Finishing well requires a focused pursuit, or what you might call a vision. Consider Jesus’ phrase:

It is finished

What is the “it” that needed to be finished by Jesus? What is the “it” factor? 

Going back to John 17:4, Jesus says this:

I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.

So what is the “it” for Jesus? The work the Father has given Him to do. Jesus had a calling, a vocation, a task to accomplish. That work would include for Jesus the shedding of tears, stress, denials of friends, bleeding, a passion, an excruciating, painful, and crushing death on the Cross. That was the work that the Father had given Him to do! In finishing that work, He completed a task that would bring redemption and salvation to all the people of the world.

As tough as Jesus vocation was, it was absolutely essential that it be accomplished because if it were not, there would be no redemption, salvation, and atonement for sins. Halleluiah! Jesus could say, “It is finished.”

I want to ask you a very important question. It’s perhaps the most important question you could ever ask yourself with intention to answer. What is the “it” for your life? What is the work that God has given you to do? Do you know? The most important question you could ever answer in your life because if you don’t know what it is—that is, what the work that God has given you to do—you will not be working to its accomplishment and finish it.

Where there is no vision, the people perish… –Proverbs 29:18

If you cannot answer that question you may be leaving the most important thing incomplete. What a sad thing it would be to have died having not completed the work that God had put you on this earth to accomplish!

You might call it single-mindedness. Paul exemplifies this in what he says,

But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. –Philippians 3:13-14

Do we say like Paul: “But one thing that I do” —the upward call of God. I think many of us say, “this is one of the fifty things that I dabble in order to keep myself busy”, but not Paul, not Jesus! The Scriptures do not teach that the key to the Christian life is busyness!

What is the “One Thing” for you? So, if you do not know the answer to that question for you, get to know it. It’s the most important question that you could ask. Ask Him in prayer, “What on Earth am I here for?” And then set your mind on that vision and finish it.

Have you discovered the “it” factor for your life? Again I ask, what is the “One Thing” that you are called to do? What is the race that is marked out for you?

Jesus, focused on the “it”. “It is finished.” You are not finished until “it” is finished!