Today, we dive into the essence of excellence and conscious reliance on God’s power as we explore insights from John Piper’s profound work, ‘Don’t Waste Your Life.’ Discover the deliberate pursuit of God’s pattern of excellence and how it intertwines with reflecting His glory in every aspect of Catholic education. Join us as we unpack the significance of pointing towards God’s sovereignty and power, aiming to inspire better outcomes and ultimately, glorify His name.
Listen on:
Welcome Aboard
Hey there, my friend, Jonathan Doyle with you once again. Welcome to the Catholic Teacher Daily Podcast. I hope you got to listen to yesterday’s episode. It was a longer one, we just talked about the spiritual battle that is not just taking place in, but is in the essence of every Catholic school. So go check out yesterday’s episode.
Today, I often say you’re familiar with Shark Week on the National Geographic channel. This is “John Piper Week”. John Piper is a protestant evangelist, whose book I just finished reading, “Don’t waste your life.” Pretty unambiguous title, isn’t it? Don’t waste your life. I love this book, which had a big impact on me. A couple of times, I wanted to put it down and not pick it up again. It kept going a couple of times. It’s just this one great big thing, which is that if God is not the focus of just about everything that animates you, then you are playing a smaller game than you could be playing.
The Essence of Our Work
Yesterday, we talked about his concept of schools or secular vocations being a war zone. Today there’s a really cool quote that I want to share with you. It talks about the path of excellence. Why should we try really hard in a Catholic school to be excellent and to bring about excellent outcomes for our young people? So listen to this; he says, “the essence of our work as humans must be that it is done in conscious -that’s very important, they’re conscious- reliance on God’s power. And in conscious quest of God’s pattern of excellence and in deliberate aim to reflect God’s glory.”
So conscious reliance on God’s power, a conscious quest for God’s pattern of excellence and a deliberate aim to reflect God’s glory. So we got conscious twice there, things which we got to be really switched on to. What are the things he thinks we need to be switched on to, a reliance on God’s power.
"...the essence of our work as humans must be that it is done in conscious reliance on God's power, and in conscious quest of God's pattern of excellence, and in deliberate aim to reflect God's glory."
The Call to Excellence
Now I’ve been teaching on this, my keynote back in St. Louis, for almost 10,000 Catholic teachers, really talked about that. The book in which I wrote, Tools and Fuels, was literally about the idea that we’ve got to move from this self-reliance into a reliance on God’s power in the concrete circumstances of daily life.
So to create a great Catholic school, to become an amazing Catholic teacher, principal leader, bishop, cardinal, or supreme pontiff. Or male or female religious I should add, Is a conscious reliance on God’s power.
And the next part is what I really liked, a conscious quest of God’s pattern of excellence. Friends, have you been paying attention? God has excellence dialed in. It’s just the laws of the cosmos and the beauty of creation, the perfection of the human person. Yes, it’s been marred by sin, but it’s going to be redeemed. God invented excellence as a thing. He dialed that in.
If you look at Aristotle‘s ethics, of course you find that Aristotle, of course, in the ethics talks about God as supreme beauty, supreme truth, supreme good. Then Aristotle says, and this all men and women have called God. So as Aristotle explores this kind of theism, he’s basically saying, Look, the supreme perfection of truth, beauty, and goodness is basically God. So God is the perfection of all perfections. He is the excellence of all excellences.
Participating in God's Excellence
So what this means is that we’re participating in that. To teach with excellence, to have pastoral care for young people that is excellent, to want excellence, to want to be brilliant at your work for the right reason.
That comes in the next clause here, the deliberate aim to reflect God’s glory, why do we want to be excellent? We deliberately want to reflect God’s glory. We want to point it back to him. Friends, I can tell you right now here in this studio, what I am trying to do with my own limitations and brokenness. Is to use whatever scraps of skill I might have or scraps of ability, or all the books that I’ve read and all the experience that I’ve had.
I’m not doing this so that you listen and go, “Wow, isn’t Jonathan great? Isn’t he just the most fantastic Catholic education podcaster in the world?” Best I can tell I’m pretty much the only one. So it’s not a big field. My point is, I’m not trying to do this for anyone to like me. I’m not trying to do this even to get more subscriptions. I’m trying to do this because I want to reflect God’s excellence. So I can point you all towards him and his glory.
If you go deeper in the faith, and if I can help with that, that’s just me participating in pointing you towards his glory, because then his glory will manifest in your life and you will be a better teacher and a better leader, and that will lead to better outcomes. All of it will point to his glory that he will be praised.
Pointing Towards God's Glory
Friend, he’s going to be praised anyway. Scripture is really clear: every knee is going to bow, every knee in human history. Every person ever created, every person that ever will be created, will bend the knee in the name of Jesus. And they will confess, to the glory of God, the Father, that He is the Christ. That is going to happen. It is non-negotiable.
I like to say to people, we are all going to bend the knee to the glory of God. The question is, when do you want to do that? As Tony Robbins used to say, ‘when would now be a good time?’ But let’s do it now. Let’s bend our knees to the glory of God. Let’s point people toward the glory of God.
What does the Catholic school exist for? If not to get young people home to the father’s house and to point everybody that comes into contact with us in some way towards the glory, the sovereignty, and the power of God. That’s how I’m doing it.
Friends, it’s early, it’s a weekend, and it’s raining. I’m in this studio because I want to point out to everybody that’s going to listen to God’s glory, his pattern of excellence, and his power.
Conclusion and Call to Action
God bless you. Please make sure you’ve subscribed. If you haven’t, angel’s are crying, and it’s your fault. It’s true, it’s a theological principle, it’s in the canons of the Roman church, somewhere at the back. That failure to subscribe to the Catholic Teacher podcast makes angels cry. And that my friend is on you. If you haven’t subscribed.
Otherwise, everything else you need to know about me is on the website. jonathandoyle.co, and on Instagram, you can find me at @jdoylespeaks. You can book me to speak live to Catholic educators, leaders, and all sorts of stuff that I do. It’s all on my website.
God bless you. My friend’s name is Jonathan Doyle. This has been the Catholic Teacher Daily Podcast. And you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.
