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There is a popular saying that……”don’t chase success, rather chase excellence, and success will follow you.” To be really successful in every area of our lives, excellence is one sure thing that we must embrace. When God made us, he made us excellently well. The bible says that “we are fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14). There was no single error in you when God was carving you. Everything that God created are made with precision and excellence in His mind.(Genesis 1:1-10).
So, our God is an excellent God, and we are made in His image, therefore we cannot exude anything less of excellence. When we talk of excellence, it simply denotes something that is of high quality, acceptable and without any iota of blemish. Other words for excellence are perfection, supremacy, superiority, first-rateness etc. There are specific areas of our lives where God would not want less of excellence if we truly want to please Him and have great success in life. We must show Excellence in the way we serve God and the our Kingdom service.
There is an acceptable way to serve God as he His our maker. We don’t just give God our less, he deserves our best. It is not every services that God accepts. And this nothing short of the truth. An example is the story of Abel and Cain his brother. The bible says they both brought of the increase of their business to offer to God as a sacrifice. The bible recorded that Abel’s sacrifice was pleasing to God and that of Cain was rejected. The question we should be asking is: What went wrong with Cain’s sacrifice that made God reject it?
The answer is in the attitude with which Cain brought his sacrifice. He was an arrogant man who didn’t do well in his presentation. (Genesis 4:1-8). We cannot display arrogance when it comes to the things of God, and still expect to go far with Him. The bible says “a humble and a quiet spirit God will not despise” (Psalms 34:18). That story tells us that there is an acceptable and excellent way to serve God, with all that He has given us and blessed us with. God is not an haphazard God, and he would not tolerate haphazardness from his children.
The Place of Diligence as a Partner of Success
One fundamental thing we must realise is that diligence and success goes together. To be diligent means to be consistent, to be hardworking, not showing any sign of laziness, keep moving on in the faces of opposition and challenges, and so on. There is a saying that those who quit don’t win, and winners are never quitters. The road to success is laid on diligence. Bring together successful people and interview them differently on how they became success, I am sure eight out of ten of them will mention that they were diligent in pursuing their dreams.
If you are consistent in doing a particular thing, it would only take a matter of time before your success becomes visible to all in that thing. Success is the visible part of Diligence, everyone is happy that you are successful, but how many people know the number of hours, and days and weeks that you have spent on the road to becoming that success that everyone celebrates. Jesus was just on the scene for 3.5 years, but for 30 years, how many people can relate with what he went through developing Himself?
Proverbs 22:29 says a man that is diligent in his business shall stand before Kings and not ordinary men. David was a great King, but he didn’t wake up one day from his sleep into greatness. The bible says he was a Shepherd boy. As far back at age seventeen, he was in charge of his father’s animal husbandry business, at the back side of the wilderness. While in the wilderness, the man David was diligent with – tending to his father’s sheep, and then developing his catapulting skills. There was a time a bear came, he killed it. And then, a lion showed up as well, he took it out. When the time came to shine, he did excellently well killing the giant by the name of Goliath.
We can glean from that story, that diligence brought David to the lime light. It brought him before King Saul, who at the time, needed help to conquer Goliath.
In the new testament, blind Bartimaeus got his sight as a result of consistently screaming that Jesus should have mercy on Him. Mark 10:46-52 documents the story. People told Bartimaeus to stop screaming, but he didn’t stop until he got Jesus’ attention. There is a moral in that story. Whatever you are diligent at brings you to your success. This is why you cannot give up right now, the road may seem rough, all the variables may not be working right for you, but with persistence; you will arrive at the top.
