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.
