I fly to speak in Cincinnati today and I’m worried. It’s been a rough spiritual year since last October. I find myself asking a lot of questions about a lot of issues and wonder if I have anything of any value ready to say. Since I’ve been to Cincy more than once, in fact some of you reading here may be there when I speak tonight (weird, huh—writing now at 7 AM in Orlando, but will be speaking then at 7 PM in Cincinnati), I have a slight worry that perhaps my inability to have the pizzazz and pop you expect will leave listeners with nothing of spiritual value.
However, that might be best for myself. One of the biggest issues a normal human faces is the challenge of the pursuit and desire of fame. That gets to our pride. A friend emailed last night with a rant against a “Christian celebrity” and their new book and how, in my friend’s view, the entire thrust of this person’s ministry is antithetical to Jesus’ theology. Now, I’m not sure the person in question actually has set out to be a celebrity, but clearly they have achieved a high degree of fame.
This is a huge problem for most leaders I know. I constantly face it in my little world. My way of dealing with it is to be as honest as I can with those that look to me for advice, leadership, guidance. Honest, I mean, about my own weaknesses and failings. In other words, I have to work diligently to scramble back down off of any pedestal that others put me on. It is a tough task, constantly. It’s tough because, at the root of life (for me and most I know), we want to be famous. We equate success with fame. It’s also tough because I like to hide my flaws, probably mostly because of the previous sentence.
This idea of fame or notoriety cuts completely against the grain of what the Bible teaches as the path to real success. One famous partner of Jesus, his cousin John the Baptist, said “I must decrease so he [Jesus] can increase.” Wow—impressive to say, tough to really do. I try to keep that sentence constantly in my mind. But the pursuit of fame, or perhaps I might say the quest to AVOID the ordinary, hits every person I know.
So many students that I work with look at fame as being a key marker for success. I think the opposite is really true. Listen to these words from Oswald Chambers, one of my spiritual heroes:
We do not need the grace of God to withstand crisis—human nature and pride are sufficient for us to face the stress and strain magnificently. But it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of every day as a saint, going through drudgery, and living an ordinary, unnoticed, and ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God—but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life, and holy on the ordinary streets, among ordinary people—and this is not learned in five minutes.
Wow. This is the idea, that, to succeed, we must die to self. We must sacrifice our own wants for the good of others.
Our nature wants fame. For our real growth, to become a truly deep and wise person, we need to embrace our ordinary, and then live in that—something truly extraordinary.