Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilmoth. And I'm Patrick Miller. We're in the middle of our Christmas

series right now. We're exploring the stories around Jesus's birth and the prophecies

pointing forward to it.

Regardless of when you grew up or whether you're a parent or not, you're probably familiar with Vegeties.

Vegeties are the videos that had vegetables teaching kids Bible lessons and they were really good.

Vegetetales was created by a company called Big Ideas and it was led by a visionary Christian named Phil Vissure. He tells the story in his book called Me,

Myself, and Bob. Bob was the tomato. By the late 90s, big ideas wasn't doing really well, it was doing exceptionally well.

Between 1996 and 1999, their yearly revenue grew from 1.3 million to 44 million. That's impressive. But by 2003, just four years later, they would be filing for bankruptcy. That was impressive. What happened?

Well, Phil Vissure reflected back on that question and he said,

you might think it was their film, Jonah, that went way over a budget.

Or maybe you think it was the lawsuit they lost that cost him $11 million.

They were part of the problem but they weren't the main thing.

According to Vissure, the main problem was that he wanted to be great.

He wanted big ideas to be great. To quote him, I wanted to build the next Disney.

See, Phil Vissure wanted to create a Christian version of Walt Disney and all that it encompassed.

Now that desire for greatness ultimately led him

to make some bad business decisions

all in the name of growth,

and that ultimately led to the company coming crashing down.

If you go to the bookstore, you'll find that Phil Visser is not the only one who wants to be great.

We're all obsessed with being great.

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