn’t work, but that I didn’t work the program. And by “working the program”, I mean I didn’t consistently take the necessary action to achieve the result I desired.

Imagine you need to hammer something together. You hold the nail in place and hit it with the hammer, but the nail only goes in a little bit. You wouldn’t just give up and say, “This hammer doesn’t work!” No, you would keep hitting that nail, over and over again until it was all the way in. Well that’s how changes in life are, you have to keep hitting at those problems with effective actions over and over again until you breakthrough those problems and see success!

But the reason we usually get hung up and quit is because we are impatient. The verse says in due time we will reap, but we want to ignore that part, we want it NOW! 🙂 But the truth is that seeds take time to grow. And just like an actual seed sown into the ground doesn’t sprout 10 minutes or sometimes even 10 days after it’s planted, the various things we want to reap in life will not just “grow” that fast either. We must decide that we will do our part and keep patiently looking for the changes to sprout and prove our hard work is not in vain. And if we do not grow weary and give up we will see the fruits of our good work.

So, the next time you feel like giving up and start thinking, “I’ve been doing this for X days/weeks/months and I haven’t seen anything happen yet!” Get rid of that thought and tell yourself, “I don’t care what it looks like right now, I’m going to DO IT AGAIN!” Because God’s word is true, and He says that in due time YOU WILL REAP if you do not grow weary!

Remember, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to keep going!!! 🙂 You can do all things through Christ Who strengthens you!