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GYC SE 2008: ReGeneration

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GYC Southeast

Sebastian Braxton: Higher Than the Highest

Sebastien Braxton

The Need

Father in Heaven, we thank you for the privilege and the opportunity to be here to study your word and, Father, to study the deep things of God, to consider Christ in a very new and different way.

We realize, Lord, that excellence, as we shall see in these next few sessions, is not an option for the Christian.

It is the expectation of God in our creation And we trust and pray, Lord, that you may abide with us now as we go into this presentation.

All right, so as you can see, the whole concept here is, the idea of the seminar is to look at the concept of Christian excellence.

Where does excellence have a place in a Christian's life?

And building this upon the concept of higher than the highest.

So I just want to first start off with a couple quotes from different thought leaders and individuals in the world that we may know of, just so we can kind of get an idea of when you think of the concept of excellence, what comes to your mind?

So when you think of excellence, what do you think it means to excel?

So you think of perfection when you think of excellence.

Who, if you could name an individual who you think is excellent, who would you name?

You say this person is excellent, obviously besides Jesus.

My instructor at school, he's excellent, but he's very, very good.

He's an auto mechanic instructor, so I class him up with the best as far as that.

So, essentially, he's the best out of the circuit of individuals and where you would categorize him.

So you would consider him to be an individual who, if you had to attribute excellence, you would say he would be a person of excellence.

Alright, well I want to share with you some thoughts from different individuals.

Johnson, he's a former US president, United States, and he said, the noblest search is the search for excellence.

Then you also notice, Joe Paterno, he made this statement.

Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy.

So he's saying that there's an association here as a sports individual.

But if you lose your desire for excellence or for worth, a desire to go beyond.

Please, come forward, you don't have to sit in the back.

If you lose your desire for a sense of excellence or worth, that is a tragedy for many of us.

Martha Graham made this statement, she said, the only sin Is mediocrity.

So these are people in the world who are making different concept ideas about, listen to Oprah Winfrey.

She says, I was raised to believe that excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.

Now we know where Oprah has aspired to, and we know where she is currently.

She's 1 of the wealthiest people in the world.

And at the same time, Oprah says that she was taught, she was raised to believe, that when her being a black female, to overcome racism, to overcome sexism, the only deterrent was excellence.

And we'll actually look at an actual case of that in different areas of philosophy, where people were biased towards a philosophy, biased towards an individual because of their race, and how excellence was a means of overcoming the barriers that exist in society.

He said, what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

So here he is as this German leader, and he's saying, look, this is the thing that I've always hated and detested, this concept of it's OK just to be average.

This constant brood is what he calls it, prosperous brood of mediocrity.

Philip Brooks made this statement from a book called, I Love Books.

If you've never heard of it, it's by John D.

Any person who desires to be excellent, you need to read that book.

And this is 1 of the quotes from that book, I Love Books.

He says, bad will be the day for every man when he comes, when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is now living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is still, in spite of it all, the child of God.

If there's never something beating at our doors for something better, to say, look, you can do something larger than what you did yesterday.

This concept, he says, when we get to the day, we say, look, the thoughts that I'm thinking today, I'm fine.

The things that I did today, I never have to do anything else, because I've achieved this place of excellence where there's no way to go beyond.

He says, bad will be the day for every man when we reach that place.

Perfection, fortunately, is not the only alternative to mediocrity.

A more sensible alternative is excellence.

Striving for excellence is stimulating and rewarding.

Striving for perfection in practically anything is both neurotic and futile.

Will we ever get to the place where we'll be completely comfortable with what we have done?

It's oftentimes said to us, and we often think it in our minds, that you are your best, you are your worst critic, right?

When no matter what you do, other people may praise you and thank you for what you have done and say, man, it was a blessing.

As a preacher, I typically, when you talk to your friends, Everyone always wants to encourage you when you preach.

Oh yeah, praise the Lord, it was a blessing, it was a blessing.

Really, okay, what do you think I could've improved?

Then people kinda stop and think, and some people, I didn't see anything wrong with it.

I thought it was fine, I thought it was perfect.

So this began to give me personal insight in my experience that I cannot trust the opinions of other people to determine my standard of excellence.

The question of excellence, as we'll look at in the second presentation entitled 100 Percenters, is the concern of what exactly am I talking about when I'm striving for excellence and I'm looking at room for improvement in my own life.

She says, the secret of joy in work is contained in 1 word, excellence.

To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

You know, you think about the things that people who play instruments, when they know how to play that instrument well, they enjoy it, don't they?

I had a friend, he plays the piano, and he sings, he's a tenor.

And when he's stressed, when he's having a rough day, when things are just not going the way that he had wanted them to go, he goes to that piano and he just sings songs.

And the fact that he can play well, no notes, no music, he can play by ear, all these different things and sing at the same time, to know how to do something well is what Pearl seems to define for us as the concept of excellence, learning how to do something well.

Aristotle made this statement, excellence is an art won by training and habituation.

We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, follow his thinking, But we rather have those because we have acted rightly.

Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.

Do you understand what he's trying to say?

So he says, excellence is an art, first of all.

The Heart of Excellence

I know that we're starting about 5 minutes off, so bear with me.

I get excited because excellence is a beautiful topic, especially this presentation.

We're going to look at the heart of excellence.

Because we've talked about the need for excellence, the fact that from our creation God expects us to be excellent.

Then we looked at what does it actually mean to be excellent?

It just means to give 100% to everything we do.

It means to sit down and say, Lord, I'm making up my mind.

From this day forward, I'm going to be a 100 percenter.

I don't care if there's 90 percenters around me.

And this will radically, radically change, not just necessarily the outcomes in our lives, but this has to do with us fulfilling the purpose in our creation.

It has us receiving the likeness of Jesus, appreciating the sacrifice that he gave.

We looked at that last seminar as well, that when God gave Jesus, he gave us how much?

The beauty of the stars, the universe, everything.

And so with that being said, now we want to assess what is the heart of excellence?

What is it that spurs a person on to excellence?

Is it enough to say that, okay, I did well, I have straight A's and all these different things.

Is it enough to say that there's no 1 beyond you?

Is that when we know I've achieved excellence?

So we're going to look at that this afternoon.

With that, before we do that, let's go ahead and have a word of prayer together and we will start our seminar.

Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for this last presentation.

Lord, it is so encouraging to know that excellence, while it is not an option, It is not something that we have ourselves to produce but we can come to Jesus just as we are and Jesus will give us the heart of excellence Bless us now as we study Lord give us wisdom We pray for the Holy Spirit that he would guide us into all truth.

Higher than the highest human thought can Reach is God's ideal for his children.

Godliness, God-likeness is the goal to be reached.

We've heard this statement a hundred times, right?

You say, no, I ain't never heard this before.

If you never heard it before, again, can we shut the doors back there?

So in education, she said, what is God thinking when he's talking about going to school?

And in the book education, we're told that what God is thinking is higher than the highest human thought can reach.

So we looked at 1 aspect of God's godliness or God-likeness is the fact that he's a 100%er.

God gives all to everything that he does.

So he says, if I'm going to save man, he gives all.

He gave everything in Christ and he gave Jesus to us forever.

So God is not just a one-time 100 percenter.

He says, look, I gave you Jesus for eternity.

Can you imagine you go see Jesus and there are angels who knew Jesus before he had his human form.

Every time they look at him they will remember the gift and the love of God Because he'll never, ever look how he used to look.

How earnestly does God want to restore us back to being excellent?

The fact that He was willing to give His only beloved Son should speak to us volumes of how deep and earnest is God's desire to return us back to excellence.

To be 100%ers in everything that we do, and to always excel from glory to glory, higher than the highest human thought can reach.

He says, flatter me and I may not believe you.

All these different things He gives us response, but he says, flatter does not return flatter.

He says, if you ignore me, I may forgive you.

Encouragement doesn't always necessarily return encouragement, but love begets itself.

When you love someone, they want to love you back.

If I ignore you, we'll say like, man, this girl's ignoring me, I'm gonna ignore her too.

You go to the store and you say, a person criticized me, we make sure we criticize them.

Man, I don't know, that seminar you gave, man, was it was kind of slow in the beginning, I wasn't really following you, you were kind of all over the place.

You're sitting there listening like, well, you know, do you think you could do better?

Some of our criticism never leaves our lips, right?

It stays up here, but God heard it, angels recorded it.

Somebody ignores me, like we said, I'll ignore you.

The interesting thing about flattery, and why this statement is so funny, it says, flatter me and I may not believe you.

It's because, did you know that if you flatter someone and it's not even true, they won't necessarily turn away the praise.

The only time we have issues with flattery and praise is when it's given to someone else.

So someone comes to me and says, man, you're the best preacher in the whole state of Tennessee.

Someone comes up to me after this seminar.

There's a whole bunch of good preachers in Tennessee, man.

There's all kind of powerful preachers here.

Da da da da da, we'll try to do this, but in our hearts, it's swelling.

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Series

Sebastian Braxton: Higher Than the Highest

The Heart of Excellence

Transcript

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Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

The Need

53m

The Heart of Excellence

1h

Sound Doctrine