(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

When you're dealing with yourself and your own standards, you should be very, you know, I would say harsh or very strict or have real high standards for yourself. But when you're dealing with other people, you have a lot of mercy and grace and, you know, not necessarily require the same standards of them that you do of yourself. Right. This is the spirit and attitude I think hopefully we all can have so that you have that that mercy when other people aren't maybe doing things as well. But that you personally are going to say, I am going to do my best. Now, the reason why we start on 1 Timothy chapter 3, right, 1 Timothy chapter 3, it goes over the qualifications of bishops and deacons. And then at the end, look at verse number 14, it says, These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee surely. But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. Now, one of the things I love about our church is that we truly have a church family here. And I believe that like everyone cares about each other and loves each other. I think it's along really well with each other in general, by and large. Now, I may not know about, you know, if there's some people may not get along or something. I don't know. In my opinion, what I see, I think everyone pretty much gets along great and we work really well together. And I love that about this church. But sometimes now when you have a real comfortable setting and everyone's real comfortable with each other, you can kind of let things deteriorate on making sure we're keeping up with the things we need to keep up on. Right. The more it starts to feel like home, you know, sometimes at home, you can kind of let your home just turn into a big disaster and a big mess or whatever. But you don't let your house be a big disaster when you got company coming over. Right. I mean, it just kind of is an illustration. This is how I'm trying to relate this. Well, at church, right, we're a big church family here, but we're always expecting guests to come in. Right. So we want to make sure that the church is looking nice and decent and in order and that everything can be in its place and that, you know, that everything is going to look right and that we are also well behaved and that we know how to behave ourselves in the house of God. You know, we don't worship a building. The church isn't about the building. It isn't the building. The church is the people inside. But there is something to keeping some regard and some respect for the place that we congregate and treating some things as being holy and being a place where, OK, we're gathered together. We know that, you know, this isn't we could meet at any building. It doesn't matter. But you know what the building we meet at? It ought to be. We ought to take care of it. We ought to care about even the appearance of when people come in. Is that the most important thing? No. The most important thing is your heart and your soul and, you know, in those things. And that's what we focus on. But we don't want to just let everything else go either. So this is where the heart and the spirit is coming from today. And I'd like to just kind of ratchet things up, you know, a little bit. And also turn to Colossians chapter three, because this goes really broadly. I'm going to be applying it mostly just in-house. But this concept of wanting to be excellent and having excellence in all that you do, I think should permeate all of your life. I think everything that you do, whether it be service to the Lord or not, you ought to be approaching everything in a way where you are doing your best and that you can provide excellence in the things that you do. When I'm at work and I do things on my job and I do some mundane tasks and stuff, I tell you what, I want to make it be excellent. You know, part of my job is just making sure people have computers. I have an IT job, so I'm making sure people have monitors or computers and keyboards and stuff like that. And, you know, I can make it functional and just forget about the rest and just like, OK, well, here you go and just throw some stuff together. But I want to do the best job I can. I want things to look professional. I want things to look good. So I take the cords and I wrap them up and I make everything look real nice because I care about it, because I care about the job that I do. If I'm going to put my name to something and I'm going to do something, I want it to look good. I want it to be done right. I don't want to have to go back and do it again. And this concept or this principle is taught here in Colossians chapter 3. Look at verse number 22. The Bible says, servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh. So this isn't even talking about something spiritual. This is talking about according to the flesh. Right. You have a servant. You have a master. You're working for someone. You're their servant. Right. Not with eye service as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God. And whatsoever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men, knowing that of the Lord you shall receive the reward of the inheritance for ye serve the Lord Christ. So he's saying even in just fleshly things, even in areas outside of walking spiritually, you still should have this mindset that, hey, when I work, when I go to the job, I'm going to work not as just trying to not as eye service. What is eye service? Eye service is when the boss is looking at you, then you look real busy. Right. You put up the appearance of being busy and you try to make yourself look like, oh, man, I'm doing a lot of work. You're not really doing anything or you're only doing it when they're looking at you. What this is teaching is that you do it all the time as if you're working for the Lord Jesus Christ. That you be a good worker, that you're a good employee, that whether someone's looking at you or not, you know, you're not doing it just to please men. You're doing it because it's the right thing to do. Because if you're going to invest your time and do anything, you ought to strive for excellence and not do things halfheartedly and not just give up and not just say, oh, whatever. Right. Let's not have that attitude.