Excellence Part 1

One thing is sudden.
If you stick to the Word, you will come back with a testimony.
What God wants to give in your life is not a healing.
What God wants to give in your life is not a job.
What God wants to give in your life is not money.
What God wants to give you is the Word of God in your spirits.
It'll make you what it talks about.
And you are shining, and you are shining by the power of the Holy Ghost.
You are shining by the power of the Holy Ghost.
You are shining and nothing can stop you.
It is your season.
It is your time.
Nothing can hinder you.
This is your time.
This is your hour.
Labor is yours.

Life is a series of events which have the ability to form your personality.
You say, I want to be excellent.
Get instability out of your life.
Get on reliability out of your life.
Get in discipline out of your life.
You can have so much ability and yet you're not chosen for something because your character will destroy it.
Discover how to chart your course in life through discipline, stability and reliability as Pastor Chris teaches on becoming the best of you in this message titled excellence.
Becoming the best of you is very very important.
Working on the potentials within your spirit, your personality.
What are those things that are inside you before God can carry you to another level you must cooperate?
Introduce that into your character for your next level of excellence.
Listen and be blessed.
God bless you.
Genesis chapter 49.
from verse 1.
The Bible says that Jacob gathered his sons together in his old age and this was on his dying bed and he was going to speak to them
words, last words that were very important.
And he was going to speak prophetically into their lives.
And he began to address them one by one.
And the first one he spoke to was his first son by the name of Ruben.
And he said, Ruben, you are my first bone, the beginning of my strength, the excellency of wisdom.
Then he said, on stable as water, thou shalt not excel.
And he went on to say, you went up to thy father's bed.
Now, why was Ruben not going to excel even though he was the first born?
Does that happen to people today?
Oh, yes.
He said, you will not excel.
Why?
He said, unstable as water.
The word translated unstable is the Hebrew word pakas.
And what it means
There's twofold.
The first one is the one you have right there, unstable.
The second one actually means unrestrained.
It means to be undisciplined.
One that is unrestrained.
Whose emotions are unrestrained.
Whose behaviors are unrestrained.
That's why the word Pahaz was used in Hebrew.
And he said, because you are unstable, because you cannot be restrained, you are not disciplined, you do what you want to do, you do what you choose.
He said, you cannot excel.
Remember, the Bible says, a man of understanding is of an excellent spirit.
A man of understanding is of an excellent spirit.
And the Bible tells us that understanding helps a man to cultivate discipline.
A man of understanding receives correction.
That means he can be restrained.
A man of understanding can be guided
The Bible says a fool does not accept correction.
He only does his own thing.
And that is what it is to be described as unstable here, the word pakas, meaning unrestrained.
This unrestrained as water.
Like they say, water finds his own level.
You have to build barriers to stop water.
He will enter any way as long as it has the ability to flow.
You have to build barriers to stop it.
And what does the Bible say about a goat?
He said you have to put something on his neck to restrain him.
He is not like a sheep.
You can make a sheep stand with you, but you cannot restrain a goat.
And so God says here, through the prophet Jacob, for the Bible says that Jacob was a prophet of God, he says, on stable as water.
On stable.
And the word on stable also means on dependable.
On dependable.
On dependable as water.
You cannot stand on it.
And the kind of water he's talking about there is foam.
For me water.
Can you sit on for me water?
On stable.
On dependable.
You can't tell him to do something and the rest assured he'll do it.
No.
He's different.
He's not the kind of person.
That's why, in the world, very few people have too much to do.
And too many people have too little to do.
And it happens in various organizations as well.
There are people who have too much to do, too much in their hands.
They need to get other people to do some of them.
You have most of the people doing too little.
You know, sometimes there are people who are critical of other people.
But you see, the ability to take on more all the time because of your performance is an excellent spirit.
It means you are dependable and every time we think about something new we want to do, we're going to have to call you again.
And then there are those who are never called to do something.
Because you say, well, if someone will try me on it, they'll say, I can do it.
No, but why wouldn't they try on it?
The reason they wouldn't try on it is because they tried you on something lesser before, and you messed up.
And nobody wants to give an important thing to somebody who would mess it up.
Sometimes ability and character collide.
You know what that means?
Ability and character collide.
That means that here you have someone who has the ability to perform.
This is what happened to Ruben.
He said, you're the beginning of my strength, the excellency of wisdom.
In other words, all of these things were for you.
All of this was for you.
Think about it.
You can imagine the investment of his father in this young man's life when he was growing up.
But then his character didn't help.
He said, on stable as water.
This was his character.
On stable as water.
Then he said, you shall not excel.
Ruben could not excel.
He was unstable.
Character and ability.
You can have so much ability and yet you're not chosen for something because your character will destroy it.
And that's why we talked about the other day, mental structures.
Mental structures.
What have you built in your mind?
What have you built in your personality?
That's the idea behind education.
Building first mental structures.
If you build mental structures, you will sooner or later see the physical structures.
The important things in life are not the things that most people go for.
That's why you have people with five degrees and their lives still mean nothing.
Because mental structures here don't mean erudite knowledge.
That's not what it means.
Mental structures actually mean that you are
Constructing things within you.
These structures are constructions, not observations, not imaginations, not the reasonings.
The structures, in other words, things that have been built into you that actually control your actions.
So you see that man's life, and you see the outworking of the knowledge that he has gained.
And that's why we talked about practical wisdom.
Phronesis, it is the wisdom of the righteous.
Think about somebody with a great voice, what is untrained.
And so he can't make good music.
Not because his voice is not good, but it's untrained.
He didn't have the discipline to stay with it.
Becoming the best of you is very, very important.
Working on the potentials within your spirit, the potentials within your personality.
What are those things that are inside you?
Let me tell you something.
Inside every one of us is a hidden treasure.
Inside every one of us is a hidden treasure.
Nobody was born without a unique DNA.
Everyone who came into this world came in with a unique DNA.
Everyone.
There's a uniqueness to your personality.
There's something that you carry that nobody else in the whole world carries.
But the important thing is to find one's place and be the best of what you brought.
Be the best of what you brought.
Did you know no job is a low job?
You didn't know that.
There's no job that's a low job.
It's the person behind it.
It's a person behind it.
That gives it authority.
That brings the glory into it.
Let me give you an idea.
Back in the Bible, you had the apostles who were all Jewish, and the Jews were those that were chosen of God.
And by the way, the word Jew was initially applied to Judah, the tribe of Judah, and later on was used for all Israelites, okay?
So that's how they end the name Jew.
it initially referred to those from Judah.
So all the Jews believed because they were told, they were the chosen of God and the rest of the world was unclean.
And this was real.
That's what God said.
All right.
So when Jesus came, he came in as a Jew and he picked these apostles that were with him.
And after he left, there were the ones that were sent out as ministers and the ministers only to the Jews, the Jews that were God's people.
And later, God opened the door for the Gentiles.
We found Peter in Acts, chapter 10, going into the house of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, to preach.
And the Holy Ghost came on that family.
And when Peter got back, the apostles called him, and they rebuked him.
They said, you went into the house of the unclean.
How called you?
How called you?
You have become unclean for entering into their house.
But then he said, Men and brethren, it wasn't my intention to go there.
But I had a vision.
And in that vision, God spoke to me and said, what God has cleansed, do not call, come on.
He said, this happened three times.
And then the Spirit said to me, three men seek you.
Go with them asking no questions.
And that's the way I followed them to the house of this man.
And on getting there, I'd hardly spoken when the Holy Ghost came on them.
And when the Holy Ghost came on them, I couldn't restrain but get them baptized.
And then when they all listened, they said, OK, that means I got also given those Gentiles repentance unto salvation.
All right, well, thank God for them.
But please don't go there again.
And so God raised another apostle by the name of Paul to preach to the Gentiles.
The Gentiles were dirty.
The Gentiles weren't clean.
The Gentiles were sinners.
And then what happened was they
looked at him as a low apostle, one that was to minister to the unaccepted and unacceptable.
And what did he say about it?
He said, I am an apostle to the Gentiles.
I magnified my office.
He recognized to whom he was set.
And he was the one who had to magnify his own office.
He respected his office.
He had to promote his office, his work, for his God.
So he said to the young fellow, unstable as water, he shall not excel.
He wasn't cursed in his son.
No, he was letting understand the result of his character, the result of his attitude to life.
It's not possible to excel when you're unstable.
This week, you're like this next week, you're someone else.
And you just keep flipping, flipping, flipping.
That can't work.
Excellence is for those who make a choice.
You make a choice, and you make the right choice.
Life is a choice.
Excellence is a choice.
It's a choice.
You see, when you develop your spirit for excellence, it's got nothing to do with who's looking at you.
It doesn't matter who's looking at you.
It doesn't matter who spots you.
It's just a choice.
And it'll pay off.
It's just a matter of time.
Life will locate you.
It's just a matter of time.
Remember the words of Jesus, a city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.
That's why he said, let your light so shine that they may see your good works and glorify your Father that's in heaven.
Not just that you'll light your shine.
but that you'll light you so shine.
Let it so shine that you cannot be ignored."
That's the way I made up my mind years ago.
I said, I'm going to so preach it.
I'm going to so do it that we will not be ignored.
I said, that's what I'm going to do.
Doesn't matter what anybody thinks.
We may come in small, we may come in young, we may come in like we don't count.
But we're going to so do what we do in a matter of time we will not be ignored.
That's it.
And I suggest that to you at every point of your life.
do what you do so well, you cannot be ignored.
Because that's what Jesus said.
He said, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father.
So I know you're shining, but are you shining enough?
That's the question you're going to ask yourself today.
I'm shining.
I'm shining, but am I shining enough?
Is it enough to not be ignored?
Is it enough to not be ignored?
There are some people you ignore in certain things and you ignore them to your detriment.
You hear what I mean?
Because they're so important to what they do.
They do it so good.
And if you ignore them, it is to your detriment.
So you better not ignore them in your own interest.
Why don't you be that man?
Indispensable.
Such that those who feel like they want to ignore you would do it to their own hurt.
Because they don't have to fight for it.
But they need you.
They need you, that's upon.
You're gonna make yourself so needed.
So needed.
Now, I mean like a fellow one time, you know, he knew certain things, he knew how to do some things, and he wouldn't want to teach anybody.
So he'd be the only one who knows it.
That's wrong.
That's not from God.
Let me give you a secret.
The more you teach, the more you learn.
Because it's a principle, teaching is giving.
Teaching is imparting knowledge.
And what Jesus said, give, and it shall be given unto you.
So the more you give, the more you receive.
So it works the same way when you teach others what you know.
When you teach them what you know, your reservoir of knowledge expands to receive more.
But when you don't teach others what you know,
And you're the only one who knows that saying?
Your world closes upon you.
So that's a secret.
It's a secret that only smart people know, so practice it.
But it to work.
Try to teach someone else something you know.
And be excited at doing it.
Well, what if they get better than me?
Well, there's nothing wrong.
Why?
Like somebody is getting better than you.
Gotta open some of the channel.
He'll open up some of the channel for you.
You say, I'm going to be excellent.
I'm going to be excellent.
I'm not going to be unstable.
I'm going to be reliable.
I'm going to put reliability into my character.
Reliability.
I'm going to put it into my character.
I'm going to introduce it into my character.
How instill in me reliability.
Make up your mind for that.
Decide for that.
Decide for that.
I'm going to be reliable.
You know, a lot of people who come to work are not reliable.
Whether they are artisans or whatever.
Most are not reliable.
Even out there in the hospitals, so the doctors are not reliable.
They expect to come at 5 p.m.
and don't show up.
Why?
They're pursuing someone business somewhere.
Unreliable.
Unreliable.
Unstable.
How can they excel?
The Bible says, on stable as water, they shall not excel.
You say, I want to be excellent.
Get instability out of your life.
Get on reliability out of your life.
Get in discipline out of your life.
Be controllable.
I told you the word pakaz means uncontrollable, unrestrenable.
That's the word pakaz from where unstable was translated, uncontrollable.
Are you that kind of person that your boss cannot talk to because you are
Like they say, nobody can talk to him.
Nobody can talk to her.
She does her own thing.
She does what she wants on stable as water.
That description is not a good one.
I mean, you are heady.
No one can restrain you.
You're going to do what you choose to do.
You may enjoy it.
You may like the description.
You know, sister so-and-so nobody talks to her.
Nobody controls her.
Brother so-and-so nobody controls you.
Pastor so-and-so nobody controls you.
Nobody controls her.
He does what he wants.
She does what she wants.
It's not a good description.
Your description is in the book.
Unstable as water.
Uncontrollable as water.
And what is the verdict?
You shall not excel.
with great ability, he said, the excellence of wisdom.
That's what he called him, the beginning of my strength.
And with all of that, he could not excel.
So what are you going to do with your life?
Like they say, if a child doesn't raise his hands like this, you can carry him.
If you force him, if you carry him like that,
You would drop him by yourself.
In other words, the child has to cooperate if you're going to carry you.
Before God can carry you to another level, you must cooperate.
You see, your cooperation is that yielding yourself to authority, yielding yourself to be controlled, to be restrained, to be guided.
Be reliable.
Introduce that into your character for your next level of excellence.
Did you hear me?
Introduce that into your character for your next level of excellence.
Say this with me.
I'm moving to my next level of excellence.
Are you?
We're going to find out
We're going to find out.
It's a matter of time.
It's a matter of time.
We're going to find out.
We're going to find out.
In the short while shall we pray.
May God spirit rest upon you.
May his blessings be multiplied in your life.
May his glory
Work out the purposes of God in you.
May the character of the Word of God be manifested in your life.
Today, I pray that the words that we have shared will live through you as your journey in your next level of excellence.
Won't ship him, thank him.