- This is part of a series on the theme of commitment. -

Thousands of years ago, God asked, “Who is he who will devote himself to be close to me?” (Jeremiah 30:21). We don’t want to hear it, but the fact of the matter is that following God involves sacrifice, effort, devotion. We much prefer the spiritual growth plans that guarantee complete maturity in “15 minutes a day!”

Mark Oppenheimer has written of the proliferation of these mistaken ideas regarding what is truly involved in personal life-change. These false notions can be found in everything from the Chicken Soup for the Soul books to WWJD bracelets to the awe-inspiring angelic visitations received in the lives of television characters. It all sounds good, but there’s never any kind of demand or call for commitment or life-change involved. “Just Do It” doesn’t really mean, “Just run 100 miles every week like marathon runners do.” “Just Do It” means, “Just buy the shoes – swift feet sure to follow.”[1] As if you’ll become magically fit simply by purchasing the proper footwear.

Leaders know that this is not so. Leaders know that such behavior used to have a name; it was called sloth. In “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” Dorothy Sayers said,

In the world it is called tolerance, but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is mortal sin.[2]

Leaders know the truth of Theodore Roosevelt’s words: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” There is a great danger in our time of succumbing to mediocrity not through incompetence or a lack of integrity but simply from a lack of genuine commitment. To live without such commitment is to live in that “gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

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[1] Mark Oppenheimer, “Salvation Without Sacrifice,” Charlotte Observer, 30 October 2000, sec. 11A.

[2] Dorothy Sayers, “The Other Six Deadly Sins: An Address Given to the Public Morality Council at Claxton Hall, Westminster, on October 23^rd, 1941,” (London: Methuen, 1943).

• The danger of succumbing to mediocrity from a lack of genuine commitment.

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