Giving our best
Years ago during a speaking engagement, I stayed in a hotel in Dallas. It was late at night, and after flipping channels for a while, I landed on ESPN, which is how I learned that tennis legend Martina Navratilova had just won a grueling match in Florida earlier that day. I drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, I got up early and headed to the hotel’s gym. It was barely five thirty when I stepped onto the indoor track, but I wasn’t the only one there. A woman was coming through the double glass doors. It was Martina Navratilova. She’d been in Florida the day before, she was in Dallas now, and she was up at the crack of dawn, eager to hit balls back and forth in a hotel gym as if she had nothing better to do. Like sleep.
It’s just a guess, but I don’t think anybody told her to do this. I think she crawled out of bed and pulled on workout clothes before the sun was even up because of an insatiable inner need for excellence. She wants to win that badly.
Leaders in every arena possess an internal quality- control mechanism, a longing for excellence that won’t let them off the hook. It pushes them to achieve higher levels of effectiveness and efficiency than anyone else would ever hold them accountable for. Mine was born many years ago after I spent time reflecting on a single passage in the Bible.
In Malachi 1:6 God tells the people of Israel that he has an offense against them. Their minds race as they try to figure out what they’ve done wrong; finally, they ask for some clarification: “Well, what did we do?”
Speaking on God’s behalf, the prophet Malachi responds, “What did you do? You know the laws about making sacrifices. You know that you ought to go out into your herds and select the best, most valuable, most prized lamb from your flock for your offering to God. But instead of doing what you know to do, you are heading out to your fields and intentionally overlooking the top sheep in the herd. Rather than selecting your prized lamb, you look for one that’s sick and blind and lame and leaning against the fence, ready to keel over! You grab that one and race for the altar before it dies, thinking, ‘It’ll suffice. It’s only for God.’ ”
Malachi then said to the people, “This is what God says. ‘Don’t even bother building a fire. Don’t waste your time. I don’t want the sick and lame and blind and almost-dead lamb. What a mockery to me! Either bring me the prized lamb or bring me nothing at all!’ ”23
Can you imagine receiving a rebuke like that directly from God? I read the passage that afternoon all those years ago and felt as though something had permanently shifted inside of me. The Spirit of God seemed to be saying to me that everything I do in Christian leadership—every plan I put together, every meeting I lead, every talk I give—needs to be my best lamb, my very best offering! Not so that I’ll operate out of paranoia or wild perfectionism, but so that I’ll live from my heart’s deep desire to honor God.
In my thirty-plus years as a senior pastor, nobody has ever set a standard for me to try to reach with regard to my preaching. It would be a waste of their time, because my internal standard will always be higher than that which others can mandate. People at Willow have had to tolerate a lot of pretty sorry sermons, but at those particular times in my life, those talks were the best ones I could give.
I wonder what would happen to every church on the planet if every pastor, staff member, volunteer, elder or deacon, and servant in children’s ministry were to say, “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m committed to giving my best lamb, every single day. I’m going to live in vital union with God, and I’m going to consistently render my most excellent offering. The standard I have established is higher than any you could possibly set for me!”
What would happen to our leadership? What would happen to our preaching? What would happen to our music? What would happen to our administrative functions if everybody in the church established their own level of quality control based on the excellence of Jesus Christ.
