{"id":16225,"date":"2026-07-16T16:07:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/?p=16225"},"modified":"2026-07-19T16:08:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T21:08:35","slug":"doing-our-best-vs-being-our-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/16225\/doing-our-best-vs-being-our-best\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing our best vs being our best"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Pastor John,<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Tonight&#8217;s message that we are to \u2014bring our best\u2014be our best\u2014do our best\u2014 unto the Lord was good. It felt like a different way of looking at things and explaining them, too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">There is a &#8220;Pearl&#8221; that went out a couple of years ago that says something like, &#8220;God never said for you to do your best.&#8221; That doesn&#8217;t contradict tonight&#8217;s message at all. That old Pearl means\u2026<em>\u00a0don&#8217;t try to please God by being the best YOU when Jesus paid the\u00a0price for you to be a HOLY reflection of HIM.<\/em>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">We can &#8220;do&#8221; our best at anything that we do, and the effort mean nothing more than that we are too self-willed or too proud to appear less than excellent.\u00a0 But for us to &#8220;be&#8221; our best before the Lord, for that, we have to submit to the Lord&#8217;s purging and willfully purge ourselves (as Brother Jimmy once said) of whatever isn&#8217;t Jesus.\u00a0 The nature of God that remains after that will only do its best in everything, because everything it does is unto the Lord.\u00a0 In that condition, we can be a flop, sound terrible, present terribly, whatever, and still be perfect.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">It just felt like a different, right way of looking at things tonight.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Jerry<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pastor John, Tonight&#8217;s message that we are to \u2014bring our best\u2014be our best\u2014do our best\u2014 unto the Lord was good. It felt like a different way of looking at things and explaining them, too. There is a &#8220;Pearl&#8221; that went out a couple of years ago that says something like, &#8220;God never said for you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-netmail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16226,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16225\/revisions\/16226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}