‘EXCELLENCE’
Dear Friends,
My Dad had a stack of simple one-liners.
He was a Yorkshireman (though with more than a bit of Scottish blood in his veins); a Yorkshireman with that distinctive northern instinct for speaking the truth with an impressive economy of words: and these well-considered aphorisms were trotted out with such a regularity that, without any conscious effort on our part, we children learned them very quickly off by heart. Indeed, they became so embedded in the very fibre of our being that our whole perspective on life was subtly shaped and informed by his well-chosen, oft-repeated lines.
“If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well,’ was one such simple aphorism. Whatever it was we might find ourselves doing, we were to do it always well. No half measures. Nothing shoddy. No settling for anything less than our best and our all. He taught us the pursuit of excellence.
And we learned to pursue such excellence not just by his drumming this simple one-liner into our young and impressionable minds – but by showing us what it was like. Everything he did, he did well. From washing the dishes to washing the car. From cleaning his shoes to cleaning our teeth. From keeping the books to keeping his cool. From mending our messes to minding his manners. He was a real-life, daily object lesson in how to live life well: as potent an advert for the benefits of excellence as you could wish to find.
The pursuit of excellence was thereby soundly nurtured in our hearts from earliest days: a pursuit both exhorted upon us and exemplified daily before us. And so, in this way (as indeed in many another), we were blessed with a father who showed us the Father himself; who taught us what God is like, and how God works; who impressed on our hearts that right at the heart of the universe itself, undergirding everything, there is a fundamental excellence.
The excellence of God. Everything He does is good. The word recurs repeatedly in Genesis 1, a thrilling, throbbing chorus-line of excellence that pulses through the Bible’s opening chapter – God’s grand, initial introducing of Himself to those who are His creatures. Everything He does, everything He says, everything He plans – everything about the Lord is always, only good. Supremely good. Excellent.
Whatever it is the Lord does, He does it well. His words are flawless, His ways are perfect, His works are stunning, His will is good and pleasing and perfect. And therefore, too, such striving after excellence is basic and foundational to humanity – in with the bricks, as it were, of all that it is to be human. For we are made in His likeness and image: and made with that same innate and instinctive desire for, delight in, pursuit of the truly excellent.
But sin has marred the whole of our humanity. No part of our humanity is free from the corrosive and distorting power of sin. And thus it is that even the pursuit of all-round excellence – an attribute and attitude both noble and commendable – even that has not been left exempt from the effect of sin: it, too, is singularly flawed, its ‘fault-lines’ always issuing in pain and hurt.
What are those ‘fault-lines’? How does such an eagerness for excellence result in harm? There are, I think, two main and striking ways in which these ‘fault-lines’ commonly occur. Both of them are seen in the apostle Paul. And both of them I recognise within myself.
The first big way in which this all plays out is in a less than healthy competitiveness which the pursuit of excellence regularly spawns. When you dig beneath the surface of the New Testament documents, you see this clearly in Paul. The noble desire to do his best became the less than noble yearning to be the best. A subtle but significant difference.
Remember how he wrote about his ‘previous way of life in Judaism;’ “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal.1.14). There’s more than a hint in his statement there that his aim was to ensure that he was the best among his contemporaries: that he’d get the highest marks and the top degree; that he’d be the dux of his year; that he’d be the one who got noticed; that he’d be the one who came out on top; that he’d be the best. Not just doing his level best, but being the best. Competitive, and therefore inevitably combative.
Is that unfair? I don’t think so. For you see the hints of exactly that trait in the way he wrote to his fellow believers at Philippi: again speaking about his former life – If someone thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more ..” he declares, before instancing all his credentials (Phil.3.4-6). But notice how he put it – ‘I have more.’ That’s top-dog language: that’s a being-the-best mentality.
Dig around and you find that self-same trait emerging at various different points when the apostle indulged in bits of autobiography. Think of another passage when again he lists his not inconsiderable credentials, prefaced by the confession that ‘I am speaking like a fool.’ “Are they Hebrews? he asks. “So am I. Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again ..” (2 Cor.11.21-29). Whatever criteria you want to use, this man was there at the top of the list. Pedigree? Position? Performance? The man has a higher ranking than anyone else.
Now there’s nothing inherently wrong, of course, in wanting to be the best. Except … except when that makes us overly combative. When in order ourselves to be the best, we have to do others down. Paul’s pursuit of excellence in his early years, the desire that he had to outrun and outrank all his peers, brought him face to face, in the fulness of time, with another young man called Stephen, whose preaching, we learn, was such that “they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he spoke” (Acts 6.10). Almost certainly, for the first time in his life, Saul (as the apostle was known back then) came up against a contemporary whom he could not get the better of.
And you know where that then led! Stephen was killed (“and Saul approved of their killing him”) and “Saul began to destroy the church” (Acts 8.1, 3). When the pursuit of excellence becomes the desire to be the best, then others inevitably become rivals, the enemy, and to be the best you have to do them down, one way or another: bad-mouthing them, belittling them, disparaging them, destroying them.
That’s the first major ‘fault-line’ in the noble pursuit of excellence: it results in a certain competitiveness which can see you doing others down. And it seeps into the mindset of fellowships as well, of course; pursuing their own excellence, they subtly start to think of other fellowships as more potential ‘rivals’ than their friends. A combative perspective can define the way such other Christian fellowships are viewed. We see and choose to speak about their faults, and piously and quietly can try to do them down. We want to be the best church here in town, the one to which the crowds will have recourse – because they see our excellence.
But the second major problem which the pursuit of excellence can often spawn is a certain subtle ‘legalistic’ outlook and a desperate sense of failure on its back.
Brought up on a diet of doing things well, informed as I was by my Dad’s instructive one-liner, I found failure hard to handle. I’d missed a crucial element in what my Dad had said. I’d perversely assumed that performance was the means and the measure of favour. Excellence was the ladder by which my standing was measured. The better I did, the more I’d be loved. And so, unaware of the terrible fallacy which I was feeding myself, I applied myself hard to my studies: I practiced and trained hard at sport. To be the best student. To make the first team. When I got good marks, when I made the grade, when I came out on top, it was fine: but to play second fiddle, to be less than the best, well that only felt like failure: and failure itself was rejection.
I applied myself earnestly to living all of life like that as well. Performance, performance, performance. The rigorous pursuit of excellence. I understand exactly how the pre-conversion Paul, or Saul of Tarsus, lived his life: striving always for excellence in what he did, how he spoke, where he went, the lot – as the means of earning favour with the God whose own inherent excellence must be the measure of our own.
But that’s where the problems began. For the apostle. For myself. And I suspect for many another. If the standard’s always excellence and your best is never good enough, what hope have you got? The pursuit of excellence can become in that way a Sisyphus-like experience: rolling the boulder of godly performance right up to the brow of God’s hill, only to find, as you neared the top, that it rolls the whole way back down – a never-ending cycle of dispiriting despair.
So, an unhealthy, unpleasant competitiveness, on the one hand, which makes a person ‘combative’ and cold: and an unacknowledged legalism, on the other, which leaves an individual always struggling with a growing sense of failure and despair.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the pursuit of excellence is itself inherently flawed. Far from it. It simply requires that the thing is rightly handled. The New Testament – and Paul in particular – is adamant about this. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent (notice that! it’s his summarising word) or praiseworthy – think about such things. What you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me – put it into practice” (Phil.4.8f).
In a word (or two) – pursue excellence! It’s distinctive feature of our following Christ. Because that’s how His life is always marked. He does nothing by halves. He gives His best, He gives His all. And all that He says and does and thinks and plans is true and noble and right and pure, lovely, admirable – excellent in a word.
So, yes, as you follow the Lord Jesus Christ, make sure you pursue such excellence. But not in a combative, negative way. Not in a way which sees you competing with others. Not in a way which sees you comparing yourself with the skills and performance of others. And certainly not in a way which has you computing that such excellence earns you God’s favour.
We aspire, then, always to excellence – in response, first of all, to the excellence of God Himself: and with a view then to declaring, displaying and delighting the more in that excellence of God in creation, salvation, and cosmic restoration.
We aspire to, pursue and cultivate that excellence across the board. In the praise we sing and the music which accompanies it: musicians practice hard, worshippers learn to stir their hearts, to open their mouths and to sing in time and in tune. We’re ready to be stretched, keen to offer up a sacrifice of praise, that which doesn’t cost us nothing. Eager that the praise we bring is anything but naff, banal, and trivial, but marked throughout by excellence.
We aspire to the same in the reading and preaching of the Word of God. His Word, pulsing with that great creative power whereby the darkness is dispelled, the chaos of our broken lives is stunningly re-ordered and renewed, and a vibrancy and radiance is breathed again into our languid, deadened lives. No place for the merely superficial. No time for the shoddy and ill-prepared.
And that excellence to which we aspire in our acts of communal worship then spills over into our moment-by-moment worship of God in all the multitude of daily minutiae which comprise our new found lives in Christ. That’s what my Dad was on about, I realise now. Whatever it is, no matter how small or mundane the task may be, I do it as unto God – the Lord, who Himself does all things well.
Living in the light of our Lord’s resurrection, living in the power of His indwelling Spirit, may our lives and our living be marked by just such excellence in every regard!
Jeremy Middleton