Excellence

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of excellence. This is a little bit of a continuation of last week's episode where we talked about purpose and motivation. It was inspired by a conversation Cory and I were having sometime in the last week where we were discussing what the new Earth might be like with regard to our bodies, the perfection of our bodies, to what degree speculatively might they become more excellent than they are? Purely you know idle speculation, and I don't know if we'll even get into it today, but it made me realize something that inspired this episode, which is that there is a feminization that has

1:18 taken place in the culture that we're all participants in, men and women. And when I say feminization, I'm not being insulting to women here, but there is a particular aspect of the female psyche that we've talked about on several occasions, including the leadership episode most conspicuously. Women have a tendency towards equalization, towards egalitarianism. Where if someone is superior by some measure, the tendency is to be a crap in a bucket. It's just inherent to how girls interact socially with each other. It's just how it works. And the feminization aspect that concerns us here this week is that that has entered into how all of us think and talk about everything around us, such that when we see something that is more

2:06 excellent by whatever degree the tendency is to tear it down. When you see something excellent, you don't say, Wow, that's amazing. I'm impressed. I'm blessed to have seen this incredible thing, to have seen someone do something at their peak. Just blew me away. I can't believe they were able to do that as a human being. But there it is, I saw with my own eyes. That should be the approach and the response that we naturally have. And yet we're in a position civilizationally where the normal response from even decent decent men otherwise is to tend to want to tear it down and say, well, that's not that impressive. I could do that. Like it's whatever. It's no big deal. He that he that was easy.

2:44 there's nothing to what I just saw. That is, we think, a real problem because when you look at how scripture exemplifies excellence, it's often lauded as you know the pinnacle. You know, there's a word that's used in Greek that is translated sometimes excellence in in the New Testament. Most of those cases involve I think we'll link in the show notes if you look. Like we're not gonna do a big word study. There's not some fiddly Greek etymology point here. It's just a matter of in the New Testament when God speaks of excellence, often it's related to moral excellence, which everybody's fine with. We're fine with the most excellent, the most moral, the best, most sinless version of whatever. Where this feminization causes us to fall down is that the first

3:35 example of that word in Greek that's being used for good or excellent is in Genesis one thirty one, where after God says God saw that it was good, God saw that was good, God saw that it was good, on the last day, God saw that it was very good. After creation was completed, it could be reasonably translated that word very good, the two words meaning very good, you could have translated excellent. It was correctly done very good to differentiate between the good good good. I'm not trying to say that the translation's wrong, but it does mean excellent, just like it means in the New Testament. And what's vital about noticing that is that when God in effect called creation excellent after he finished it, there was no actual moral

4:16 action taking place. It was just a bunch of stuff. He created man, he created all the stuff, and he saw that it was very good. And then he rested. If we exclusively limit the notion of excellence to moral excellence, then we can't appreciate anything that's just impressive. You know, a sunset, like, oh that was pretty, but you know, whatever. We end up being casual and we end up being irony poisoned by seeing things that are genuinely impressive and genuinely good and beautiful. When you look at the philosophy that was involved in those words at the time that scripture was written, it ties directly into the transcendentals. The discussion of excellence is directly tied to what is good, beautiful,

5:03 and true. All these things are bound up. And so, in a roundabout way, when we today, in effect, I'm talking as Christians here, we have a tendency to deny that a man can have done something excellently, that a man can have performed in sports or in music or politics, anything that is an endeavor of man, to say that that guy did excellently, he's an excellent example, we get really nervous because we try to think in moral terms. And so the reason for discussing this today is to not to talk about works righteousness or any nonsense like that. If you're excellent at something and you're not gonna save yourself. And there's no excuse for not being morally excellent. That's the one case among all of them where falling short is

5:54 falling short of the glory of God, and that's sin. Christ died for that. But if you're not an excellent baseball player, that's not sin. That's someone else doing a whole lot better. And so when we see excellence, we should celebrate it, but we shouldn't think that it doesn't exist. Christians have gotten into this bizarre mindset. Again, I believe it's downstream from feminism causing girls to enter into all these spaces where they're part of how we're interacting, how we're assessing everything that we see. And bit by bit, this notion of crabs in a bucket where if you see something better, you can't just appreciate it for how good it is. So the first part of this episode is just an exhortation to

6:36 admire excellence. You know, one of the most recent examples is I've talked about before. And then people get mad at me for saying I'm a fanboy. I have a thousand bad things to say about Elon Musk, but you cannot deny the excellence of the engineering achievements that he has accomplished in numerous companies. Even if you think they're a waste, even if you think it's completely retarded to go to Mars, and the fact that Starship, you know the booster itself is two hundred and thirty three feet tall, that tower basically flying into space like a building when these huge objects then come back down and land and they're captured by a pair of chopsticks. The first time that that was done, I left.

7:16 I like I watched in rapt attention, not to see it succeed, but to see it blow up. Because there's no way that something like that can happen the first time. And in the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve of I was gonna say Steve Jobs, Elon's the same kind of guy. In Elon's biography, they describe where the notion of capturing the starship with the tower came up, where he brought it up in a meeting, and all of Elon's engineers who were like some of the very best engineers in the world of doing this stuff basically argued with him for an hour and said there's no way that the tower is gonna be able to capture starship. Because the problem that they were trying to solve was how do they land it?

7:56 Because they wanted to reuse the thing and reuse it rapidly. And Falcon 9 has little legs, little tripod legs that come out. But Starship is so much bigger that putting the same kind of legs on there was going to add a ton of weight and a ton of complexity, which makes everything, you know, means you get less payload orbit. It means it's just everything's harder. And so just brainstorming, Elon said, Well, what if we have the tower catch it? And they talked about different ideas and came up with what they called the Mechazilla chopstick thing, where you have two big arms that would actually catch the rocket as it fell from space. And as engineers like that's insane, we can't do that. We don't know how and they decided in that meeting they were

8:39 gonna do it. And it took them years. And so when we watched that happen for the first time, no one had ever seen it. It was science fiction. It was completely ridiculous the notion that you could just catch a giant spaceship with a pair of chopsticks as it fell to the ground. And that does exactly what they did on the very first try. That is us being privileged to witness excellence in those endeavors and engineering and rocketry, literal rocket science, absolutely amazing that that was accomplished. And it doesn't matter if you think of going to Mars as retarded. Especially, frankly, if you think that everything that he's doing with Starship is stupid and a waste of time, the reason we're doing this

9:21 episode is that that person who gets angry when they see this misallocation of resources, misallocation of talent, not even making the case for whether that's a good thing. If you think that it was stupid that they tried, you in particular are bound to respect the fact that they did it. Because you have every reason to dislike it, but you cannot disregard the fact that they pulled it off. We witnessed excellence. We witnessed something that no one thought was possible, including his own experts. Like nobody thought it was possible until they decided to do it and they just did it and they made it work. When we talk about excellence in one sense, that's what we mean. To see something so amazing that you can't believe your own eyes.

10:01 I've watched that video fifteen times and I cheer every time because it's incredible. I have the vaguest notion of the complexity and the effort that went into that. And so I'm not cheering for like Mars or anything. I'm happy to see men doing the very best work that anyone's ever done in that sort of thing. And I don't even care about the practical applications. I care about seeing something done so well that it seems impossible that it even happened. The opposite response, the typical response, and the response I see a lot of time, which is why I'm mentioning this specific example is that guys will say, Oh, that's no big deal. Like that's that wasn't that hard. It was dumb. It was a waste of time.

10:40 I don't see anything there. This is a deranged response to excellence. It's a corrupt, it's a spiritually corrupt response. It's an utterly feminine crabs in a bucket response to see one of the coolest things that's ever happened. Like just it's friggin' cool. A rocket fell from space and they caught it and recycled it. That's insane. And we saw it. You should think that that's cool. You know, I'm acting like a spaz here. Like it's just obviously this is an amazing thing. Even if the idea, even if their purpose is dumb, the fact that they pulled it off is insanely cool. Most people, it seems like a loudmouth, have this innate desire to tear that down, to see something impressive that even Elon's best guys

11:25 didn't think were possible until they pulled it off. To see that and to want to tear it down, that's what's spiritually corrupt. It's got nothing to do with thinking that going to Mars is stupid or whatever, fine. Don't care. To think that to see something like that is just dumb in I don't care, I'm not impressed at all, that's a sickness. When the Michael Crichton novel Westworld was turned into an HBO series, it became a very HBO thing, it was pornographic and extremely violent. I'm not recommending it, but I did watch it. And from the very beginning there's an element that's relevant to this. The premise of Westworld was there was an amusement park, a theme park Where there were these so-called hosts, there were androids.

12:07 They were perfect simulacra of humans. So there you couldn't tell whether someone was a human or an android. And one of the ways that they kept this theme park working was that these androids that were told they were programmed to believe they lived in the 1800s in the old west. One of the tests the the maintainers of the park would would perform on them to make sure they were performing correctly, according to their programming, was to determine whether or not they'd been contaminated by any outside knowledge of the future, or the present, in the case of the people visiting. So periodically they would pull one of the hosts out of the park and they would show it a picture of a skyline, a modern skyline with future sick skyscrapers and things, or some example of

12:51 technology. And they would ask 'em, what do you see in this picture? And the host not having any knowledge of the future would look at it. And if they were performing correctly, if they were not buggy, the response was, I don't see anything at all. And I think that's what we are dealing with today where people when they see something excellent, there's this pull, there's this programming that's entered people's minds to see something amazing and excellent and laudable, something that's worthy of respect and just to respond to I don't see anything at all. And the way that manifests is usually derision, is to tear it down and to be nasty about it. So the purpose of doing this episode is to say things that

13:35 are excellent are worthy of adulation and of respect. Even if you don't want to give Elon adulation, that's fine. But you have to respect the accomplishment because it was something incredibly difficult, something that was pulled off with perfect precision. It's okay for us to recognize that. It doesn't diminish us the fact that we can't do it. I can't do that. We'll get to that at the end, that when we see these moments of excellence in all various fields, we have to get aside from this notion that if someone does something really well that you are diminished, we're actually privileged to witness excellence. We are made better in the witnessing that thing, even in the contrast to our mundane lives, things that we couldn't possibly do are

14:18 still a testament to how valuable hard work and brilliant ideas are when it's all combined into one piece. And again, that's whatever field you could pick art, music, you know, we're using some examples that are public performances, public examples, because that's a case where we're all looking in the same direction. We're We're all looking at something to see is this going to succeed or fail? You know, who's going to win the World Series? Is this rocket going to crash? Is this Soprano going to hit the high note? Whatever it is, you want them to succeed, hopefully, but even if you want them to fail, you have to respect when they succeed. All the more if you think that they're gonna beef it, it's

14:58 not gonna work out, and they actually pull it off and you were wrong about it. Show them some respect. Show the fact that someone did something way better than you could is a reason for us to celebrate. Because these are some of the things that make this life worth living. These moments of excellence, these moments that show us our How much better we can all be when we are gifted by God and when we do hard work and when we're pursuing specific purposes that are you know laudable. You know, for the argument of last week's episode, we're not going to tell you what that laudable godly purpose should be. Just going to assume that you're working towards something good. You know, if someone is a serial killer, we call them prolific.

15:43 We don't call them excellent. The notion of excellence always inherently has some positive moral aspect to it. Something is not excellently done if it's gross or bad or harmful. There are other words that you can describe it, but you don't say someone's an excellent serial killer. It's the opposite. Excellence has nothing to do with that. So even in the way that we speak about bad things, we sort of understand that there's an inherent moral tenor to just seeing something good. And even if it's something as mundane and you know corporately poisoned as major league sports, to see something well executed is still worthy of respect. And I think as Christians and as decent men, we need to get it out of our heads that we should be sitting on

16:27 the sidelines and sniping and making snide ironic comments when we see things that are glorious. It doesn't diminish God it doesn't diminish God's glory to say that there's glory in this life for certain things. God even uses these many examples of you know the runner's wreath when he finishes the race first. These are examples from this life that are not condemned as amoral in scripture to help us understand heavenly things. If you despise the earthly things, how can you possibly have a connection to the heavenly thing? Excellence sets an example and it's an inspiration and it's a privilege when we witness it. Somewhere in the world there is a man who is the best at building with Legos. That's a trivial example of excellence, but it's still a form of

17:16 excellence because it obviously took him time. He had to invest in the ability to do that, he had to figure out how to do it, and some of the constructions using Legos Legos or similar things, or Lego as the company would prefer we call the plural, I believe. Those are impressive. That is a form of excellence, and as Will highlighted in his introduction, some forms of excellence are of a trivial sort. They're not necessarily launching a rocket and capturing it with what amount to metal chopsticks. But it is still a form of excellence, and again, you are not diminished by the fact that there is someone somewhere in the world who is better at Lego than you are. There is some level at which you could do that same sort

18:06 of thing. Perhaps it's not as good as he is, perhaps it's better, it just depends. But there is an excellence with regard to that, just like there is an excellence in basically every field of human endeavor. The The most common example and the one that is perhaps the most readily grasped is indeed professional sports, because that's something that we can all see. And it's something that we all recognize when we see it. Because we can look at those who perform at that level and see something that if we're honest with ourselves at least, we recognize we could never do. Now perhaps we could be better than we are. Certainly, if I spent more time practicing tennis, I would be better than I am now.

18:48 But I'm never going to be a world champion with regard to tennis. God has given out gifts to different men in different measure. He may have given you intellect, he may have given you aptitude with regard to sports. Whatever it happens to be, and we talked about this in the episode God's Gifts, Man's Duties to a Certain Degree, which is part of what factors into this. But in every field of human endeavor, there is going to be someone who is the best at any given time, and there's going to be someone who was or will be the best historically, perhaps he's living now, hardly to tell depending on the field. Just because that person is excellent in that field, you are not diminished, which is part of what we are attempting to tamp down

19:38 to exterminate if we can with this episode, you should not view yourself as being diminished by the fact that there are those who are better at certain things than you are. That's going to be the case in almost any endeavor you pursue. There will probably be someone who is better at it. Until perhaps if you are the one who eventually becomes the best in that field, it will have taken you decades of practice, and you will be on top for a certain period of time. We could think of perhaps chess. The highest ranked grandmaster in the world usually doesn't stay there for very long. There are some historical exceptions, of course, but those men were truly exceptional. By and large, sports again a very good example.

20:24 If you are the top in a particular sport, you're not going to be there for very long just because of the biological reality of aging. Someone else will replace you. But there is a form of excellence with regard to being at the top or anywhere near the top. This is in fact something that has been brought up a number of times with regard to the Olympics, and there's something to the argument, it's perhaps tongue in cheek to some degree, but there are those who have argued that we should have an average person person in every single one of the events just to compare. And that might actually help because when we're only looking at those who are the absolute top of the field, perhaps it's a little

21:07 bit difficult for us to recognize the level of excellence that we are viewing and to have that right response of admiration for that achievement because we're not being honest with ourselves and looking at how well and how highly those individuals are performing compared to what we could do or an average person could do, assuming you're an average person in the endeavor. If you're just looking at the top five or six tennis players in the world, you're comparing them to each other instead of to an average player. An average player would be completely demolished by the top leagues in any sport. You would score zero points. You probably wouldn't even return the serve. But it's difficult to see that when it's just the top players

21:55 against each other. But we have to be honest with ourselves and recognize that we're not the best in every Every field. We may not be the best in any field. And there's nothing wrong with that. Again, you are not diminished by the fact that there are those who are excellent in their fields of endeavor. And I want to distinguish two different things here that are related and feed into each other, but the reason I want to distinguish them is that in the modern mind, natural talent has been downplayed to some certain extent. And the reason for this is envy. And really, that's sort of the core in a way of the episode that we are doing today. We are arguing against envy because there are those who become envious

22:42 of others when those others have been given certain talents above and beyond what the person himself has been given. So you look at this other and go God gave him exceptional athletic ability. He is excellent in this field, at least in part, because of the gifts given him by God. If you look at that with envy, that's sinful. You should not do that as a Christian. You must not do that as a Christian. But at the same time, it is destructive to yourself and to society. That is not the way that we should view this. That's the crabs in a bucket thing. When you have that envy, mentally you are attempting to tear that man down. Instead of recognizing this as an example of excellence, to which others

23:25 can aspire, to which you can aspire to a certain degree, to whatever degree you have the ability to do that, but on top of that natural talent, there is also the acquired skill. Because it is insufficient in almost any field simply to have that natural talent. Now there are some fields in which the natural talent counts for more than in other fields. But in essentially any field, you are also going to have to acquire knowledge or skill. And I'll say knowledge or skill because perhaps God has given you intellectual talents. You're going to have to acquire knowledge in a particular field to become the top in that field. It doesn't matter how good you are at math, if you know nothing about calculus, you You're not going to be a very good

24:12 mathematician. That's acquired knowledge, the equivalent of acquired skill in a sport, which yes, there's knowledge as well in sports. Obviously, it's not just all skill. But it's a combination of that natural talent and the acquired skill that makes individuals the top in their field. And you should not envy those whom God has given greater natural talent. That natural ability again is a gift from God, and Scripture is very clear, that God does not hand out these gifts equally. We've gone over this in a number of episodes previously. Part of this is your inheritance, your patrimony, you receive these things from your ancestors. There are certain subgroups of humans who are better at sprinting.

25:00 There are certain subgroups of humans who are better at long distance running. There are some who are better at hand eye coordination. These things are gifts from God that are handed down generationally. You have that as part of your patrimony if you have whatever particular skill it happens to be. It's not a matter of envy. It can be a matter of jealousy. It is something that you should certainly guard because that is important, and we went over the distinction between those in a previous episode. But it is not a matter of envy because you do not look at those to whom God has given these gifts and think I have to tear that man down because he is diminishing me. A good example of this, a more concrete example.

25:44 While we are recording this episode and every episode, we are using a handful of different technologies that we did not create. Now in Wo's case he did help with some of it because we are both using Macs, but we didn't design the processors, we didn't design the storage, in this case SSDs, we didn't create the microphones or the underlying technology. We're not the ones who figured out how to use electricity to do these things. And the list goes on and on, from the monitors down to the buttons on the control pad I use to mute and unmute my mic. Not one of these things would exist without men who were excellent in their fields. I'm not diminished by the fact that those men were excellent in a way that I am not, in a field in which I

26:36 am not excellent. In a field in which I will never be excellent, I have no interest in pursuing those fields. Even if say I could pursue them, I'm not going to pursue them, and maybe I couldn't reach the level that they reached. We are all benefiting from the fact that those men were excellent in their fields. Far from being diminished, this podcast wouldn't exist. No podcast would exist. So many other things would not exist if not for those men whom God gifted a certain natural talent and then they acquired the additional knowledge to be the top of their fields, to be excellent in their fields. That is how we should view excellence with regard to any field. With regard to sports, you can view that person as sort of

27:27 a figure, someone in the field, something to which you can aspire if you are interested in that sport, if it's a sport that you happen to play, or whatever it happens to be. You can look at the top player of a game, it could be poker. And if you are a poker player, you can aspire to that level of excellence in that field. Again, this is every field. These are all positive again as well as Woe was saying in his introduction, excellence carries with it a moral connotation. Excellence is only with regard to things that are good. That doesn't mean things that are sort of the moral height of human achievement to perhaps abuse the term there. The example I gave of using Lego. Is that moral or not?

28:16 Yes, but not in the sense that we usually employ moral. It's not in the sense of following the Ten Commandments. It's in the sense of being something that is constructive. It is not destructive. That's the moral distinction that we are drawing. And so the things that are constructive are morally good. They can have an excellence. You can be excellent at them. And again, that is whether it is something as trivial as building something with Lego or capturing a spaceship that you designed, or any other human endeavor. And that is another point that I would like to make with regard to excellence. There are different levels, different kinds really of human achievement. Some are more excellent than others.

29:05 Not all fields, not all endeavors, not all achievements are equal. There is inequality even with regard to being excellent. And so if you are excellent at Lego, that's not as impressive as being The top of the field in mathematics. The man who is the best at theoretical math is achieving a level of excellence that is different, that is greater than the excellence of building with Lego. I don't mean to beat up on Lego, but it's just an easy example for this. It's very concrete we can all recognise what it is, because virtually everyone listening to this podcast has at some point held Legos or stepped on one. But different fields are not identical in terms of the excellence in that field. It is more excellent to achieve certain things than to achieve others.

29:57 This is again something that we should celebrate. We should recognize that greater degree of excellence, and be thankful for it. That's something that God has given to us, because we all benefit from excellence of other men in other fields, whether it is the technology that we are using, the medicine that helps us to live longer and healthier lives, the man who designed the pen that I use in order to write my notes for the show, whatever it happens to be, we all benefit from that excellence, and it is a gift from God of which we should not be envious, and certainly which we should not seek to tear down. One last example from sports. I looked these stats up on Grok because I don't really pay

30:43 attention to baseball. I don't like baseball. But as Corey's saying, these sorts of things are prime examples we can all understand. I'd imagine virtually everyone listening has swung a baseball bat a couple times. So I looked up on Grok. It's entirely possible these aren't precise. I'm giving a general illustration of a type. So if you're a super baseball nerd, please don't hate me. I'm not misleading anybody. What I did was looked up the World Series from 2024 between apparently the Dodgers and the New York Yankees. I was curious about the performance of the batters because batting percentages are something that I think is often used in example, you know, batting a thousand. It's a baseball metaphor that's applies in in all sorts of cases.

31:26 And the stats that I looked up indicated that the average batting rating for the winning team for the Dodgers for the World Series last year was two twenty-nine, which is abysmally low. If you're batting two twenty nine, you're probably not gonna get into the major leagues in the first place. And I was also curious about watching the number of ab bats for any given player. And again, this is just very rough math, but it's gonna be typical. In the World Series, in a given game, a batter was gonna be up an average of three to five times. It was on average gonna swing between four and eight times and had an average of two twenty-nine. So the reason I highlight this is that if you did happen to watch those baseball games, or you watch any baseball game, you're

32:12 gonna see something similar to that. You're gonna see one guy come up probably no more than half a dozen times, most of the time. He's probably not gonna swing the bat more than a dozen times on average, and he's going to miss almost all of those pitches. And so for us sitting on our butts on our couches watching that, it's very easy for us not to see the excellence inherent in being Los Angeles Dodger or a New York Yankees player. The average salary for the winning team was around six million dollars. And for that and the most important games of their life, they batted 229. They missed almost all their pitches. If you're sitting there watching them and you're thinking, I could do that. I've swung a bat, I've I've hit a ball pretty good.

32:56 Some of you maybe even played in the minor leagues or something. I doubt we have any major league listeners. Just by virtue of how rare that is. It's not that this punkest would or wouldn't appeal. It's just there's so few guys at that level of excellence to even be able to be in the room. The very worst player in MLB is better than all of us of baseball. And he's the worst. of all his teammates, of all the teams, the very worst guy does a better job than us. He's excellent enough to be in the MLB. And the minimum salary for the league is seven hundred forty thousand dollars. He's getting paid seven hundred forty thousand dollars to do a terrible job at being a professional ball player. Now the worst guy in the league gonna get sent down and

33:37 somebody's gonna replace him because there's always competition because of the degree of excellence that's manifest at the highest levels. Again, sports is just an example that can be given because we all are aware of it. That sort of excellence, that sort of competition is present everywhere. And And the irony poisoning that's endemic, particularly to my cohort of my generation. I'm a very young Xer. I basically grew up with older millennials. JD Vance and Pete Hegsith are about my age. We all probably watched the same cartoons and TV shows as a kid. Probably ate the same cereals. We had the same experience. So I can tell you from firsthand experience, having lived very similar childhoods to them in time is that when you watch them on

34:24 camera and they are sincere and they're earnest and they're approaching things from a very pragmatic perspective. They're not screwing around the reason I'm highlighting them is that my generation was completely irony poisoned. Irony and sarcasm were our native tongue. And I've gotten most of it out of my system. I used to be really good at it. I wasn't nearly as bad as some, but we all grew up that way. Just being completely ironic about things. Saying one thing, meaning the other, you know, the way it manifests in particular when we're talking about excellence is tearing it down. And it was never sincere. It was always smug. It was too cool for school approaches to whatever you saw. You're not going to get excited.

35:10 You're not going to have a sincere response to seeing something cool. You're just going to shrug and say, whatever, I've seen better. I could do better. Like whatever. It's the dismissiveness coming from that irony and sarcasm has mostly gone away the way it was when you know we were kids. But what replaced it was something that in some ways is even worse, which is the sincere form of well that's nothing at all. I saw a rocket fall from heaven and be captured by the very same launcher that sent it up that way. Some people will look at that and say, I don't see anything at all. They're like the android that's been programmed not to see excellence, not to see anything better than its own world, its own existence.

35:55 It's this programmed blinders that prevent an entire generation of people younger than mine, although I think we've all pretty much adopted it. Is the idea that if you see something that's genuinely excellent, sarcasm and irony have mostly gone away. Now it's very sincere. And it will take a couple different forms. The Christian version of this poison is to say, well, that's not for the glory of God. That's not for God's kingdom, so that doesn't matter at all. Which is deranged. That's not what you find in scripture. Because again, we're not talking about how we are saved. It's absolutely true that the way that God saves us is manifest solely on the cross. And we receive that by faith. We talk about it all the time to point out that whenever

36:41 we say anything good about anything else, whenever we try to point at excellence elsewhere, we're not diminishing the cross. We can't do that. You can't diminish the cross by pointing to something else good in creation. That, frankly, is profoundly blasphemous to point at God's perfect work on the cross and say, well, some baseball player did a good job, so the cross is threatened. Are you kidding me? That's never anyone's rational thought. You know, this is the default position of Christians in the church today. It's the most I had somebody yesterday criticize one of my posts when I rebutted his dumb point. He's like, You think this is for the glory of God? It doesn't have anything to do with an argument or a discussion.

37:23 There's this mode of thought that has captured the Christian mind where anything that I don't like can't be excellent, it can't be good, it can't be beautiful or true. Either it's about the cross or it's a lie. It's from it's worldly and we gotta just dismiss it. The purpose of this episode is to say that that's disgusting. That's not right. That's not Christian. It's not sane. It's not rational. There's nothing good about that programmed response. It's not universal, but it's incredibly common. This will come up all the time where people will, if you're going back and forth with someone about anything as a Christian, you're Christian, you can say you're Christian, they say they're a Christian, and

38:04 they don't like whatever it is that you're saying here's a good example of something, they'll just say, Well, that's not about the cross, that's not the gospel, that's not about heaven, that that I don't see anything at all. There's nothing good or beautiful or true there. There's nothing excellent there because it has nothing to do with salvation. I can't say any more clearly. This is not how God speaks about anything. When God gives us specific examples of moral conduct, yes, absolutely, excellence and moral conduct is the benchmark. And Christ is a benchmark who led the perfect life precisely because none of us can. And no matter how hard we try and how much we care and how much we love God, we will never perfect in this

38:46 life our ability not to sin. We are given faith and we are given through sanctification the ability to sinless, to resist specific individual daily sins, to be tempted and to realize it, and say not today Satan, I don't want anything to do with that. But in the long run, every day, every week, every month, every year, for the rest of your life, you're going to sin. And that's why we point to the cross. That is why Christ is there pouring out his blood and his sacrifice for the fact that we can't live a perfect life. So excellence morally is always going to pale in comparison to godly living, to God's example of godly living. That doesn't mean that godly living doesn't exist. And it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be an example to us.

39:32 But in other aspects of life, it's not a question of falling short of the glory of God to say that, well, I'm not a major league baseball player, and so what that guy is doing is stupid and dumb and it's not that impressive anyway. He hit two twenty nine the World Series. What a joke. You can't be disrespectful of excellence. For someone to have done something that difficult that well for that long to tear them down and to say, well, by my standards, that's nothing at all. It's perverted. It's spiritually perverted. And it's common among believers and unbelievers alike. And the only difference is, you know, kind of what attack they'll take. Everyone's gonna say, well, that's stupid and dumb and I could

40:13 do that. And additionally, Christians will pile on with the additional blasphemy of, well, that's not even the gospel. So you're not allowed you can't like that. You can't think that Legos are fun. You can't think that this art is worthwhile. That's gross and you're not allowed to do that because it's not in the Bible. This is not Christian living. We have to do better. And we have to root it out of our own hearts and our minds and the way we think. This episode is a meta-episode about how we process the world around us. Because when you see excellence, if your first instinct is to tear it down and be derisive, you're making the world a worse place. And then when you bring Jesus into and say, well, this

40:52 thing that someone did well that's laudable, that's morally above reproach, but it doesn't spread the gospel, so I'm gonna say something nasty about it, that's not permissible. That is in fact an anti-testimony for the cross. When you're doing that sort of thing in public where non-Christians can see you, and every time someone does anything good, you attack it, and you say, Well, as a Christian, I'm gonna tell you that this isn't how Jesus saved us. So you got to stop that. That makes you miserable. It's not good company. It's not a good Christian example. It's everything wrong. It's destroying the gospel when Christians act this way. And yet increasingly it seems like that's almost all that we see.

41:35 And so, you know, we're talking about excellence. This will not be the most excellent episode that Stone Choir has ever done, and that's fine. Well the earliest episode that we did was on forgotten doctrines and scripture, and we highlighted five specific examples of doctrines that just kind of fell by the wayside. We don't do them anymore. We look at the Bible. We read scripture and we read these passages where it says things like, shake the dust off your feet is a curse against those who reject the gospel. And what do we do? We don't see anything at all. We're the Westworld android that's looking right at God's word saying to do something. And for basically 2,000 years, no Christians ever seen that or read

42:17 that. And as we said in that episode over two years ago, I don't know what to do with that. I look at that passage and say, well, it's there. There's clearly there's some doctrinal element to this, particularly because the apostles did it. There are two examples in scripture of them obeying that to the letter, and they had just went away. We don't curse at people anymore for rejecting the gospel. God says to and we don't. So as we said in that episode about forgotten doctrines, neglected doctrines, that's not the core of the faith. That's not the most interesting or most important thing about Christianity at all. And yet when it's in scripture and we can't even see it, that's when we have a problem.

42:56 So that episode, like this episode, and a lot of the episodes that we do, they're diagnostic tools. When we're dealing with scripture, when we're dealing with life, when we're dealing with other people, are there specific examples like choosing our purpose and seeking our motivation correctly, manifesting leadership in a way that's going to be godly and laudable, including stepping aside so that the better man can be the leader and it maybe some days it shouldn't be you. When we're looking at examples of excellence and we're responding in pernicious it's not even a carnal fashion because this is a new spirit. So it's not just unbelievers talk one way and believers talk another way and you know, Christians need to be a better influence on

43:38 all these pagans are getting this stuff wrong. Culturally, post Gen X, when the irony and the sarcasm died, the new attack is to say there's nothing good, beautiful, and true at all. There's nothing in the world that's beautiful. It's all the same. There's nothing in the world that's excellent. It's all the same. You see excellence? That's not the gospel. Forget about that. That's not important. They should have done this other thing instead of this thing. Even though the thing that they did was excellent and it was amazing. I'm gonna despise it because I didn't do it and I know in my heart that I couldn't do it and I envy that they did it. I'm gonna be something gross in the punch bowl. I'm not gonna let them just enjoy this moment that's happy.

44:17 I'm gonna say something nasty to tear them down. That's not a pagan versus Christian problem. That's a cultural problem that is everywhere. And it's just bad. We We should not look at excellent things and our first instinct is to tear them down. And so the reason for mentioning this, like this is not the most excellent episode we'll ever do, but it's a really important diagnostic tool to say: look, you're gonna catch yourself doing this? Think about it. As a diagnostic tool for yourself. What were you thinking? How did you get there when you saw something excellent? And the first thing that came out of your mouth was dismissal or envy or something just mean and nasty about something that was

44:58 genuinely good. Why did you do that? What is it inside you that produced that fruit? Because that's the value there. That's the problem. I can't tell anyone individually what it's gonna be and yeah, we have been complaining lately online about people psychoanalyzing and psychologizing everything, but Christians do need to inspect our own motives to understand Why did I see one thing and then respond a certain way? Why did I say this? That cycle should always be going. Not in a panicky mode. Just, okay, does this check out? If I acknowledge the fact that it's undeniably true that God's watching me right now, watching me say this and do this, can I defend this before the throne of God? Because that's where it is in effect.

45:40 Everything that we say and do is already taken before the judgment throne in the future. So we live our lives pretending that that's not the case because that's an awful lot of weight to bear. And that's kind of a later thing. We don't want to think about that too much. But in a moment, when you catch yourself seeing something excellent, that's whatever. I could do that. That's not impressive at all. That's whatever. it's dumb. If you're doing that, and it turns out that you had gross motives, maybe think about fixing them. That's it. This isn't heaven or hell for its own sake. But as I said earlier, this irony poisoning transmuting into I'm just gonna tear it down because good, beautiful, and true don't exist, excellence

46:22 doesn't exist, that is actually theological in nature. That is actually a backdoor attack against God Himself. Because when you say that the only thing that exists is the cross and the gospel and all this worldly stuff is just it's whatever. It doesn't I don't even care. Congratulations, you're a Gnostic. That's what Gnosticism reduces everything to. That this life is a mirage and it's just some future without bodies or anything else. That's paganism. That's a heresy. We did an entire episode on that because we did at the beginning of last year specifically to highlight that that heresy is roared back in the church. So the small minor point about thinking about excellence, when you use that as a test, you're going to find potentially that in a

47:09 lot of cases it's going to diagnose spiritual rot that maybe you didn't know even was there. So just think about this stuff. And if you catch yourself deriding something excellent, stop. Just back away quietly and bite your tongue. Don't say anything at all if that's your impulse. Because it's not a healthy one. It's not good for you, and it's not good for anyone else. At the end of many of his sacred compositions, perhaps all of them, I'm not certain on that point. Bach would write SDG Soli Deo Gloria, which of course we all know is glory to God alone, or to God alone be the glory, however you want to formulate that from the Latin. He did not do so on his secular works, but he could very well have done so.

48:02 It's one of the points that we are making in this episode. It does not diminish You in any way, and it does not diminish God's glory when there are excellent things in his creation. And this really should go without saying it should be so obvious. Creation is God's creation, and so the things that are excellent in creation are to the glory of God. And that is from the trivial, maybe you're the best at darts in the world, up to compositions like those from Bach that will probably never be rivaled, regardless of how long God permits this universe to continue. And so he could very well have written the same thing on his secular works because those were to the glory of God as well. When you do things in your field that are excellent, you

48:58 are doing that to the glory of God because you are using the gifts that God gave you in order to accomplish those things. And so we shouldn't deride these achievements, we shouldn't deride the excellence of other men in their fields, regardless of what that field may be, because we should recognize in that that it is something that is done to the glory of God. And in particular, Protestants need to recognize this is going to be a little different for the Roman Catholics and some others, but in particular, Protestants need to recognize that if you are inclined toward advancing the argument that, oh, well, that isn't about the cross. What you are effectively doing is denying the doctrine of justification.

49:47 And the way in which you're doing that, the reason you're doing that, is because Correctly interpreted and correctly taught, the doctrine of justification is that it is a legal declaration that you are without sin, because Christ took your sin for you. Christ paid the penalty for you. And a legal declaration takes place in an instant. It is not an ongoing matter. Justification is not an ongoing matter. It is once and done. Now, the issue when you try to say that oh well that's not about the cross is you're trying to drag out justification into the rest of the Christian life. And it doesn't belong there. Justification is the entrance into the Christian life. Sanctification is the Christian life lived out after justification.

50:44 That is not all about the cross. And so when someone tries to tell you that, oh well that isn't about the cross, that's not about Jesus, that's not what it means to be a Christian. And as Woe said, that's not how God speaks in his word. There is more to the Christian life than just the cross. Once you are justified, there is the and then of the Christian life. And part of that is living according to the skills and the abilities, all of these gifts that God has given you, and not deriding or attacking others for doing the same. If someone is excellent at a sport, regardless of what sport it happens to be, is that explicitly about justification? No, of course it's not. But is it to the glory of God still?

51:32 Yes, absolutely. Because it is a demonstration of the gifts that God has given to that person. He could not achieve those things if God had not given him those abilities, and if he had not used those abilities. And it is proper to recognize both of those things. You can give thanks to God for the gifts that He has given to men, and you can also admire what those men have done with those gifts, because again there is the combination of that natural talent and the acquired skill. It is insufficient just to have the gifts from God. If God made you the best potential tennis player in all of human history, and all you do is sit on the couch and eat Cheetos. You are never going to be a good tennis player.

52:21 It doesn't matter that you have the natural ability, that you have those natural gifts. You also have to put in the work. And so we can recognize that both of those things are present, and both of those things are worthy of honor and respect. And as Woe was saying about the issue of irony and sarcasm, being an older millennial, we sort of got both ends of this one, which is the case in so many different fields. But for us, we sort of got the tail end of all that irony and sarcasm, perhaps particularly growing up in Southern California, but we certainly got that, but we also lived through that transition, really Satan switching up his tactics, that transition to what has really hit the zoomer generation and younger, just full on in the face.

53:13 It's a sort of nihilism. It's this denial that there is anything beautiful or good in the world, and that it's all just eh. It exists, that's fine. You'll see people who can see the most beautiful sunrise, and many of them are I'm not going to say there's one best one in all of history, because there are many beautiful ones, and they'll see that and they'll think nothing of it. Oh it's just another sunrise. No, every one of those sunrises is a gift from God and is something He created, and it is beautiful, And the same of course for the sun set. The natural world is beautiful, and we should recognize that and enjoy that. There are a number of anecdotes from different men who knew Tolkien, and some of them would say they didn't like to go

53:59 for walks with him, because he would take too long looking at trees and various other things in the natural world. I don't think that that's a negative attribute to have. I don't think that's a negative personality trait. I think recognizing the beauty of the things in God's creation is admirable. And I think we should all spend a little more time doing that. We spend so much of our time rushing from one place to another that we don't stop and take any time to look at the creation that God has gifted us. God made us stewards of creation. We should recognize the beauty of it and enjoy it. Perhaps I act a little bit like talking on some of my hikes and walks. Usually I'm just with the dogs though, and they don't tend to

54:43 complain. But I do think that we should stop and look at the things that are around us. Beauty is another one of those gifts of God that you don't really have to acquire. You can't even really acquire. It is something that you have or do not have as God has given it to you in the measure that He has given it to you. Yes, it is something that you have to maintain. The most obvious example for human beings would be obesity, because you can certainly lose the beauty that God has given you if you permit yourself to become morbidly obese. But just because beauty is something for which you didn't really have to work, doesn't mean it is something that we should ignore or something that we shouldn't honor and respect, it is still a gift

55:32 from God, it is a good thing given to humanity in various measure across different people from God. And again it ties into the transcendentals. So much of this ties back to that in many of the episodes that we've done, this should be a core concern of Christian thought and the Christian life, because goodness, beauty, and truth, in whichever order you prefer, are attributes of God, which is to say they are God's nature. We won't get into the specifics of how that works here because it's complicated subject for another time. But these But these things being part of God's nature, in so far as they are reflected in the creation, are reflections of God Himself, and we should recognize that reflection of God in His creation,

56:19 and we should cherish it. We should never think that these things are trivial or something that can be dismissed. Oh, I've seen a sunrise before, I don't care about this one. Would you respond that way if God were standing next to you? Would you tell him I don't care about this sunrise that you created because I've seen other ones? Each and every one is a gift from God, and the same is true of every time you see a beautiful flower or a particularly interesting piece of moss, whatever it happens to be To be, again from the seemingly most trivial up to the grandest scale. Whether it is the most beautiful sunrise you've ever seen in your life over a mountain range while you're out camping, or again a

57:00 particularly interesting piece of moss. It doesn't matter, because they are all excellent in a certain way. They are all gifts from God, things that He has created for us to enjoy. And so whether it is the natural world, or humans are also part of the natural world, but we do like to draw the distinction, or it is the gifts that have been given and trained and are on display have been exercised by men, we should cherish these things. We should not attack these things, we should not seek to tear them down or to minimize them, or to respond ironically or sarcastically. And I recognize that I have a tendency to respond with irony or sarcasm, but by and large I do not do so, and I intentionally avoid doing so with things like this, because these things

57:54 again are gifts from God and we should not minimize them. Because when you minimize these things, what you're really doing is you're insulting God. And that is something of which we should be terrified. Christians should never want to no one should want to, but Christians certainly should never want to insult God. And if you insult his creation, you are insulting him. We could think of some of the responses of Job's friends as much as we like to return to the book of Job. But I think that a large part of this is that if we resort to irony or sarcasm if we're from the older millennial or older generations, or a certain form of nihilism or perhaps even absurdism in some cases for the younger millennials and younger generations, is

58:45 that if we respond in that way, we don't have to engage with these things in an authentic and a heartfelt way, a real way, and if we have that sort of light touch, then nothing matters to us too much, and nothing runs the risk of causing us some kind of harm. And that is not really a life lived. That is life avoided. You are going to have to invest in certain things in this life. One of the most obvious examples, of course, and everyone should have thought of it already, is marriage. When you marry, you are running a very real risk of suffering certain harms. That doesn't mean that you should avoid it. It doesn't mean that a wife is a curse. A wife is still a gift from God. He who finds a wife finds a good thing and finds favor

59:37 with the Lord. That should be cherished. The same is true of everything in this life. If you invest in it, there is the very real risk of some kind of harm. In many cases, there is the certainty of harm. Another good example would be pets. If you invest time and emotion and all of these other things into your pets, there is going to be a certain level of harm inflicted on you when the pet dies, and you are going to by and large outlive a number of your pets in this life. I think I've outlived seven of my dogs so far. That is just the reality of living this life. But again, if you do not make that investment, if you remove yourself from it by having this light touch shielded by your irony and your sarcasm or your nihilism, all you're doing is harming yourself

1:00:30 and insulting God. You're saying, I'm not going to invest in your creation because I don't want to deal with these things. You aren't actually avoiding the harm. You're inflicting a greater and more lasting harm on yourself. And the way to avoid that is by not having these inauthentic responses to the natural world. If you look at a sunset, you are going to recognize that it is beautiful. The only way that you can respond to that in any other form, in any other way, than recognizing the beauty and appreciating it is if you have been trained by the world and reinforcing it yourself to respond with that sort of aloofness, that indifference to these things. Don't do that. Have the actual, authentic, natural response that God gave you for free.

1:01:27 You recognize excellence when you see it. There are some cases in which it's more difficult to discern excellence, or at least certain degrees of it, but by and large we recognize it when we see it. You recognize if someone is great at a sport, because you can kind of look at it and go, there's no way I could do that. He would destroy me at tennis or whatever it happens to be bowling. The same thing is true of the natural world. When you see beautiful, you recognize it. Because beauty is something that is built into creation and is built into the human psyche. It is something that God has given us. Because don't forget that we are in fact icons, idols of God in this world, and so we have a reflection of His abilities

1:02:15 that He has given us, of His attributes. And so we recognize goodness, beauty, and truth when we see these things. The only way that you can fail to recognize those is by deliberately suppressing them. Now, over a lifetime of wickedness, of course, it becomes easier because eventually your conscience becomes seared, your heart becomes dead, it becomes a stone, and so then it's too late. You no longer recognize goodness and beauty and truth. What we're saying is don't go down that path. Don't take that road. It doesn't lead anywhere good. It leads to a place where all you've done is destroyed yourself and made the world worse in the process. That's of course what Satan wants. Satan doesn't want you to recognize that there's beauty in the world.

1:03:02 He doesn't want you to recognize that there's goodness in the world. He certainly doesn't want you to recognize there's truth. He would much rather you respond with indifference. But if he can't get you to be totally indifferent, then at least you can be ironic in your approach, or you can be sarcastic in your response. That's almost as good. Do not do that. That is not living a Christian life. It's not living a life worth living. You can't have this light touch with regard to life, and actually have a life that is lived. You may very well live a long time. But effectively you died long ago. It doesn't matter how many years God happens to give you on this earth, if you don't spend them appropriately, if you don't invest

1:03:51 them appropriately. And part of that is recognizing that excellence exists, that there is excellence all around you, and that it is to be appreciated, not attacked, or derided, or ignored, or treat it as trivial, or indifferent, but recognized for what it is, a gift from God that is meant for us to enjoy and to make the world better for us, and then we can indeed enjoy those improvements as well. Excellence is a good thing, regardless of where we find it, regardless of the field, and we should celebrate that. As Cory was describing walking in nature and appreciating it. Even before he referenced Job, I had already pulled up Job 38 and following, so I could reference it again. Hopefully a few of you thought of that.

1:04:42 If you haven't read it before, or if you haven't had it recently, go read Job 38 through the end of the book. It's when God comes out of the whirlwind and challenges Job and says, Who are you to challenge me? And what he does is describes creation. He describes his very good work. God describes the excellent world that he has created, in contrast to Job's uppity attitude to challenge him. That's part of what's going on here. It's a question of attitude. And the reason that I mentioned JD Vance and P. Heggseth earlier is because as we see guys like that from that generation who are seem to be good examples so far of what men should be doing in their political positions, they come across as sincere because they are.

1:05:32 It's very difficult to fake sincerity. And that's something that for all of our faults, Corey and I are both sincere. I think that comes through to people who are also sincere. Someone who's not sincere, it's gonna sound alien. And so there are a lot of people who hear JD Vance and Heggseth and whomever else. I don't think Trump's sincere. I think he's always a performer, but he surrounds himself with sincere guys. I don't mean that Trump is insincere, but like he's just he's always on. When his lieutenants go out, they have not a vulnerability, but they have a sincerity that shows that it's rooted in something substantial. They're not just performing. They're not performing for the camera or the microphone.

1:06:14 They're not performing for an audience. They're getting a message out there, but they're doing it in a way that's I don't know of a way to describe it other than sincere. The irony poisoning, the refusal to recognize excellence, the refusal to see beauty in the world. All of it is, again, it's fundamentally an anti-Christian attitude. That's the reason the Job 38 and following is such a useful text. It's not a proof text. It's just here's God talking about himself through the world that he created and saying, Look at this. Do you want to see how big I am? Look at everything around you. I'm the one who made this. There are things in this world that should rightly inspire awe. Chief among them is God Himself.

1:06:57 But when He calls upon us to see how awesome He is, He points to creation. And so if you cannot at least recognize excellence in creation, there's a spiritual blindness that you really need to examine and fix. And that's true in other human endeavors. As Corey said, we are part of creation. We're creatures. We are at the top of the food chain by design. We are to be stewards of this world. We're not to prey upon it. We are to care for it. But that is done from a place of dominance. And that is scripture itself attests what we all see with our own eyes. That inspires a degree of fear among the beasts. They recognize that we are dangerous. We are something to be feared. And that's not a bad thing.

1:07:45 That's a recognition of hierarchy. Creatures can recognize, and yet people can't. When people can no longer recognize hierarchy, it's not only breaking the social paradigm that's necessary for a civilization, it's also breaking what's necessary to have a proper relationship with God because creature creator is hierarchical. If you can't recognize that you were not equals with God, that you are not equals with other men in all ways. We are in terms of salvation, we're either saved or we're damned. And all men who are saved, it's received as a gift from God. So there's no pulling rank when it comes to salvation, but in every other way, there's going to be some degree of rank and hierarchy, and therefore you will find excellence among you, and you

1:08:39 will find people who just completely fall short. And what does God say to do with those, with the meek? He says to care for them. The fact that there's superiority somewhere in the room does not diminish everyone else. It means that everyone else has an example and potentially everyone else has a protector. That was the purpose of the leadership episode. The guy who's taller, stronger, smarter, braver, you put him in charge because he's going to take care of you. He's going to do a better job at doing the things that need done than you could do. And if you're that man, you need to step up and do it. I think one of the most important things that we lose when we refuse to acknowledge excellence, is the recognition of how it

1:09:24 touches on all of our lives in the mundane aspects. Because when you see the guy in the World Series bat 229, you know, he swings the bat, you know, half a dozen times in the game. A dozen times at the most, maybe. What you don't see is that in that year he swung the bat fifty thousand times. That's why he's a pro. Because he swings the bat fifty thousand times a year every year. You don't do that. So you couldn't possibly bat even two twenty-nine in the World Series because you Because you couldn't even touch a pitch from a major league pitcher. We don't recognize greatness and so we don't recognize the value of our own mundane acts, the daily grind. You know, we talked last week about purpose and motivation.

1:10:12 That's about the daily grind. Not every day that you have at work is going to be excellent, and that's fine. Not everything has to be superlative in order for it to be good and worthy. When we take pot shots at excellence, what we're doing is we're denigrating all the hard work that it took to get there. And that's usually what the guys they'll thank God, they'll thank their families, they'll thank their coaches for putting them through the ringer with training. Because they didn't just swing half a dozen times in the game, they swung fifty thousand times in the season. That's what got it done. And so when you just see a few small examples and you see excellence manifest in that moment, always remember the the same ordinary

1:10:55 stuff that they got it done with you are capable of. And again, you know, we talked about talent, not saying everyone can be a major league player and shouldn't want to. I don't think that's like I would rather those guys with that ability do something else, but I also don't care. I'm not gonna take pot shots of them when they're doing something really well. What I will recognize is that their tenacity, you know, it's not just that they swung the bat fifty thousand times. They're doing drills for whatever their positions are. Lately, you know, for last decade or two, they're all in the weight room. Probably many of them have scientifically calibrated diets that they stick to religiously during the season in preseason training, specifically so that they can

1:11:36 compete at that level because that's how hard it is. So all those mundane things that you don't see on the big screen are what it takes to achieve that level of excellence. And even then, most don't achieve the excellence. But the mundane work, you are a participant in that too, every day. Every time you go to work, you're probably, you know, if you're lucky, you have an excellent day a couple times a month. And the rest of the time, you're sometimes you just feel lucky to get through it. But what's important is that you are a participant in excellence by doing the mundane things. You're doing the same kind of grind that they're doing. You're doing a different grind with different results, and you have, you

1:12:17 know, ostensibly set a good purpose for for whatever is keeping you in the game for your job. You know, sometimes the purpose is just I gotta feed my family. That is one of the paramount purposes in any man's life. Job might stink, but if it feeds your family, you do it 'cause you gotta get it done. That doesn't always look or feel excellent, but doing that work is invaluable. And the reason for highlighting excellence, for highlighting the pinnacle. In fact, I looked up the etymology of excellence. I can get into it because it doesn't really matter here, but the etymology of excellence has to do with lofty or great heights pinnacle. It's all relative in physical terms, where you have something higher.

1:13:01 And every time we talk about these things in just normal conversation, the heights, the peaks, the pinnacle, the thing that's excellent is that which is above the rest. There can only be one capstone that's right on top, right in the middle. And then all the other stones on the wall are what make it possible. So the daily grind, the hard work that we do that doesn't get recognition, you know, you get paid for it, hopefully. but you don't necessarily get a pat on the back for it and it doesn't look impressive. But by delivering day after day, you are building a wall that will eventually have a capstone that can be called excellent through having lived a good life. And this has nothing to with salvation.

1:13:42 It's just show up, do the work, be honest, be completely ordinary, and you are a participant in the very excellence that we celebrate whenever we see it. It's a good thing to be sincere about seeing amazing performances, about seeing amazing moments in history, because it's a reminder that we as men are capable of doing incredible things when we put that much effort into it. And not every man can achieve that. You know, rocket science is rocket science. You know, rocket science and brain surgery, two of the hardest things that man can do do. So they're highlighted, they're singled out or doubled out as examples of most of you can't do this and you wouldn't want to because you're going to kill people if you try.

1:14:27 It's really hard. Even if you're good at it, it's really hard. When we see someone doing the best, someone doing something that's very good, something that's excellent, always give that the credit that's due. Just be willing to have a sincere and open heart to say, yeah, that's impressive. I'm delighted to have seen that. And you can do that with the recognition of all the hard work that it took to get there. You know, we see the rockets go up every time that Elon launches. Now it's so mundane that no one really pays attention to most of the rocket launches. He blew up a bunch of rockets at the beginning. The first rockets all exploded because it's rocket science. So when you see guys at the pinnacle doing excellent work, it's

1:15:06 easy to forget how much struggle it took to get there. And that's struggle is a struggle that you're familiar with. So just remember that when you denigrate excellence, you're actually dragging yourself. You're diminishing yourself by refusing to acknowledge that the same hard work that you do, that you participate in is a sort of hard work that produces excellence. And even though the trajectory of most of our lives is going to follow a path where we don't ever see visible public excellence like we're talking about as examples here. That's perfectly fine. The hard work, the sincere and honest work has a moral excellence because it's the right thing to do. And you don't do it for credit, you don't do it for

1:15:48 glory, except for the glory of God, and that's just fine. But try to make sure you get away from the irony poisoned or post-irony poisoned feminized crabs in a bucket attitude of I'm gonna tear this thing down because it's better than me. No man should act that way. And certainly no Christian should act that way. We should celebrate excellence because it's an example for us all. It's an inspiration. To be a human who is alive to witness such things is a privilege. We should be happy about it. Just as happy as Tolkien was walking in the woods, and he will again in the new earth. Everything will be recreated, and we're all gonna get to enjoy walks with Tolkien together. We'll have eternity. I look forward to my turn because I loved his books as

1:16:30 a kid. That creation that he celebrated, ad nauseum for some people's tastes and his novels, were inspired by his love of God's creation. It's a good thing to be inspired by the excellence around us, even when it seems mundane. So I hope this has been a positive episode. This is a framework and a tool for thinking, let's just make sure that when we're looking at things elsewhere in the world, things outside of ourselves, that we're using the right benchmark. And it should never be, well, that guy's doing something I could do if I wanted to, but I'm not doing it, so it doesn't matter that he did it. If he did something excellent and beautiful and good and amazing, give him credit where it's due.

1:17:13 Show men respect when they do well. And then when respect is due to you, hopefully it'll be accorded to you. This is also a reminder, give people a pat on the back. If someone's doing a really good job and no one's ever telling them, try to go out of your way to tell them. Very rarely do men get compliments for doing good work. Doesn't happen much anymore. And part of that's a lack of sincerity. Back when the you know there were newspapers, I clipped a Dilbert comic that I still have somewhere in that Somewhere in the house where Dilbert went in for his review with his pointy haired boss, and his boss said that he only met expectations last year. And Dilbert went back and forth with a couple things that he

1:17:55 had done, and one of them was like donating his kidney to one of their top customers in his boss's response was well I said you meet expectations because I expected you to do that. That's not the way to treat people. If someone goes above and beyond, make sure that you acknowledge and respect doing something amazing. It uplifts everyone to acknowledge and to respect that which is deserving of respect. When you see excellence, call it excellent. It's okay to be sincere about these things. That's it. Be sincere. Don't be ashamed to just be genuinely impressed by something. It doesn't diminish you. I don't know where that came from. We try to trace the trajectory here, but it's insane to me that to see something that's better than I could do somehow makes

1:18:43 me less. No. I'm privileged to have been alive to see it. I'm honored to be a witness to it and to be able to tell others how cool it is. That is a good thing. It's a blessing. We should never have any response other than respect for greatness. One of the functions of excellence in the world is serving as a standard toward which we can aspire, or a pinnacle we can seek to reach. This is perhaps how some people view mountain peaks, those who are inclined to go out and summit mountains at any rate. We shouldn't view it as being something that is a challenge to our abilities because it exists. So, for instance, most of us will never climb most of the tallest mountains, not only in the world, but even just in, say,

1:19:38 our own home countries, or in some cases, our own home state. I used to live in California, as all of you know, and very few Californians will ever climb Mount Whitney, it being the tallest peak in the lower forty eight. That doesn't mean that the existence of Mount Whitney somehow diminishes you as a person because you'll never climb that mountain peak. Most of us will never play in the major leagues in any sport. We will never be the best chess player in the world. Another good example of being a pinnacle of one's field that should perhaps be mentioned in this episode since we've talked so much about about space flight and rockets and things is Wernher von Braun. Without his achievements, we probably would not have a space program.

1:20:30 We would certainly have been set back some unknown amount of time with regard to rocketry and things like that. He was an exceptional man. The things that he achieved in his life are of an order and magnitude that is seldom met by any man. And so regardless of what you may think of his politics or anything like that, you can recognize the excellence of what he achieved in the physical sciences. If you are someone in those fields, you can look at him and let what he achieved serve as motivation for you. You can look at that excellence and strive toward it. Attempt to achieve that sort of excellence yourself. Perhaps you won't rise to that level and you probably won't in this case. But just because you won't rise to that level doesn't mean you

1:21:22 can't achieve your own personal sort of excellence. And that is sort of the point with which I want to leave you in this episode. There is such a thing as objective excellence, and there is such a thing as subjective excellence. Objective excellence is the easier one to understand, perhaps, because we all recognize the existence of it. There is a best tennis player in history. Perhaps he hasn't been born yet, and so I could say there will be a best tennis player in history. At the point we are now in history, there is a best tennis player in the past. One of the players, existing players, is the best at that game. One of the chess grandmasters is the best at chess. The same is true with regard to every human undertaking, every human

1:22:19 endeavor. There is a man who is the best at it. That is, in one sense, the objective best, because he is the best human at it. You could also say that there is an objective best in that there is a perfect version, but that's sort of a philosophical aside. In contrast to that, we have the subjective excellence. And that is your personal form of excellence. And so, with regard to anything that you undertake in your life, there is a a best version of you at that thing. It's going to take work to get there. I will never be a concert pianist, but I could certainly be better at the piano than I am now. There is a level I could reach that would be my personal version of excellence with regard to playing the piano, the same for

1:23:15 playing tennis, lawn darts, whatever it happens to be. With regard to your personal undertakings in this life, there is an excellence that you can achieve in that endeavor. And one of the ways that you can use the excellence of other men is by looking at those who are excellent in the same fields in which you endeavor and aspiring to that. You can look at the performance of a great pianist, one of the best ones in all of history and there are a number of them. And you can aspire to that, you can let that serve as a motivation for you. Part of your purpose to tie back into last week's episode can be to achieve the best level of performance that you, given your gifts and abilities, and obviously time and other things, can achieve.

1:24:10 The motivation for that can in part be looking at these other men who have achieved these great things. That's a proper response to that. That's honoring and respecting that excellence in other men, instead of the negative way of using that and using it to tear down perhaps that man if you can and yourself at the same time. You shouldn't look at these other men as being necessarily competition. Not everything in life is a competition. Some things certainly are. We've talked about sports in this episode. But in some ways, it's not a competition between you and these other men. Because what you are attempting to achieve, the thing toward which you are working, is that subjective excellence. Yes, if you happen to be one of the men competing at

1:25:00 the very pinnacle of the field, then you are competing over that objective excellence, and there's a form of competition there. But it's not in the sense of tearing down the other men or having his accomplishments tear you down. It should be in the sense of building each other up and letting his achievements serve as motivation for you to achieve, and then he should in turn let your achievements serve as motivation for him to go on and achieve further things. This is a productive use of these differences that God has built into creation, of these distinctions between and among men, of this hierarchy that is a natural part of everything in God's creation, because there is hierarchy everywhere Which this is a point that we have emphasized

1:25:46 in a number of episodes, and we will undoubtedly continue to do so, because it has simply fallen away in modern society. But there is hierarchy everywhere. It doesn't matter if we try to construct a society that does not have hierarchy, it will still exist. Because God built it into creation. You cannot get rid of the things that God has built into creation You can ignore them to your detriment, but you will not destroy them, because they are things that God has designed, things that God has implemented, things that God intends to exist in this life, and in the next. We're not all going to be equal in the next life. There's no way that you can read God's Word and think that we will all be equally good at everything in the next life.

1:26:35 That's completely and utterly absurd. For one, I have a reach of about an octave on a piano. I am never going to be able to play some of the more difficult, particularly Scandinavian pieces, that call for a reach of an octave plus two or three. I simply can't do that. It is beyond my abilities, physically speaking. That doesn't mean that I am diminished by the existence of those. I should look at those pieces and the men who can play them and be impressed. I have respect for the men who can do that well. It's something that I personally can't do, but I can certainly play some of the other pieces, particularly the German ones, and I can try to play those well. We have been so trained by the modern world, which has been

1:27:26 quite frankly, designed by Satan, but we have been so trained to try and diminish everything around us in order to make ourselves not necessarily feel better, but not feel worse. Because the alternative to that is, of course, putting in the effort, is doing what needs to be done in order to achieve that personal level of excellence. And it's much easier to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos. And that is, quite frankly, what Satan would rather you do. He doesn't want you to use the gifts that God has given you. He doesn't want you to enjoy this creation that God has gifted to us. He would much rather that you just think that everything is a matter of indifference. That everything is, well, it's there, but who cares?

1:28:16 It's another sunrise, it's another mountain. What does it matter to me? And so the response that he wants from you when you see excellence is to think that it's trivial, is to ignore it. Even better to try and tear it down. The response of the Christian, the response of the moral man, is to look at that and recognize the greatness for what it is, to recognize the excellence that is an expression of again the gifts from God and the hard work that those men have put in to use those gifts, to train those gifts, to refine them, to hone them to that fine point To recognize the depth of that achievement and see it as a cause for celebration and motivation in your own life. Now, it may be that when you look at a sports figure,

1:29:10 that's not going to be motivation for you personally because perhaps you have no interest in baseball or you have no interest in tennis. But again, in your own field, there will be those who are excellent in that field. Let them serve as motivation for you. Let them serve as a fixed point, as it were, something to which you can aspire, because you can look and see. This is the sort of thing that men can achieve if they use God's gifts that He has given to them and they put in the work, and it's that putting in the work that truly matters, because again it is insufficient if all you have is the natural talent and you do nothing with it, if you are the most intelligent man who has ever lived in all of human history,

1:29:58 whatever man that happens to be, and all you do with that intelligence is play video games all day. Are you really using the gifts that God gave you? The answer of course is no. And that's a big part of this. What we are advocating, what we are saying, is that God has given you certain gifts. Perhaps He hasn't given you the gifts necessary to be a rocket scientist, or to be a brain surgeon, or to be a major league baseball player, but he has given you gifts that you can employ in whatever occupation you have, in whatever undertaking has been set before you. You can use those things and you can hone them using the motivation from looking at other great men, from those who have achieved excellence in their fields or your field, and you can use these

1:30:54 things to the glory of God. And that's an important point. The glory of God is not putting crosses on your shoes if you're a cobbler, if you're a shoemaker. It's making good shoes. And the reason for that is because making the good shoes is using the gifts that God has given you. And maybe you don't make the best shoes in the world. That's not the point The point is using the gifts that God has given you to the best of your ability, honing those gifts, becoming excellent in your field with regard to your own capacity. That is what you should be doing as a Christian man. It's not putting the cross on your shoes and declaring before all the world, look how Christian I am because I put a cross

1:31:41 on my shoes. Your neighbor needs good shoes. He doesn't necessarily need shoes with a cross on them. And so you may think again back to that issue of when you engage with certain other Christians and they always try to say, well, that's not about the cross. That's not a matter of salvation. That's not soteriological, whatever language they happen to use. Think about putting a cross on shoes. It's completely ridiculous. That is what they are arguing. And quite frankly you should probably laugh at them. Because at the very least it's silly. Often it is also wicked because there's an ulterior motive. But it's just a ridiculous argument because that's not the Christian life. Again, justification is one and done, as it were, because it is

1:32:30 a judicial declaration that you are justified, that you are holy for the sake of Christ and his work. And then comes the end then. Then comes the Christian life. Then comes sanctification. But you have to actually live a life in order for that to happen. Sanctification is progress in this life. You slowly become sanctified over time due to the work of the Holy Spirit and the cooperation of your will, because once your will has been regenerated, you do in fact cooperate. But that's not the totality of the Christian life. Because part of the Christian life is using these abilities, these skills, these things that God has given you, these gifts from God, and doing the best you can with them. It is a Christian life to be a cobbler and make good

1:33:29 shoes. It is a Christian life to be a baker and make good pies. It is a Christian life to be particularly good at a sport, and to invest the time and the effort to do well, to use those skills to train them up and to become the best that you can to become excellent in the field in so far as you are able. And the same is true with regard to every Christian man and every single occupation set before them. Because it doesn't matter which occupation you happen to have, it doesn't matter what undertaking. What matters is that you use the gifts that God has given you, and you aim toward excellence, and you achieve it to the best of your ability, because that is a Christian life actually lived. Again, it's not a matter of

1:34:22 everything has to be the cross. That's not scripture. That's not what God wants for us. The whole point of you being justified, of you being saved, given the free gift of faith, is that so you can live as a Christian, so you can live as a redeemed son or daughter of God. Those who try to tell you that everything about the Christian life has to be soteriological, it all has to be the cross. Really, what they're denying is the very existence of such a thing as the Christian life. We don't want you to do that, and God certainly doesn't want you to do that. And some of them will bring up, Paul says, For I decided to know nothing among you except Christ and him crucified. That's with regard to teaching justification in the Christian

1:35:14 It's not with regard to the Christian faith itself and the Christian life lived. The same sort of ridiculous argument comes up when people try to argue that Christ said he came only for the lost sheep of Israel. Well the issue is what does he mean by Israel? And of course he means the church, not ethnic Israel, but that's a topic for another time. When people try to argue that it's Christ and him crucified, and that's all that Paul wanted to know and so we should just imitate Paul. What they're arguing is utterly ridiculous. Read Paul's letters. Is that all Paul says? Is that all that Paul teaches? No, because it's not the totality of the Christian life. The Christian life is a matter of striving toward excellence, insofar as

1:36:03 it has been given you by God to do so God has given you gifts. You need to use them. Let other men, who are excellent, serve as motivation. Recognize that excellence. Recognize that you can achieve a form of it, and give thanks to God both for the excellence of those other men and for the gifts that He has given you.