If you haven’t developed excellence to be a part of you it will be difficult to do things that will return excellent results
Skillful Living Series – Message # 12
The message today is Delivering Excellence and Results.
Have you even been asked, what do you do for a living? Most of us should say, I work at learning how to be excellent and successful. Many will work at acquiring skills and talents, but few will be willing to work at delivering excellence and results.
God says something like this when He says in 1 Samuel 15:22, “Has the Lord as great a delight in burnt offering and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord?” Samuel is speaking to King Saul a sacrifice Saul had attempted to offer God. Why does He ask this question? Because many of us would rather do what is easy and convenient than to change something about us that would change what we choose to do.
God did not accept what Saul did (his sacrifice), or his heart for doing it (his mindset). Because we do this, we fail at things we do because success and excellence are not a part of who we are. Saul wanted to focus on doing something when God wanted him to focus on being something. Many of us are like Saul. It’s easier for us to do things than it is for us to be something better than what we can do.
Life and living are not the same things. Those who are the most skilled at life are the most skilled at living. Life is knowing who God made us to be. Living is doing the things in life that are the expression of who we are. Life is the I am, and living is the I do. The two need to match. King David understood life, so he lived and had an abundant life. Saul understood living, so he did all that he could to live abundantly. He failed.
Excellence and Results are really more a state of mind in who we are than a thing we do. If excellence is not in you as a part of who you are, it is not likely you will be able to do things of excellence. Both life and living worked for David because he started with being skillful at life. Neither worked for Saul because he was unskillful at life.
Some of us would think God is silent on the idea of results. But He is not. Jesus says as much when in John 10:10 He says, “I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly.” Jesus says, He is the Way and the Truth and the Life. So, if you want a life of abundance, you must learn to skillfully develop more of Him in your life and in how you live.
Skillful living comes from a skillful life. A skillful life comes from a life that is developed by the Word of God. The book of Proverbs can be taken as God’s how to instructions for developing a life that is abundant. Excellence and Results in living can be yours when you have perfected Excellence and Results in life.
Here are some helpful things about people who are more skillful at life than we are:
- Rule the things that would love to rule or irritate you. An oyster has no arms or legs, yet it produces a pearl right in the middle of its belly using nothing but its own will. Life is not about getting out of bad things. It’s more about what you make of the irritants that are within you.
- Not what you must get but what you get to be. Many of us live to pursue what we can get with life. But the most skillful of us use life to be what is needed by others.
- Purpose more than passion. In living many are pulled by desires that never cease. But in life many of us are driven by the Purpose of Life that is defines how we live.
- Do successful things. Many of us live by trying to make the things we do to work. The most skillful of us learn to do what works so that life is full of excellence and results.
- Discover more of what you don’t know. Many of us learn to live by doing what we know. The most skillful of us learn to fulfill life by discovering what we do not know so we can have a life that could not be had.
- Be something of value. Living tries to get more things of value; life tries to be more value than cost.
Excellence and Results are a natural part of life. Life is yours to have for eternity. Living passes away with each day. Living can be tossed to and fro by waves and winds, but Life with a Purpose withstands the strongest winds that come at the living.
Keep yourself sharp at all times. A dull life is a wasted life. Accept that you may lose sometimes at some part of living, but you are never a loser at life. And finally, never rush to start to do something that you are not prepared by life to be excellent at doing.
The oyster uses a substance called nacre to cover an irritant it cannot rid itself of. In this process it creates the pearl we all know. You have something in you like nacre. It is designed to help you learn to be skillful at life and to live life to its fullest.
What is that substance you ask? Its your Will. It is the will to learn to be what most people want to have in living that will enable you to live skillfully and to deliver excellence in all the results you achieve in life.
Living is easier than we make allow it to be. Be skillfully great at life is the thing that will make you more successful at the things you do in living.
Be skillfully great for someone today.
Live a Delivered Life. Love you.
Live Delivered 