Forty hours a week on a golf course may sound like fun to some people, but it is not always fun. It is forty hours of being out in the elements, feeling the heat and the cold, the fog and the wind, and sometimes the rain. It is forty hours of shoveling, raking, weed-eating, watering, and wrestling with stubborn and heavy self-propelled walk-mowers. It is the forty hours of work I had to do to earn money.

Few people start their adult life rich. Most people start life with bills, and I was no different. For me, the main bill was college tuition, which was sending me to work 40 hours in the hot sun. During these laborious hours, I questioned how I could serve the Lord with my work and how I could even keep my strength sustained. These questions led to problems with my motivation and, eventually, to problems in my walk with the Lord. But in this muddle, the Lord had a solution that we all should know. The solution was a matter of focus.

Before I found this solution, though, I wrestled with these two questions.

The first question, How am I serving the Lord in this job? did not bother me too much. I was busy, and, being busy, I was happy. However, I was also confused about this question, and that confusion became more evident in my motivation. You see, if I am a Christian, my life is in God’s hands; and if my life is in God’s hands, then my motivation comes from a love for Him. But, if I can’t see how my actions are serving Him, I can’t be very well motivated to continue that action. This was exactly what happened. I couldn’t see the point in this work, so I wasn’t very motivated.

The second question, How can I be sustained in this work? was much more evident to me. Work was a constant attack on me, both physically and spiritually. Physically, the strain of shoveling, raking, and weed-eating was draining my energy. I was waking up sore every morning and was struggling with fatigue. However, my spiritual life was also under attack. People at work were not Christian. They drank, swore profusely, smoked like they didn’t know what asthma was, and espoused a philosophy that was so unlike Christianity as to be an almost perfect perversion. The constant barrage of this philosophy was wearing me out spiritually.

It was at this point when the solution came to me. One day I picked up a little book that categorized Bible verses topically; I looked under the heading, “What To Do If You Are Spiritually Lukewarm,” and began to read. The verse that stuck out to me in that section was Revelation 2:4: “Nevertheless, I have this against you, that you have left your first love.” Therein is the solution. These problems arise from an even bigger problem: a problem of focus. I was letting my focus linger on work and things related to it (my second love), instead of putting my focus on God and leaving it there (my first love).

With my focus on the worldly things, I had the two questions and their resulting problems. However, if I turned and faced the Lord and trusted in Him, the problems faded away. The problems in my walk with the Lord were immediately swept away, because my focus was on Him. The problems with my motivation were also solved, because I now had the Lord’s love motivating me to do the best I could.

Furthermore, the questions are also answered. The question of how I can serve the Lord in my work is answered by the fact that I am no longer serving man to get money. I am serving the Lord, and that focus on Him will give me better strength to do what He has laid before me. I am also entirely freed from the question of how I will be sustained, because the Lord will always sustain me for as much as He wants me to do.

Many of you, if not all of you, will be facing the same things that I faced. You may not go to college, but you will have bills and a job, and those things will grapple for your attention. But the point is that if you give these things your attention, you will have both questions and problems in your faith. If you focus on the Lord, however, He will not allow these things to draw you away from Him.