Your Call to Faithful Mediocrity
Recently I’ve been noticing a sad trend among leaders. They’re actually calling for their followers to faithfully pursue mediocrity.
I’m seeing this trend in churches, in corporate environments and in relationships.
Mediocre faithfulness in church.
In church they teach us not to focus on the results of our efforts to reach people but rather to simply focus on staying true to what we believe. That’s terrific but why not stay faithful AND live a passionate life that reaches out and influences the people around us? Why not take it to the next level?
Mediocre faithfulness at work.
We’re trained that the key to success is to find a good job and to stay with it until we’re old enough to retire. But which of you want to spend every waking minute working at a dead end job hoping to make enough money to squeeze out a meager retirement until you end up in an elderly care home?
Why not incite your passions, get motivated about what you do, and start really moving your career forward?
Mediocre faithfulness at home.
In relationships we’re taught that as long as we stay faithful to our partner then we have done good but if that’s all you’ve done then you have completely missed the boat.
Rather than focusing on being true to a mediocre relationship, you should be working to fuel the flames of love every day. Buy roses. Make a home-made card expressing your love. Create romantic getaways. Sneak up behind your special someone when they’re doing something and whisper your love in their ear. Don’t just be faithful. Take it to the next level.
Faithfulness is great but if that’s all your working toward then you are cheating yourself of the excitement and satisfaction that you could be enjoying.
Be faithful…but not to mediocrity. Faithfully be passionate. Faithfully express a positive attitude. Faithfully work to motivate and influence the people around you. Faithfully work to transform everything you touch into something truly great.
Chris Young
Great post Nicholas, with which I totally agree. A great book that helped me here is Chuck Swindoll’s ‘Living Above the Level of Mediocrity’ – it’s an oldie but a goodie.
Nicholas Cardot
Chris I sure appreciate that book recommendation. I’ve not hear of that book before but it sounds like it might be right up my ally. I firmly believe that just being loyal or faithful is not enough to achieve the success and satisfaction that we all truly crave. We’ve got to step up and live our lives with passion and excitement.
Jean Sarauer
One place I know I’ll never find mediocrity is on your blog. You always have some new topic or twist to things on here, and I appreciate that. Here’s to living with passion!
Nicholas Cardot
Thanks, Jean. We’ve got to get past that concept of just ‘sticking with it’ and start rising above that level of mediocrity that so many people are so content with.
Trece
You have certainly hit something on the head here. Remember Moody’s comment: set yourself on fire for God and let the world watch you burn? That does not speak of a life lived in balance, but rather of one where passion was pursued to the end, and there were lasting effects for eternity. Sadly, if we all live for balance, I think mediocrity is all we’ll get. Your thoughts?
Bruce Teague
As far as the church one goes. I fully agree you should live your life with a passion that influences those around you and have an expectation for results. I don’t however think you should focus on the results. Only on Him. I could really get into a much deeper theological discussion on that one. In the end, we don’t change hearts, He does.
Nicholas Cardot
I disagree with that concept. Although you’re right that he changes hearts, I don’t think that God wants us to reach out to people to A) shake the responsibility (e.g. I tried to warn them so it’s their fault now) or B) to simply obey (e.g. I invited him to church because I now that I’m supposed to).
Instead we should be reaching out to people with the same spirit and intent that Christ had. We should be reaching out with a burning desire to actually see lives changed. It’s not good enough for me to simply live a hum-drum existence satisfying my conscience with the thought that I’m trying to help others simply because God tells me to and if they won’t be helped then it’s there fault.
If you saw a bridge out and your wife was driving toward it would you put up a sign, hand her a brochure and then let her keep driving or would you do everything in your power to stop her car from moving forward to include throwing yourself in front of her car at the expense of your own bodily safety to make sure that she stops moving toward that bridge?
Too many people allow that “let God take care of the results” so much so that we see people becoming Calvanists and they throw away reaching out to people altogether. After all, if God wants them to be reached then he’ll do it with or without our help and that philosophy completely defeats the purpose of the great commission.
Bruce Teague
I totally agree with everything you just said. You better believe I want results. We need to be lit on fire with passion and go after souls because if we don’t people will spend an eternity in Hell.
But I don’t focus on the results. I focus on living my life for Him, running after Him as hard as I can, and loving people as he did. If I focused on results then I’m like a pharisee. I’m basing things on my performance and my performance can never even come close to earning my way into heaven. It’s his grace alone.
Onibalusi Bamidele
Really great post,
Sometimes, doing things outside the box or going the extra mile might only be what you need.
Thanks a lot for the great post,
-Onibalusi