If a person is laboring away in middle management in their company, their goal is to move up to the executive level. If a person is an assistant principal in a school system, there is every likelihood they would like to move up to become the principal or even the district superintendent someday. If a student made the merit roll in their academic performance with a 3.0 grade point average, they would not be blamed if they set their sights on achieving 4.0 and a spot on the Dean’s List or the honor roll. In almost every area of our lives it is expected that our aspirations will move us in an upward direction.

If you are an associate professor at a university, you are not trying to be demoted to the level of an instructor. Rather, you want to move up to become a full professor with tenure. If you are the second string player on an athletic team you do not want to be returned to the practice squad where you never get into the game. Instead, you want to crack the starting lineup.

The vocabulary of the world in which we live clearly and consistently points in one direction: upward. We talk about achievement, promotion, progress, increases, advancement, elevation and upgrades. What do all of those words have in common? All of them point in the same direction: upward. That is how we are conditioned to think in our society. You are not doing well in whatever you are doing if you are not moving onward and upward.

It is no different in my profession than it is in any other; preachers are often heard talking among themselves about bigger churches and larger memberships. We hope that our budgets will increase. We work so that our programs will expand. We plan ways to improve our churches in every way possible. The truth is, if you belonged to a church where growth and improvement was not occurring you might begin either to look for a new church or for a new pastor. It is pervasive in every area of life that success is measured by how far people are able to move in one direction and in one direction only: upward.

Look at your own life and your own job and measure yourself in this area. If you consistently made less money each year than you did the year before, would you consider yourself to be a success? If you started out with a Cadillac and then moved on to a Chevrolet, would you point to that as a sign of your progress? If you began the year with a balanced budget and ended the year with a significant budget deficit, would you be satisfied and content with that result? Probably not!

Last year the Cleveland Cavaliers were the Eastern Conference champions of the NBA. They played for the NBA championship; and even though they lost, they progressed farther than 30 of the 32 teams in the NBA. Now what would you say about the CAVS if, instead of returning to the NBA finals again this season, they were to miss the playoffs, lose more games than they win and come in last place in their division? In the achievement-oriented culture in which we live these days, we would call that a terrible season. We would wonder what went wrong. We would presume that Lebron wearing that Yankees cap brought bad luck to the Cavaliers.