One of the great lies in the church stops us as fathers and mothers from fathering people because we think in order to do it we need to be better than them. It’s not about my ability. It’s about my encouragement. It’s about my love. It’s about believing in Him. For sons and daughters to become heroes they need moms and dads who believe in them, cheer them on, and encourage them even though they might not be as good at what they do.
The fatal tendency is to divide Christians into two groups: religious and the laity, exceptional Christians and ordinary Christians, the one who makes a vocation of the Christian life and the man who is engaged in secular affairs. That tendency is not only utterly and completely unscriptural; it is ultimately destructive of true piety and is, in many ways, a negation of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no such distinction in the Bible.
God is quick to catch the sigh of the heart. He hears our silent sighs under the heavy mantle of leadership or parenting. He hears our short sighs of loneliness or exhaustion or choking grief that go unnoticed by others, and he seeks to comfort us. The Spirit is translating those sighs into prayers according to the perfect will of God. May we be comforted to know that our Father hears our slightest sighs as loud cries.
The problem in our church world is that we’re so fixated on pastors and pulpits. The vast majority of people in the Christian world will never see a pulpit. If we don’t get unimpressed with the pulpit and pastors, then we’ll never see the reformation and harvest we all want. Whatever you affirm, you empower. Not afirming the ministry that goes on through the saints in their daily life, work, family, the mundane but necessary things, etc., has caused the repetitive strongholds that don’t get a breakthrough. We wonder why we don’t see a breakthrough in our churches, so we try harder and harder to preach better sermons and have better speakers because we hope that it’s the way to bring transformation. In this reformation, God is moving the pulpit from center stage to the back corner. The pulpit will still have a role. But our view of the pulpit will drastically change, and preaching in a church building behind the pulpit will become a smaller part of the transformation needed in the church, not the largest part. Now don’t get me wrong, most of my world is built around the pulpit. I love to preach and spend a lot of time preaching, teaching and training. But God is up to something different.
If an elder or private member of the church finds his brethren cold towards him, there is but one way to remedy it. It is by being revived himself, and pouring out from his eyes and from his life the splendor of the image of Christ. This spirit will catch and spread in the church, and confidence will be renewed, and brotherly love prevail again.
If we have a call to lead many, how well are we loving and caring for those God has placed around us? Sometimes we can get so lost in the idea of our “grand call” that we forget about loving the one in front of us; we forget about discipling those who God has entrusted to us. We must remember that God entrusts nations to those with the heart of a shepherd.
I have been drawn to the story of Moses, because his hard-won strength of soul forged in his private encounters with God gave him the staying power he needed for the long haul of leadership. He made it all the way to the finish line of his life in leadership not because he knew how to think about leadership and conceptualize it in clever ways. He lasted because he allowed his leadership challenges to catalyze and draw him into a level of reliance on God that he might not have pursued had it not been for his great need for God which he experienced most profoundly in the crucible of leadership. He literally had no place else to go!
Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.
Blessed the man and woman who is able to serve cheerfully in the second rank — a big test.
Words not spoken in love, are like knocking on a door of an empty house. You can make a lot of noise but no one will respond.