Believe in What?

“Believe passionately in what you do, and never knowingly compromise your standards and values. Act like a true professional, aiming for true excellence, and the money will follow.”
– David Maister (1947- ), business management consultant. The Advice Business: Essential Tools and Models for Management Consulting, Chapter 23.

Believing is important. People cannot exist without it — literally! Belief is the foundation of human life. But what we believe in makes a huge difference. It is not enough to simply believe in … whatever. The object of our belief constitutes the content of our belief.

Consequently, it is not enough to simply believe in what you do or to believe in yourself. How can anyone not believe in themselves? The idea of self-belief is ludicrous. To not believe in yourself is to doubt your own existence.

Nor is it sufficient to believe in humanity or the supposed goodness of humanity. As any cursory observation will reveal — a lot of people are not only not good, but they have no interest in being good or helpful or kind, etc. The hard cold truth is that people are natural born sinners — to a man! And because people are natural sinners whatever standards and values that they naturally have are sinful.

Thus, the problem with the values behind the above quote is that there is no reference to the transcendent values of God that are found in the Bible. It is precisely because people are not naturally good that they (we) need to be reborn or remade in the likeness and image of Jesus Christ, who’s standards and values are those of Scripture. Apart from the reference and acknowledgment of God in Christ as revealed in the Bible, people have no access to goodness or transcendent standards or values  (standards or values other than self-concern).

It is because God created the world that God is actually and intimately related to everything in the world. And the ignorance or denial of this basic fact is itself a hallmark of selfishness and sin.

To be a professional means having a profession. It means professing something. And that “something” is namely the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Anything less than this profession is simply unprofessional.