The Seven Habits of Highly
Ineffective Christians (3)
Embrace the Triangle of Mediocrity
Cardiff Heights Baptist Church
16 January 2000
Summer is one of my favourite TV watching times of the year. With
all the tennis and cricket it is very easy to be wholeheartedly
mediocre. But there was a cricket match at the turn of the century,
in England, which is truly inspirational for anyone wanting to be
highly ineffective. The match brought together King’s College
Choir School and the Trophy Boys XI.
Trophy Boys won the toss, batted first and were all out for nought.
Then King’s went in and Trophy’s first ball was a ‘no ball’. Which of
course gave the King’s Choir school a score of one and victory in
the match.
We come tonight to the third installment of the seven habits of
highly ineffective christians. There are many ways to look at the
highly ineffective life but there is perhaps none better than the view
from the couch. So with that in mind I present the triangle of
mediocrity.
Show Overhead http://www.geocities.com/dreamingisdangerous/triangle.bmp
The third habit of the highly effective Christian is that they embrace
the triangle of mediocrity. Christians who are grounded in the Bible
know that God desires a life lived by faith, a total surrender of the
will and a casting of oneself on God’s mercy. However, if you want
to be wholeheartedly mediocre your triangle will lean more towards
the bottom right hand corner and you will be governed by fear, not
by faith.
Governed by fear means you do not act on God’s word. Instead
you only act according to your own assessment of any situation.
You need to trust your own understanding, your own judgement
according to what you can see around you. Do not put your hope
in things that cannot be seen, such as heaven, and you will live a
gloriously ineffective life.
The Bible and church history are filled with accounts of men and
women who stood up for their beliefs and their God. However, the
ineffective Christian will learn a plethora of ways to become a
spiritual wimp. Tonight I would like to do a case study on the
triangle of mediocrity. We are going to look at Numbers 13 and 14.
We aren’t going to look at the whole passage. Instead we are
going to touch on a number of places.
Israel after leaving Egypt in search of their new home now stand
on the brink of the promised land. A land that none of them have
seen but all would have dreamed about. They certainly would have
had expectations about what it was like and now they were about
to find out.
Read Numbers 13:1-2
What was God’s purpose for Israel? The promised land. It is
important to note the promise in this verse. “Explore the land of
Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites.” “I am giving it”. “It is
yours”. God had a great vision, great purpose for Israel - the
challenge was would Israel trust in God and follow Him into the
new land! Would they be part of his vision? God has a great
purpose, great vision for ministry here at Cardiff Heights. The
question we need to ask is ‘do we want to be part of it?’
Read Numbers 13:17-33
In the report we have two voices. Firstly there was the voice of fear
from ten of the spies.
Read verse 31.
And then there is the voice of faith from Joshua and Caleb.
Read verse 30 and 14:8-9
In response to God’s purpose, God’s vision for Israel these two
voices were heard. The voice of fear operates by what they saw
whereas the voice of faith operates by what God sees. This
passage presents us with two paths that we can take in response
to God’s purpose. It presents us with the path of fear and the path
of faith.
Each path has four steps. Which path shall we take first. To be
ineffective is to take the path of fear so lets take that one first.
The Path of Fear
a) We can overplay the obstacles and underplay the opportunities
(13:31-33)
To be ineffective, you must strive for stagnant living. One of the
best ways to accomplish this is to stifle all efforts to realize ‘the
dream’.
I define ‘the dream’ as your God-given, nagging sense of purpose.
‘The dream’ keeps coming back at you, as if God were pushing
you toward your ultimate goal. No matter what you do you can’t
stop thinking about it: starting a ministry to a particular group,
beginning an outreach to your neighbours, or spending more time
with your family.
You must fight these little whispers from God. You must tell
yourself that it probably wouldn’t work and nobody would come or
it would cost too much money.
This passage reminds me of when I was playing soccer in under
10’s for Merrylands Soccer Club. Every match was the same
routine. Both sides would run out in their lines at the beginning of
the game to have our boots inspected by the ref. There we were
lined up against the opposition and they always seemed that much
bigger then us. When you looked at them expecting to see their
faces or at the very least their shoulders, you would only see their
stomach. And I know the same thought went through everyone of
my team mates minds and our parents for that matter. “I want to
see their birth certificates.” I don’t remember even winning a game
that year. We were a beaten team during every boot inspection,
before the game even started. We had the art of being wimps
down to a fine art.
In your Christian walk, if your trying to be ineffective, you need to
become a wimp. Compare the obstacles you need to face with
yourself. Remember, becoming a wimp is a choice. A process.
First convince yourself restraint is the better part of valour. As you
progress through the various levels of wimpishness, you will find it
easier to live a limp faith. You will look throughout the centuries at
people who have been jailed, mocked, scorned and even killed for
their belief in God. You will not want to become a statistic. As
someone wise once said, look out for number one.
You have heard it said that the Christian life is a great adventure.
You have heard it said that the world has not seen what God can
do through a person totally surrendered to him. But while that is
true it is also true that the ineffective, mediocre life is a safe life.
Do not take chances with your existence. It could hamper your golf
game.
b) We can desire to return to the past (with an idealistic view of the
past) (14:3-4)
I like the story of the little boy who fell out of bed. When his mum
asked him what happened, he answered, “I don’t know. I guess I
stayed too close to when I got in.”
The ineffective Christian should live in the past and stay too close
to when they got in. This may be the best way to stay in a state of
spiritual decline.
You must understand that many effective Christians use the past
for great good. They remember the sins of the past and ask
forgiveness. They remember the lessons of the past and act on
them. They seek change in themselves because of the past.
However you must not do such things. You should longingly desire
the past. You must convince yourself it was better ‘back then’. The
hymns were richer. The worship lasted longer. The fellowship was
sweeter. The shared meals were not low-fat. The people were
more considerate. The missionaries stayed away longer. You
didn’t have to give as much in the offering plate to feel good about
it.
Unlike the future, which eventually arrives and becomes the
present, the past can never happen again, so you must bring it
back with your mind. Wallow in it. Suck the marrow from the past
in your mind, and your eyes will be so glazed over that you will not
be able to perceive the gift God gives you in the present.
You must always look backward. Never stand in this moment, the
now, and ask what God would have you do for his glory. Do not be
content with the smile of your spouse, the purple-orange of the
sunset or the feel of a child’s hand slipping effortlessy into your
own. The smiles, sunsets and hands were always better in the
past. As a wise person once said, “constantly compare the past
with the present, you will escape any responsibility to change the
future.”
c) We can foster a negative and critical spirit (14:36)
Some people seem always to see the glass half full instead of half
empty, find the silver lining in every dark cloud and make
lemonade out of life’s lemons. If you want to be ineffective and
mediocre, you must get far away from these people and seek to
live negatively
You may think I am talking about the obvious ways to demonstrate
a negative attitude. Believe me there are a million small avenues
to help spread dread every day.
First the weather. Complain that it’s either too hot or too cold, too
wet or too dry. A negative attitude starts with the things you can’t
change like the weather, your spouse and your children and
moves to things you can change such as your lawn, your breath
and your exam perfomance. Half the fun of being a negative
person is pointing out the flaws in things you could actually
change. But because of your stubborness or laziness, you don’t,
and that’s great.
A negative attitude begins in the morning, when you first awaken
to a new day. If there is a part of you, deep inside, that smiles at
opportunities that are ahead, you must immediately focus on how
early it is or how late you are or how awful you look or how much
weight you ought to lose. Being negative is only a thought away,
and it’s a great avenue that connects you with the ineffective
highway.
d) We can sadly discover the reality of Prov 29:18, “Where there is
no vision the people perish” (14:36-37).
Not only did these men perish but the whole Israelite community
spent a further forty years wandering the wilderness because they
acted in fear. Talk about ineffective. We have the opportunity to
reproduce that sort of inactivity and ineffectiveness if we take the
path of fear when it comes to God’s purpose here at Cardiff
Heights. If we only get out of life what we put into it then why don’t
we keep it in the first place and save a whole lot of wasted effort.
To be ineffective you need to take the path of fear but to be
effective you need to take the path of faith.
The Path of Faith
a) To refuse to allow obstacles to outweigh the opportunities
(13:27-29, 14:8)
Instead of measuring the giants in the land to themselves as the
other ten had done Joshua and Caleb measured the stature and
strength of the giants against God. They were nothing by
comparison.
The effective Christian believes opportunities are everywhere;
without vision, another will be overcome by problems or obstacles,
and succumb to complacency and despair. An optimist sees an
opportunity in every problem; a pessimist sees a problem in every
opportunity. When twelve spies were sent into the Promised Land,
two of them - Joshua and Caleb - believed it was a good land and
could be occupied immediately; the other ten reported the land
was infertile and full of giants: ‘We felt as small as grasshoppers,
and that is how we must have looked to them’ (Numbers 13:33).
The same country can be seen so differently depending whether
you are on the mountain of faith or in the valley of doubt and
pessimism. G K Chesterton was right when he said that a positive
challenge is a difficulty rightly understood.
b) To be willing to take risks in the face of opposition. (13:30,
14:10)
In a life without risks no one wins, no one loses, and no one
learns!
One of my favourite catch phrases at the moment is by a man
named Martin Buber. When talking about vision and hope he
described it as imagining the real. Joshua and Caleb dared to
imagine the real. Well if vision is to imagine the real, then a risk is
to imagine possibilities, then having the faith to work hard to see
those possibilities realized. A risk is to realise the imagination.
When you are prepared to act on a dream, to have a little hope in
the most hopeless of all endeavours you may just see those
dreams become a reality. The impossible become possible.
And we need to be willing to make mistakes and allow others to
make mistakes when they take risks. Sometimes we are suppose
to make mistakes. If you cannot make mistakes you cannot do
anything. I like what Henry Ford once said, “Think you can. Think
you can’t! Either way you’ll be right.
c) To be totally dependent on God (14:8)
God has a purpose for us here at Cardiff Heights. It is a purpose
that for us is impossible. The obstacles too great for us to handle.
But for God they are small. God not only imparts dreams but also
the means to see those dreams become reality. We do not have to
measure what we do here by our capacity to do things. If we are
totally dependent on God we can measure dreams by God’s
capacity to do them.
d) To be ready to persevere (the wilderness experience).
Joshua and Caleb would eventually see the promised land but
they would need to persevere the forty years in the wilderness and
remain committed to the dream.
I recently heard the story of a man named Jim Stovall, who
became totally blind at age 29. While he still had partial vision, he
volunteered at a school for the blind. He was assigned to help a
4-year-old boy, who was blind and severely handicapped. Stovall
spent considerable time trying to convince the boy he could tie his
own shoes or even climb stairs in spite of his limitations.
“No, I can’t!” the boy insisted.
“Yes, you can,” Stovall replied.
“No, I can’t!”
The verbal battle went on.
Meanwhile, Stovall fought his own limitations. Because of his
deteriorating vision, he decided he had to quit his college courses.
On his way to withdraw from college, he passed the school for the
blind and decided to resign his volunteer position as well.
“It’s just too tough,” he explained. “I can’t do it.”
‘Yes, you can!” said a little voice beside him. It was the 4-year-old
who refused to tie his shoes.
“No, I can’t!” said Stovall with conviction.
"Yes, you can!"
Stovall realized that if he didn’t continue, the child would give up
too. So Jim Stovall stayed in school and graduated
three-and-a-half years later.
The same week he graduated, his little friend tied his shoes and
climbed a flight of stairs, sitting on the top step.
God has a purpose for us here at Cardiff Heights and it is not
automatic. We need to choose the path that we will take in
response to that purpose. The path of fear or the path of faith. To
be ineffective we need to take the path of fear. To be effective we
need to take the path of faith.
In deciding which path to take (if you want to be ineffective), it
might be helpful to remember that while eagles may soar,
wombats don’t get sucked into jet engines.
