Mediocrity: An Enemy to My Joy (Dear God - 1)

Dear God,

I come before you with a broken and contrite heart. So many of Psalm 51, I can feel. I was brought forth in inquity. Against you have I sinned. I have done what is evil in your sights. Blot out my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart. Renew a right spirit. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. It has become blatantly obvious with my lack of convictions, my drought of Word saturation, my neglect of prayer, and my forgetfulness of the Gospel, that my joy in You that was once ablaze has been reduced to barely a simmer. My JOY for YOU is almost gone, and I have fooled myself into thinking that it was ok.

Mediocrity never leads me to joy, it always leaves me settling for less. And settling for less has proved to be far more dangerous than it sounds.

Mediocrity is never ok with you God.

You were not mediocre in the way you lived and laid down your life for me. 

You did not call your disciples to mediocrity. My mediocrity is the fruit of my own foolishness. I have fooled myself into believing that my sin is in fact not sin at all. And with that deception there comes no need to seek and drench myself in your good news of grace or recognize my desperate need for you Jesus, the Savior. Especially, as long as I am not commiting adultery or murdering someone, my most preached and proclaimed gospel to myself, is the gospel of mediocrity.

That I am ok, and do not need desperate reliance upon the grace of Jesus Christ, I do not need to seek the will of my sovereign Father, and that I do not need the empowering of the Holy Spirit. This is a trinitarian tragedy. 

Lord I pray that you would create in me a new heart, that I would seek your sovereign and good will, and that I would not sink in the quicksand of mediocrity, but that I would sprint and dive into the deep waters of laying down my life and following you. Because it is in that pursuit, in which I will find myself swimming in the deep ocean of your joy.

GRACE

“I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed the Jordan, and now I have become two camps.” – Genesis 32:10

- This is the grace of God. He came with a freakin staff, and a past filled with deception and fakeness. There was no merit for the love and faithfulness of God, and yet the Lord loved him, the Lord was faithful to him, and the Lord promised good to Him. That is the grace of God. Grace is grace when the prerequisites for blessings are not met, and yet blessings are given. 

The Forgetful Peripheral

                     All through out Psalm 106, there is a recurring theme: forgetfulness and rebellion by the Israelites and justice, remembering, and atonement by God for the Israelites. Again and again God intervenes and saves His people with mighty works and to make His name known among the nations, but the Israelites again and again forget the wondrous works of God and the steadfast love of the Lord. And as they forget God, they begin to consequently put other things at the center of their lives, essentially rebelling against the only One who is worthy of centeredness. Their forgetfulness gives way to peripheral worship, aka idolatry. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox. When we forget the only one who is worthy to be center and begin to center our lives around other things, we are exchanging the glory of God for infinitely and drastically lesser things. But God, amidst the continual forgetfulness and rebellion of the Israelites, responds with love. Amidst their forgetfulness, He remembers his covenant with them, and amidst their rebellion He redeems them. Amidst our forgetfulness and rebellion, God remembers and redeems! (Psalm 106). Is it fair that God loves us like this, that he loves us when we are least worth? No, but He does. May I not ever forget that. This is why we fight to remember the steadfast love of God. Fighting to remember the steadfast love of God is fighting to keep Christ central. Fighting to keep Christ central is to fight idolatry. Fighting to keep glory of God the center is fighting to increase joy.