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."

Jesus and spirituality can easily become therapies that merely help us cope with life. They can serve us if we chose Him over other service providers. We even talk about "making Jesus my personal Lord and Savior," as if we could make Him anything!

Christians are driven by God's promises, and directed by God's purposes.

The gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God’s help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father.

How can I trust that the Bible is reliable?

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.

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