Ask the proficient athlete, artist, businessperson, or homemaker what creates excellence and they'll all agree: a commitment to long-term goals - and with a community of mentors and fellow "disciples."

If you want to be an athlete, there's no way around it: You have to go to the gym. You can't Google your way to it.

The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and narrow, confided to our own immediate knowledge, experience, and intuition. Trying desperately to get others, including God, to make us happy, we cannot seem to catch a glimpse of the real story that gives us a meaningful role.

Ask the proficient athlete, artist, businessperson, or homemaker what creates excellence and they'll all agree: a commitment to long-term goals - and with a community of mentors and fellow "disciples."

Our society trains us to think of marriage as a contractual arrangement. If one party fails to fulfill his or her end, the contract is null and void. Increasingly children are raised in a contractual environment. When contractual thinking dominates our horizon, we can even make Jesus or the church an asset we think we can manage.

To preach the Bible as 'the handbook for life,' or as the answer to every question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached Scripture, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus. For the Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life's dilemmas.

Excellence is being thwarted not only by laziness but by reckless attachment to causes, programs, and - in some cases, leaders.