For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.
Romans 3:23 NLT
For since our friendship with God was restored by the death of his Son while we were still his enemies, we will certainly be saved through the life of his Son.
Romans 5:10 NLT
There is only one hero in the Bible.
I may say “Bible Heroes” and many names might come to your mind, but there is only one hero in this story. Every other name in the whole book, and in all of creation, and in all of time — has not only fallen short of being a hero — but they have all played their part as an enemy of the one true hero.
So why are we tempted to lift them up as heroes? Why are we tempted to see them as either who we strive to be like or those on a hero level we could never reach? Aren’t those perspectives horribly flawed? Who wants to be wise like Solomon with his wives and chasing after other gods? Who wants to be outwardly bold like Peter yet denying the Lord three times and demonstrating his racism and hypocrisy to be called out by Paul publicly? We could go through the whole list and see that there is truly only one hero.
Add to that the fact that anything good in the saints is the gift of God, of what He put in them by His Spirit to accomplish ther God works He set before them — and the “honour amongst men” evaporates quite quickly.
So why do we judge each other?
Why do we lift up human teachers and human leaders for ourselves instead of being led by the spirit and taught by The Teacher?
LORD, you are worthy of ALL the glory, ALL the honor. You are the hero of the gospel. Not us. Not others in Bible stories that have become familiar and rote and easily repeated like a practiced nursery rhyme. LORD, help us to always see you at work mightily in the midst of so many of your enemies — of which we ourselves have even stood foolishly in opposition to your sovereign will. LORD, forgive us for measuring and comparing ourselves instead of humbly submitting in awe and wonder at the hero who inspires and changes and uses his enemies and calls the beloved and friend. Thank you for your grace and mercy and love. Amen.
Harold J. Ballinger 
Absolutely. I appreciate the reminder. I can raise lesser heroes up too high because they show me aspects of myself I want to see, but I am not being conformed to their image in any lasting sense the way I am with Christ.
I am just experiencing that whiplash from making too much of somebody’s praise, and then really when I found out it didn’t have the impact I was hoping for, at least not yet.
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It is also interesting to me that sometimes what I intend to communicate in “my own grand plan” is not actually what the spirit needed to impart. We sometimes think of truth like it is binary, a simple yes or no, a checklist, a rulebook. That may be part of the human condition where our thoughts are not His thoughts. What if His will through you had exactly the perfect impact on your target, but your own idea of the expected impact was limited to a yes it worked like I expected, or no it didn’t. Like a roulette wheel with horrible odds and you chose a single number, not realizing that God only needed out to land on red.
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