Moving Beyond Just Getting By: A Devotional On Escaping Mediocrity And Living in Excellence

By Rudolph McKissick Jr.

One of the greatest impediments to the greater life of the believer is the spirit of satisfaction. If we are not careful, satisfaction can be used as a tool by the enemy to keep us from the greater life that is awaiting us in every area of our lives. Bishop McKissick takes you through a thirty-day devotional that will challenge you to refuse to settle down in satisfaction and refuse to be happy with just getting by. Excellence awaits you at the end of this thirty-day journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732775435

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Jr.

In Acts 2:8 Jesus says we will be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and all the world. Jerusalem is both geographical and metaphorical. It stands for starting at home. So often and too often we have advice for the Judeas and Samarias that are excellent in their wisdom but aren’t even practiced in Jerusalem. How is it so easy to speak and write such good advice for others to adhere to when we don’t even practice it ourselves? Often our public recitations are mere gatekeepers hiding a personal life that is full of dysfunction and disorganization. The greater dysfunction, however, is that our words show we know what to do, but our personal lives show a refusal to do. I can’t help Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost until I first stop putting on an image I want people to believe and admire. As for me, I’m fixing Jerusalem. Perhaps you too need to stop trying to advise Judea and Samaria.

It is the curse of the critical spirit. It is quite tricky and very deceptive. It masquerades as the spirit of help. You know, we share our observations with others in an attempt to help them, or we share insights and wise thoughts on social media in an attempt to help others better themselves. Please don’t get me wrong. It is a noble gesture. It is an awesome thing to want others to be better and do better. It can also, however, be the place of serious deception, sometimes unintentionally. You can become so consumed with helping others that it becomes a blockage to the reality that the help you are sharing is really the help that you need. The enemy can keep you blind to your own need for growth and development by causing you to be focused on helping others and to see in them what they might not be able to see in themselves.

Jesus gives us a stern warning about this critical spirt in Matthew 7:3. He has been discussing the danger of judging others. He then says in verse three, and I paraphrase, you are so busy looking at the speck in the eye of the person you are judging when in reality you can’t see their speck because of your plank. A plank is much bigger than a speck. If there is a plank in my eye, then I can’t even see around that to see the speck of an issue in the life of somebody else. That begs the question: am I really seeing their speck, or am I actually seeing my plank and thinking it is their speck? Perhaps it is misplaced criticism. Jesus makes a profound statement, which becomes a good place to start your journey. Let us start with the things we need to change in ourselves before daring to try to change or help anybody else. That is not to suggest that you have to be perfect before you can help. If that were the case, I should have resigned long ago. But you should be on the road of transformation in your on life before you exercise examination in the life of somebody else.

Think of it this way. If you can be so profound in how you write it or speak it for somebody else to follow, then why aren’t you following it for yourself?

DAY ONE REFLECTIONS

1.What are some areas in my life I need to work on and change?

2.Why am I so gifted at challenging others but not at challenging myself?

3.What is keeping me from practicing the principles I am able to give to others?

As you begin your self-reflection be prepared for your inner self to come to the defense of your get-by self. Your inner self will begin to bring to your mind every reason why you haven’t done better or can’t do better. In reality, they are not reasons but excuses. You do know what an excuse is? An excuse is a fabricated reason to abandon resolve, abdicate responsibility, and apologize for your resources. We come up with excuses such as, This is just who I am. To that I say just because this has been you doesn’t mean it is you or should still be you. We get caught up on what we don’t have, who we don’t have, and who is keeping us from being all we can be. When you accept this as a part of your identity, you will never know who God really intends for you to be. The words of that old poem still ring true: Excuses are tools of incompetence used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness, and those who use them seldom specialize in anything else.

Excuse making is nothing new. If you read the bible, you will discover that often people who were given assignments by God threw up their reasons for why they could not make it happen. Moses told God he had a stuttering problem. Gideon told God he was the youngest son in the weakest clan from the smallest tribe. Adam told God he didn’t do better because God didn’t give him a better partner (not sure if he was blaming God or Eve or both). I could go on and on. At every point and with every excuse there was always one common theme in God’s response, and it was this, I am with you. In other words, if you really know who God is, there is no excuse powerful enough to override His intentions for your life. Make sure you don’t get into the practice of idolatry by idolizing your excuses and giving them a power that doesn’t exist.

This is one of the things that can lead to the get-by syndrome. The excuses that we raise as reasons make us feel that it is OK to stay in the position of suitability because we have reasons for why we can’t get beyond that level of achievement. Being suitable is not an achievement. It is an excuse. And please don’t confuse the usage of that English word as a translation for what God said concerning giving Adam a helper. The word there in the Hebrew means compatible. (That was for all the analysts out there, side eye.)

One of the other dangers of empowering excuses is that it causes you to then make decisions based on emotions. Excuses fuel your emotions. They cause you to feel a certain way based on how that excuse made you feel about yourself. Too many excuses have a lot of emotion and little reasoning, and as a result