1. Delegation – We don’t delegate because we don’t trust God with the results. We don’t delegate because our default mode is to do it ourselves: “If I do this, my pastor will be pleased with me. If I do that, God will be pleased with me.”
We don’t delegate because we have a half-hearted view of what eternal rewards are. What ultimate beauty is. C.S. Lewis addresses our self-focused small-mindedness in his book The Weight of Glory:
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
We often don’t delegate because we are building our own kingdom. We are far too concerned with who gets the credit rather than who gets the glory.
What I think is interesting about Gen. 2 when God creates Adam is:
1. He gives him meaningful work.
2. He gives him clear parameters for that work to take place.
3. He gives him something that forces him to reflect his Creator.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
2. Leading under Authority – ??We lead under authority when we understand ultimate authority. When you come on staff at a church, you have to submit yourself to the pastor you serve. This can only be done to the degree you have submitted your life completely to Christ.
What does submission to authority look like?
– It’s walking and leading in humility
– It’s trusting Jesus more than your circumstance
– It’s not checking your dreams at the door of the church
– It’s not blindly following your pastor off a cliff
– Submission to authority starts with you submitting your life to Christ ultimately. As a result, you walk in humility. You speak when you need to and be quiet when you need to. Paul talks about our submission to Christ and uses marriage as an example for us:
EPHESIANS 5:22-25
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…
The power to submit to the authorities God has placed in our life comes from our ability to fully trust Christ above all else.
“But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away? ‘blindly,’ so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality ?is what you are bothering about, you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. ?The principle runs through all life from top to bottom.
Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.? Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
C.S. Lewis
3. Connecting with Families – We have to move from atmosphere of co-dependence to an environment of interdependence.
There has been a huge push for family ministry the past decade, and rightly so. Leading into the future, we have to value families not as a stated value but as an actual value. The church and families alike need to admit this co-dependent relationship is broken and doesn’t honor God. We need to move to a model that creates interdependence, where families and church are dependent on each other and where they are both fully dependent on Christ alone.
When talking about connecting parents, sometimes our creative ideas and the connecting itself become an end in itself. We start with the wrong question. We ask how we can connect parents. We need to ask that, but we first need to ask, what are we connecting them to? Do the parents we are partnering with value the same things?
4. Measurement – We measure the wrong things. Measurement is a good thing, but what we measure reveals a lot about us. The thing that is so dangerous about measurement is it can very quickly become the thing in our life that informs every decision we make. We can find our identity in something other than Christ.
Our tendency is to move off of the things we can’t see and start to measure things we can see. We often find our worth in kids’ ministry by how many kids come, by what curriculum we use, by what check-in we have or by how well our spaces are themed. A lot of the dissatisfaction we have in ministry comes from us measuring the wrong things.
We spend our time and energy on the things we measure. What you measure, you get more of. What scares me is getting more of something that isn’t Jesus.
5. Priorities – Our priorities are informed by our loves. We make time for the things we love. Where we spend our time shows what is most valuable to us.
Our priorities are determined by our loves. We spend our time, our money and our energy on the things that matter most.
As a leader, you will be pulled on by everyone around you if you don’t put guardrails in your life. What drives us? Our desire to please everyone. We want to make everyone happy. This is a pipe dream and comes from our desire to have others think well of us rather than God.
What is crazy is we can so easily use Jesus to get what we want. One of the scariest things about ministry is we can so easily make the things of ministry the ultimate desire of our lives.
Revelation 21:5, 6?: And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
Our lives have purpose because of him.
