ONE Lesson #4: Raising the Bar

With God behind us, we can do anything (Php 4:13).  But when our knowledge goes too far beyond our practice, our belief becomes a burden because we’re not giving God space to fulfill the promises of scripture in our lives.  It’s easy to acknowledge what God says to us and still live lives that never go beyond what we can do.  As Christians, we’ve got to keep each other accountable, and not just with struggles or responsibilities, but with our faith at its core as well.  If we want to step into God’s dreams for our lives, we have to challenge each other to live in ways that require both God’s sustenance and each other’s support (both are necessary…Lk 10:27).

While explaining how individual’s personal walks with God play a part in their unity as a team, the youth staff at NewSpring Church said that they hold people to a standard they can’t live up to without Jesus and each other.  Leaders especially need to have unity between each other that is so solid that every person’s quiet time is vital to the operation of the ministry.  Holding each other accountable in this way not only makes sure that what you’re doing is always based in, surrounded by, and covered with scripture…it also ensures that your personal time with God becomes not only for yourself, but for your teammates too!

ONE Lesson #3: Purposeful

I accidentally deleted this post from before, so I had to completely rewrite it…I have to confess an unreasonable amount of frustration after I realized what I’d done…hopefully I haven’t forgotten anything really significant!

The best thing a leader can do is NOT to be in front of people, dragging them behind.  The best thing a leader can do IS to be behind people, pushing them to go places on their own.  The primary purpose of leaders in ministry should be to encourage others into their gifts, to help others realize their callings, and to provide others with the means to accomplish what God has laid before them.  Brad Cooper said “People are saved from hell, but they are saved for a purpose.  If they did not have purpose in the kingdom, God would take them straight to heaven right when they became saved.”

Leaders—draw out the purpose in people.

Here are just a few ways we can do this (NOTE – this is by no means an exhaustive list):

1) Empower them. Too many leaders keep all the responsibility to themselves and don’t trust the people they’re leading.  If you don’t put trust in the people following you, they won’t be able to put trust in you either.  Remember than when the disciples came to Jesus about the five thousand hungry men, He told the disciples to feed them before He fed them Himself (Mt 14:15-16)!  Show them that they have purpose that is of equal importance to your own purpose (as it is given by the same God), and have the faith in them that they need to have in God.

2) Help those you’re leading do what you’re doing better than you. YOU ARE NOT ETERNAL!  Your time may be now, but it won’t be always.  It is our responsibility to build up followers of Jesus who not only do what we do, but do what we do better than we do it.  God wants His church to grow, and if we never help people to achieve more than we do, we become the biggest obstacle for our ministry.  You must lead in a way that makes you unnecessary because of how prepared you’ve made everyone else.  Follow Jesus’ example when He told His disciples that they would do “greater things than these;” we should be able to say that to the people we’re leading!

3) Humble yourself. This is the most important thing a leader can do.  The less glory you take for yourself, the more glory goes to God…He is most glorified when you are most humbled.   You are not leading your ministry, God is leading His ministry and just so happened to choose you as His vessel.  When we forget that, we become poor stewards—broken vessels—that end up “sinking” the opportunity He has given us.  This doesn’t mean we can’t be confrontational and confident: Jesus was both, but still willing to humble Himself further than we can really grasp (Php 2:8).  What it DOES mean is that we’ve got to put others before ourselves, and make sure our leadership serves them, rather than demanding that they serve us.

How else can you draw out the purpose in people?

Necessities

I cannot tell you how excited I am for tonight. It’s our first 24-7 service of the new school year, and the leadership team has been praying so much for God to show up in an incredible way…I believe that God is going to answer that prayer!  When our ministry (which is EVERY effort you make to share the gospel and show the love of Christ, not just church-related jobs or groups) is supported by prayer and passion, it becomes unstoppable.

If you are involved in ministry and you are not constantly praying for God to bless what you are doing, you need to do one of two things:
1) START praying about your ministry, because you cannot do anything of significance without the Holy Spirit backing you up; and when you pray for God to move where you are investing your time, it shows Him that you really do care about it and believe that He can do anything and everything to make it succeed;
2) STOP doing it, because if God is not involved in your ministry you are wasting your time.

We have to constantly be in a place of helplessness and total reliance on God to come in power and change people’s hearts…you received the grace of God from God, not from another person—that doesn’t change with your ministry!  You never received the ability to give that…people only receive God’s grace from God.

If you are not passionate about your ministry, you need to do one of two things (this might sound familiar):
1) START praying for God to change your heart about what He has called and anointed you to do, and begin putting every effort you can into serving and building up the people you serve with.  God doesn’t ever want us to do things begrudgingly, but sometimes we have to press on through a lack of motivation and passion as an act of faithfulness to what God has chosen us for.  IF you are truly doing what God has called you to do, obligation will shortly become obsession when it is backed by a sincere pursuit of God’s heart.
2) STOP doing it, because the world has enough people who dirty God’s reputation by doing ministry half-heartedly and showing through their actions that the kingdom of God is not worth pursuing excellence for.  God has chosen you for a purpose, and if you are not seeking and fulfilling that purpose because you have planted yourself somewhere else, you are not only missing out on a life of meaning and fulfillment that only comes from serving God as He calls you, but you are also keeping those you are currently serving from meeting with God in the way that He desires, because He has chosen someone else to do what you’re doing with the passion that you don’t have.

Every single one of us has a purpose in the kingdom of God, and to fulfill that purpose we need to continually seek God’s blessing and direction, and constantly be evaluating where we’re at and comparing it to where God wants us to be.  When we are where God wants us and passionate about being there, miracles happen!

ONE Lesson #2: Sports and Math

The vision that God gives us for our ministry to others is so vital to the life of that ministry.  Without God’s dream for our lives placed in our hearts, we will always burn out and lose focus.  But WITH God’s calling, we cannot STOP being on fire for it!

However…just because God gives you a vision doesn’t mean He gave everyone that same vision.  And sometimes it is really easy to try and force your vision onto others, because you think it’s right and it’s what God wants.  But you can only know what God has called YOU to do, not anyone else.  And forcing your vision onto others results in them burning out and losing focus, because you are not God, and He is the only one that can inspire people beyond their imaginations.  If you want someone else to be sold out on your vision, you’ve got to rely on the wind of the Holy Spirit to spread the fire in your heart to others – it cannot ever be forced on someone.  As Brad Cooper said, “Vision is caught, not taught.”

With that being said, every single person that is involved in one particular ministry MUST be sold on the vision.  When two people are working together but have different goals, it will cause a split.  So many different ministries fall apart because not everyone is sold on one vision, and end up trying to steer it in multiple directions.  “The vision must be identical or it’s ‘double vision,’ which is the same as ‘division,’” Perry Noble said.  When we have double vision, we can’t see straight, depth perception is gone, focus is impossible, and nothing is accomplished.  When we have division, things simply keep getting smaller and smaller, and there are remainders (that in ministry end up being people who need God to speak through you) that we push off to the side.  If we want our ministry to succeed, we have to all be clearly seeing the same goals, be in agreement on how God wants us to get there, and be absolutely zeroed in on our purpose…and when that happens, God makes things bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER and instead of leaving people behind in our hurry to accomplish our own individual passions (see 2 Samuel 4:4 for a Scriptural example) God continually brings people to us so that they can see and be a part of the unifying power of Jesus.

ONE Lesson #1: Possessed

I recently attended the ONE conference at NewSpring Church for senior pastors, youth pastors, and children’s pastors and man, did God speak to me there!  I’m going to do a series of blogs on some of the things the Holy Spirit revealed to my heart, starting with this:

Because my friends and fellow leaders are such visionaries and big dreamers, a common topic of conversation is how big other churches are, how many people attend different conferences, and even how much growth is happening in different ministries of the same church.  This is an awesome way to encourage one another and get bigger vision for where God may be leading us (after all, Ephesians 3:20 says He can do “immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine”), but it can also be dangerous, because it’s really easy to start comparing churches and ministries.  When we start comparing “ours” to “theirs,” we lose sight of God’s Kingdom because we are obsessing over our own kingdoms.

This can lead to “strategic evangelism,” in which ideas are pitched and people are talked to and ministries are promoted in such a way that one ministry (yours, if you’re the one doing this) should get everyone, and other ministries shouldn’t get anyone.  Selfishness, greed, manipulation, and lying go on all the time under the banners of revelation (“God told me He wants MY church to be the biggest”), calling (“God called ME to be a successful minister, so I should succeed”), and other common church words.  BUT…

God wants HIS Church to be the biggest – the body of Christ, the Kingdom of God, the Church (with a capital C), not the church (with a lowercase c).  And God may have called you to be a minister, and He may bless your ministry to appear successful, but HE is the one succeeding, HE is the one who should be famous, and without HIM your ministry and/or church would be a building filled with dead people condemned to hell – YOURSELF INCLUDED – and everything that’s done there God would see as filthy rags.

We can’t ever take possession of the things God has blessed us with; that includes leadership ability, lots or few people attending your ministry, a big or little building, one or eight services.  And we can’t ever become jealous of that church being bigger than this church, because we are all part of the body of Christ, serving different purposes in different places so that the gospel can be preached to everybody!

“Do you want to control a move of God, or do you want to unleash it?” -Perry Noble

Sunday school Alumni

Very rarely do I hear any pastors preach from the most common Bible stories anymore – those stories are apparently only suitable to Sunday school.  I am just as guilty of this, I am incredibly disinclined to speak on the teachings found in stories like Jonah and the Ark, the fall, or David and Goliath.  Why is that? Is it perhaps because these stories seem childish to us, because they were taugh to us when we were children?  Is it maybe because these stories seem old, and there is nothing more to be drawn from them than what has been already?  Do these stories seem to simple, with not enough deep insight to wring out of non-descript verses?  Are they too plain?

I think that they are not too plain – they are too clear.  While the “moral of the story” seems obvious to us, it is for that reason that we avoid it; we don’t want to make the sacrifices those characters made, we don’t want to give up what they gave for the sake of the kingdom, we don’t want to have to face the trials that they faced (which we KNOW are in our lives, but hope that they might go away if they’re ignored).

These “most popular” Bible stories may seem childish, old, and simple.  Yet we need faith like a child (Lk 18:16), we need to be reminded of what we know more often than we need to be taught something new (1Ch 16:12), and devotion to Christ is a simple and pure thing (2Co 11:3).