Giving All Diligence...

I feel a bit like a cowboy this morning, trying to lasso this poem before it got away...

It was wrangled and wrestled to the page midst the muddle and music of life💗

Inspired in part, as I read this morning's Daily Bread Devotion based on this passage below;

Also included in the devotion is inspiration from the life of Charles H. Spurgeon!

2 Peter 1:3-9

But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue,

 to virtue knowledge, 6 to knowledge self-control, to self-control [b]perseverance, 

to perseverance godliness, 7 to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.

 8 For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither [c]barren nor unfruitful

 in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

9 For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, 

and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.

Last week on the post Star-trek I mentioned a preacher from my youth

intoning repeatedly the verses that come after the above scripture...

(ha-ha, I bet Ira B. never imagined his name in any way used with the words Star-trek😂)

2 Pet.1:10-11

Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, 

for if you do these things you will never stumble; 

11 for so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly 

into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Stanza 4 of today's poem was inspired by the joy of laughter this morning...

Miss Four-year-old has not yet mastered the letter 'f',

so she is enjoying a bowl full of toot-loops😂

I told her I don't think I will ever see fruit-loops in quite the same way again! lol!

I do not want to live, my dear, as if I had no vow to keep

No Highest Calling to revere or like a soldier half-asleep

Rather than standing on full guard, wary of enemies that lurk

To lure me from the Sacred Hard of diligence in prayer and work

I do not want to drift as if this dawn-to-dawn was nothing more

Than a cruise down the Amazon to some yon-not-so-endless shore

I do not want to squander time as if life was a holiday

Rather than a most sacred climb to what will never pass way

I want to recognize what lies beyond this Bitty Beckoning

A long ‘dirt-nap’ is not the Prize that will succeed the reckoning

Therefore, I do not want to live as if this was some dead-end street

Without account we all will give to Holy God we all will meet

I want to laugh, fully in touch with the joy in its melody

I want to hear, see, smell, taste, touch with a rush of holy-holy

I want to think of Him, not me when weighing wishing’s cons and prose

I want my heart and hope to brim with thankfulness for Mercy’s woes

Imagine, as time disappears and I fall down in reverence

I would look up to see God’s tears crowning my lack of diligence

As I behold His Hands still scarred with pardon’s awful autograph

Imagine being barred from Heaven for life lived on my behalf

© Janet Martin