Don't Make Excellence an Idol
The same excellence that honors God can become an idol when it serves our ego. God loves excellence — but never to the exclusion of holiness, love, and how we treat our people. People over product.
The last lesson made the case for excellence. This one is the necessary guardrail: excellence can easily become an idol — a monster — in your life and your ministry. It happens in a lot of churches, and it always starts in the heart.
It’s a heart issue
Excellence goes wrong the moment we use it to serve ourselves:
- To feed vain ambition
- To get an ego boost or accolades from people
- To draw attention to ourselves and grab the glory because we’re so good at what we do
That’s excellence with the wrong motive. Excellence is meant to be transparent — a form of service, done not for ourselves but for the good of others and the glory of God. The very same skillful playing can be aimed at God or aimed at our own ego. Same notes, completely different heart.
God won’t be bought off with excellence
Here’s the encouragement and the warning together: God loves excellence, but not to the exclusion of everything else he asks of you.
If you are excellent at your craft but your heart is full of pride — or disdain for others, or impurity, greed, or immorality — God is not interested in your excellence.
That’s not Alex’s opinion; it’s Scripture’s. In Hosea 6:6, God says he desires mercy and a whole life of righteousness, not merely your best sacrifices. Jesus says the same to the Pharisees in Matthew 15 — they honor God with their lips while their hearts are far from him — and in Matthew 23 he calls the hypocrites whitewashed tombs: clean on the outside, full of death within. God wants your excellence to come alongside faithfulness, love, generosity, kindness, purity, and holiness — not instead of them.
People over product
Some people make excellence the ultimate aim and pursue it at any cost — even if it means treating people poorly along the way.
An excellent ministry where people are treated poorly is not a ministry that honors God.
God always cares about people over product. So yes — help your team grow and develop musically. But care about your people holistically at the same time. The two are not in competition; pursuing excellence must never trample the people you’re pursuing it with.
Application
Take a moment and honestly locate yourself on the spectrum:
- Have you turned excellence into an idol? Are you neglecting holiness, love, or your team relationships in the chase for a better-sounding band?
- Or the opposite — are you great with the people and the heart stuff, but avoiding the hard work of helping your team bring God their best?
- Wherever you land, pray right now and ask God to help you hold musical excellence and everything else he requires in the right balance.