I’ve heard it said a hundred times “I don’t care what other people think”. Shoot I’ve even said it myself. And there is a truth in that statement that can really help you in life and shape you.
However, as a leader that can be the dumbest statement you can make. While God didn’t design us to live our lives trying to get other people’s approval, He did design our lives to be a showcase or a “city set upon a hill”. The problem with a city set up on a hill is that everyone can see it.
For leaders who think they can get away with behaviors that make bad perceptions in the people that they are leading they are kidding themselves. You better care what they think. That doesn’t mean you should make that your priority for how you live your life. But you had better know what kind of leverage you are having to use up by making the decisions that you make. I’ve seen leaders who were suddenly surprised when someone vaulted from among them and blatantly rebelled. I’m rarely surprised anymore. I usually see it coming, and I usually know which decision that I’m going to make is going to cause the problem. Then I make the decision with as much knowledge as possible and if it can be avoided and handled differently I do that. Not because I’m afraid of the person, but because I care for them.
To many leaders are “my way or the highway”. In fact, I’m that way sometimes. The question is are you aware that you are that way. We should try to please people. There is nothing wrong with making people happy. However, I won’t live a life of condemnation because I can’t always please people when my principles lead me in a different way. Principles make leaders, but perceptions create followers. The perceptions of your followers will dictate just how much of a leader you are. You had better build your character on principles, but you had also better be aware of your perception in people’s eyes. If leadership is measured through influence then I had better understand what influence the perception of me causes.
I’m not saying to become an approval addict and always have to make people happy as the priority in your life, but sometimes its ok to make people happy along the way. If simple decisions buy me influence why not make them? Especially if they don’t have any cost one way or the other to my principles. I’m not talking about compromising values, I’m talking about the little things that win you perception. God looks on your heart, so keep it pure first, but man looks on the outward appearance, so you had best work on that too if you intend to lead man.
I work at it to please the people in charge over me. I work at it to keep my teams happy and together. It’s not my #1 PRIORITY…. but it is high on my list. Pleasing God always trumps pleasing people, but pleasing people often trumps pleasing me.
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Tags: change, compromise, follower, heretic, influence, leader, Leadership, perception, principles, reality
Measurement … it’s decisive.
Ok I did alot of posting last week on sin, and if you’re like me, you probably thought you didn’t need it.
Here’s a ‘quick’ sin test for you.
Make an inventory of your time for the last week. Write down everything you did.
Now take that list and read over it and beside it write “why” you did it. And don’t give some superficial mumbo jumbo. Dig to the root.
Then do this take a seperate sheet of paper and look over the last week. What would God want you to have done? Were there opportunities that you missed that He made available to you? Were there places that you put family, friends, and comfort over God? If so I’m betting you are on the trail of some sin nature in your life that you need to wrestle with. The BIBLE says seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.
Do the test? Find out what you’re seeking.
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Tags: change, heretics, Leadership, measurement, Sin Test, time, transformation, wwjd
Don’t Jump the Gap
As a spin off from yesterday’s post I want to dig a little deeper into how to span the gap. I think my biggest failures have always come when I have tried to jump the gap. What do I mean? Well let’s take the example of me wanting to impress my inlaws. I was very aware of the gap (step one). I hated the gap (step two). However, it’s not as simple as being aware and hating it, somehow there has to be a grace and a law that helps me occupy the gap. I’ve found that basically I’m tethered to my current performance. I can run and jump to cross the gap, but the tether of my character will always cause me to fall back to where I was. And usually that fall is about halfway across the gap.
I think this is the place that most Christians literally fall because they don’t understand Faith. It is presumptuous and even arrogant of me to think that because I’m aware of something and because I hate it that I can make it stop. Only the creative and miraculous power of God can change me. Does God want me to change, of course. But see there is this rather large obstacle between me entering into the fulness of grace. It’s called my lack of faith. Oh sure, I can hype my soul up that I’m not going to fall, but if my character isn’t built up to sustain it I’ll just fall back. It’s kinda like that scene from the matrix where everyone expects Neo to make the jump from one building to the next, and instead he falls flat on his face. Just because you’re called to be able to do it, doesn’t mean you have the faith to. Until you believe “there is no spoon” you aren’t going anywhere.
Let’s break it down another step. I’m aware of the sin, I hate the sin… what do I do?
Step 1 – Repent. That doesn’t mean say you’re sorry. While there is an element of that involved, it’s much more about a change of direction rather than a confessions of stupidity. If confessions of stupidity would get me over my sin I would be the most perfect person in the world!
Step 2 – Confess Your sin. What does that mean? Well there are 2 parts to confession. 1. Acknowledgment. Acknowledge that it is SIN, once you’ve called it SIN then you can’t make it out as a “bad habit” or knock if off as just a “bad day”. Instead, then it becomes and indictment against God and you MUST deal with it. 2. Confessing Your Solution. The Bible says that “the just shall live by Faith”. Think of it this way. God didn’t design us to just “stop” doing stuff. Smokers have a hard time quitting smoking without some replacement habit. For some people it is eating, I’ve seen quitters who constantly have to have a toothpick, or even gum chewers. The point is this, God didn’t design us to be quitters, so if we are going to change something we have to replace that foundation in our lives with something else. A substitute for our sin in this case. So what is the substitute for our sin? CHRIST! IN US! So how do I make the substitution. Through confession. By daily confessing the word, that says thing (in my example) that ‘I thank you God that I seek to please you and not man’, ‘I am the righteousness of God through Christ Jesus’, ‘It is not I who live but Christ in me’…. etc etc. By confessing the word of God about my life. By taking on the identity of Christ over the identity of Ken then I begin to put to death the sin in my life. Combine that with praying in other tongues and fasting … and instead of jumping the gap I fill in the hole. That way if I trip up somewhere along the way or I’m in a position that causes me to live from my character and not my intentions then I am built on a firm foundation. FILL IN THE GAP.
3. Submit. This is the one that most Christians can’t do. This is really the third part of confession. Confess to someone who can put you under law. Not just a law to measure your sin, but a law that leads you to righteousness. Apostle David can put me under law that does multiple things.
a. He can remove me from situations that cause the sin to manifest … which is necessary for people early on in separating from sin.
b. He can put me on a plan to measure the sin and see how prevelant it is so the he calls me on it anytime he sees it showing up in my life.
c. He can help me craft a diet for myself that equips me to fill in the gap with the Word of God and with resources that God has put in our hands.
d. He can put me in situations that provide me with opportunities to practice living from righteousness instead of the sin.
And there are probably more. By doing these things I am putting myself under a schoolmaster. Not Apostle David … but a LAW. The Bible says that the law is a good school master and is present until grace comes. The law is there to help me occupy while the grace of Christ is building up and taking dominion in my life. One day I won’t need the law because the grace will be manifest to fulfill it without the law being necessary (my heart will have changed), but until then TEACH TEACHER!
So don’t jump the gap… fill it in. It’s not an overnight process, it’s a journey. But God’s grace is sufficient and His law is written in our hearts that we might not SIN against God!
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Tags: Christ, confession, grace, heretic, law, Leadership, love, sin, The Gap
The Gap pt 4
As I’ve continued to meditate on the gap of sin in our lives that lies between our knowledge of what to do and our possession of that knowledge by doing it, God has brought me to some more interesting discoveries.
Ever heard someone talk about Intercession and say “I’m standing in the Gap” for someone? I’ve heard that phrase alot and I’ve heard it used by some “spiritual” people to talk about praying for people and that sort of thing. While I do believe that you can ’stand in the gap’ for someone through prayer I believe that real intercession goes beyond just praying for someone. Don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to belittle the power of prayer so please no ugly comments about my lack of faith in prayer or anything like that. But I think that alot of our world has been prayed for with no doing tied to it. We’ve ‘walked in faith’ but we’ve had no accompanying action to that faith.
I believe that God is wanting us to close our gaps, so that we can stand in the gaps of others.
For example, if you live in the area of Northeast Georgia then you would be considered “In the Bible Belt”. There are people around us everyday that have heard the truth of Jesus Christ (at least to some extent) and yet they still haven’t given their life over to Him. They know the truth, they even agree with the truth, but they think they can’t live it out… so why bother trying. To be honest I think anyone reading this post knows people like that. They are living in the gap. They know God has a plan for them…. yet they run from it for whatever reason. They don’t occupy the gap between what they know and what they do.
Therefore, if God is really calling us to be intercessors He’s not out for us to point out the gap to people, but to help stand in their gap. What does that mean? That means that He is calling us to close up our gaps so that we can show people how to live life beyond the gap. If you know how to clean your room and your room stays clean…. then I bet you can help someone else get their room clean as well.
3 ways you can help.
1. Provoke them to live beyond the gap. The bible repeatedly speaks of God’s people provoking one another to good works, and even makes statements that indicate that people will know we are Christians by the peace, love, and prosperity that we walk in (not by the Jesus T shirt or by the fact that we act like idiots and don’t pay our bills). You can inspire people to live beyond the gap because of the blessing of the Lord that is found there.
2. Equip them to span the gap. Most people don’t want to live in sin… they just don’t know how to get out of it. The alcoholic who keeps going back to the alcohol, the big spender who digs further and further in debt, the luster who hates the porn they watch everyday but can’t figure out a way to stop. They need someone who has walked the path. Who knows how to teach them to walk by faith and not by sight. How to walk in the righteousness of God. Shows them each step to get out of the mess they are in and over to life beyond the gap! Sometimes they might need tools, sometimes prayer, sometimes deliverance, sometimes just accountability, but they need you to help them get through the gap.
3. Cover the Gap. I’m blessed to live in a house at Gateway that knows not only how to help me identify and overcome my sin, but they also know how to cover it. I’m not talking about a cover up … that’s a whole different story. I’m talking about spiritual leadership that knows how to help me see the gap in my life without letting me fall on my face to do it. Let me explain through a personal example. I recently had my inlaws in town for Christmas. I was so excited to have them come down. I was scheduled to preach on that Sunday Night and I was really excited for them to hear me. As I began to prepare I began to notice the gap showing up in my life. There was a part of me that was really wanting to please my inlaws. Now the good news is that I recognized it. I hated it and I wanted it to stop. However, wanting sin to disappear and seeing it go are two very different things. Thanks to the mercy of God my spiritual father stepped in and taught that Sunday night instead. I never even had to tell him, he simply discerned where I was at. Here’s the even better part, he never made me look like the idiot I would have looked like because he was able to cover my sin. We discussed it and he’s helping me work through how to overcome it. I didn’t have to fall on my face to overcome my sin. Instead, I had someone who was able to stand in the gap for me, cover me, and help me by providing grace to cover what I couldn’t fix on my own. I believe God is calling us all to that level of intercession. Where we can cover the gap for people. Not to hurt them, but to help them. Once again, I’m not talking about covering up sin that should be exposed. I’m talking about exposing it to the people who can change it and covering it so that you don’t have suffer the consequences of sin and death. I have little doubt that it would have been a dead service that night had I stood up with the gap so present in my preparation, and yet I still couldn’t get rid of it. Because sin always produces death.
God wants us to overcome our gaps, so that we can stand in the gap for others. Where’s your gap? What are you working on? Who are you covering?
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Tags: change, heretic, intercession, Leadership, sin, The Gap
The Gap pt 3
The Gap … that space between knowing and doing. Or what the Bible calls SIN.
In James 4:17 it says “to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is a sin”.
As I continue to look at the gap in my life I quickly find that it’s hard for me to recognize the gap. My flesh is comfortable with the gap and my soul obviously is too. Only my spirit has a problem with the gap. Of course if I’m not listening to my spirit in that area of my life then it becomes extremely difficult to locate the gap. So how do I find gaps?
I’ve heard alot of teaching on this and different people say different things. I know that a couple of foundational ways are through praying in other tongues and fasting. The praying in tongues builds up my spirit and the fasting tears down my flesh. The two together make room for my spirit to take control over my soul. So that’s a foundational key.
But then while I’m doing that … how do I recognize areas that I’m not trying to recognize. It’s a difficult task. Here’s a few things that the Lord is showing me that indicate gaps.
1. Places I run from. If I find myself subtly avoiding certain situations, I often find a gap. Whether it’s a confrontational meeting or a simple conversation about finances with my wife I find myself from time to time shying away from those areas and those things. The pain of staying the same doesn’t outweigh the pain of change so I am content to stay the same. I’ll live with my sin. However, if I begin to notice this area I can focus my prayer and fasting to specifically work on it and lay aside this sin in my life.
2. Places I run to. Have you ever seen the T-shirt or coffee mug that says “I’d rather be fishing”. Do you ever catch yourself making statements like “if it wasn’t for church I would ……” or “if It wasn’t for the call of God I’d live…” or maybe “if I wasn’t so connected at church I would work….” I bet you could fill in those blanks. I know there have been times that I wanted to fill them in. Here’s the problem, if you can make that statement you eventually will. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. If “your committment” to God is the only thing keeping you from doing something then you are living under Law and not grace. That’s just like an alcoholic saying “if it weren’t for being a member of AA I’d drink today”. While AA is good and it has helped alot of people, it confesses that we are bound by the sin and it’s merely the law that keeps us from the consequences. In the same way, if you are serving God or doing what HE wants out of law, it’s a matter of time before you will break it. If you want to live somewhere else you eventually will, if you want to work in another job you eventually will, if you would rather spend time with your family you eventually will. Find what you run to. It’s only my sin nature that runs to things that are contrary to where God has me and what He has me doing. Anytime you can fill in that blank you can start to trace back to a gap and find an area that sin still owns in your life.
3. What runs me. This one is the hardest and the easiest all at the same time. It’s one of those things that makes you say “DUH” when you finally see it and think about how blind you must have been. These are the subtle things like needing ungodly approval from man so you over commit, or wanting a dream that doesn’t align with God’s dream for you. These things push you into making bad decisions (and sometimes even good decisions that aren’t God decisions) that take you right out of what God has for you. They PUSH YOU…. they RUN YOU. What aspirations, dreams, and goals that didn’t come from God are running you…. why?
Where’s your gap? Spend some time finding it.
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Tags: change, death, gap, grace, heretic, Leadership, mortification, seeking time, sin
Finding the Gap
As I continue to meditate on “THE GAP” I realize that we all have one. That space between information and actualization. James dealt with it saying “be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.
We all walk in a measure of deception. What is scary is when we don’t know what we don’t know. I’m sure we’ve all heard that statement but what does it really mean. Here’s an example of the deception that I’ve used to teach teens for years. Do you know how to clean your room? (usual answer … YES). Is your room clean? (usual answer… NO). Then you don’t know how to clean your room. That’s the gap. Knowledge of the techniques of cleaning a room doesn’t make you able to clean it. But we deceive ourselves into thinking that we know how to clean our rooms.
Do you know how to walk by faith? …… Do you walk by faith?
Do you know how to get healed? …. Are you ever sick?
Do you know how to lead someone to Christ? …. When was the last time you actually led someone to Christ?
Can you see the gap? It’s the things we think we know because we understand them, but the things we don’t do… then we obviously don’t know how to do them.
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Tags: change, Christ, gap, heretic, Leadership, The Gap
The Gap
Seeking time at Gateway starts today and God has already started dealing with my heart about some things. Some of what He shares with me you’ll be able to receive right here on my blog… some stuff will be personal and I won’t be sharing at this time.
That being said let me share a few things that He started wrestling with me over. As I was meditating God began to deal with me about what I’ll call “THE GAP”.
The space between what I know and what I do. Specifically, He began to wrestle with me about the gap between my knowledge of biblical principles and my practice of them in my leadership structures and purposes.
I heard Him say “the gap between your knowledge and your leadership performance is sin”. It’s my sin nature that still has control. Not the kind of sin that makes you a sinner headed for hell, but the kind of sin that prevents you from walking in Christ in everything you do. It’s the WEIGHT of sin, that makes leading feel “hard”. The weight of the fear of confrontation, the arrogance of thinking I know what I don’t know, the pressure that I carry because I think “I’m” the one with the solution. That’s the kind of sin that is hard to conquer (at least for me). It’s that natural born sin that makes us think we “know” the right answers.
As I meditated further God began to show me how it’s the little things that create the gap. Not the big things. It’s the little areas that I don’t use faith and instead use my own knowledge, the small areas where I don’t trust Him because I think that “my way” is just as good. It’s SIN… Black, nasty, Old nature, SIN.
So today I repent of my sin of arrogance and self exaltation and ask God to expose the gap. Make it obvious that it might hurt me and that my conscience might be sensitive to my spirit and not my confidence in myself. May I do ONLY what I see my Father do. May Christ in me be the only part of me that there is. That I might die to my pride and arrogance and may live in the peace of His Grace.
Where’s your gap?
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Tags: arrogance, change, gap, heretic, pride, seeking time, sin, transformation
I read this terrific post by Tom Peters and it reminded me of just how much we “good” becomes the enemy of great. We try to make everything black and white. We rarely think… “both and” … Good is the great cop out to being God. By being GOOD at managements then we think that means we can be BAD at quality. Ummm that’s like saying that Oranges are the opposite of apples. They aren’t in the same thing.
However, it’s convenient for us to dichotomize things until we take the pressure and stress of insufficiency out of them and instead make ourselves comfortable. God never called us to halfway do anything… how often do we lump spiritual things together that don’t go together.
Well I’ve got faith for my finances so that excuses the fact that I haven’t gotten a single person healed. Or I have no problem with alcohol so that makes up for my problems with lying. It’s not either or. It’s not do one and not the other. I know it sounds hard, I know it sounds difficult… THAT’S WHY YOU NEED GRACE!!! It’s not possible for man to be all that God has called us to be … that’s why He gave us power to be the SONS OF GOD (yes that makes us of the lineage of Gods). So therefore, we now have the power that we in our own strength don’t own to do what in our own strength is IMPOSSIBLE for us to do! We are of the I AM. So therefore mediocrity and halfway is a curse. We must RIGHTLY DIVIDE THE WORD OF TRUTH … otherwise you end up wrongly dividing it and you think because you’re covering part of your division that you must be “ok”. THINK ABOUT IT!
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Tags: change, Curse, excellence, God, grace, heretic, Leadership, mediocrity, tom peters
Seperated from our Solution
You’re in a dark attic. You’re hunting an old picture of you from when you were a child. You’re fumbling through the dark and having absolutely no luck. Finally, you stumble across the chain that flips o an old yellowish lightbulb that immediately illuminates the entirety of the attic. You look about and with disgust you see a thick layer of dust has covered everything. Spiderwebs hang from the roof and you even see a small rat in the corner. In fear and anger you curse the light and quickly turn it back off.
It sounds kind of silly doesn’t it. However, Satan is a mastermind at being able to convince us that the light is our problem. For example, if you can’t stand your boss and you go home everyday with tears practically in your eyes because of something the “did” to you, you might be cursing the lightbulb. Let me explain. If the pain is in you, the problem is in you. No maybe not the entire problem, but at least some part of the problem. If you touch a hot stove is it the stove’s fault if you get burned? Or what if you have cancer and you go to a doctor and he offers surgery as a solution to seeing you get well? It’s easy to see in these cases how of course the problem is in us and we need their help. But with our boss it’s easier to blame the other person than to evaluate what is in us that is causing us the pain.
Burnout is another example of where you hear someone blaming a lightbulb for creating all the dust. You start working at a job or pick up some extra duties at church and before long people retreat into a place of saying they are “burned out” or “just not getting fed”. What I find in 99% of these cases is that the burnout has nothing to do with the class the job or the extra workload. But rather those things put pressure on things that were already out of place in our lives. Maybe we had priorities wrong and didn’t have God up there on the top of the list. Maybe we aren’t feeding ourselves daily in the Word and fasting and praying as we need to. Maybe we don’t have a handle on our finances or our relationship with our spouse is in the toilet. Either way, it’s not the extra workload that is the problem, it’s not the thing that appears to be “causing the pain” that is the issue. Instead, the thing the extra “workload” is doing is flipping on a light switch to evaluate the status of the rest of our lives.
Satan would like nothing more than to keep us in the dark. But when he can’t keep us totally in the dark he does the next best thing, he makes the light the enemy rather than what is revealed in the light. I’ve seen people chase their spouse and leave church to try to save them… they got separated from their source. I’ve seen people chase their job and drop their God given assignment… separated from their source. I’ve even seen people run to another church looking to get “fed” because they didn’t like what the previous one was exposing… separated from their source.
Jesus said it this way, “he that finds his life shall lose it, but he that loses his life for my sake shall find it”. It may seem like those things out there are important … and in fact they probably are. Your job may be uniquely tied to your personal destiny, your employer may be a pain in the rear, your wife may be exactly who God put you with… but the point is they aren’t your source. God is your source. Instead of running from the things God has put in your life to develop you; your church assignments, the people He has placed you under at work, even the difficulties of facing marital issues … run to the things God has put in your life. God uses these challenges to show us places in our lives that we walk in unbelief, where our sin nature still has dominion. Sometimes we have to face the pain of surgery to fix the cancer of sin. Sometimes working for the difficult and challenging boss is actually teaching you to be more like them instead of despising the gifts they have. Sometimes doing the extra work for a class our a bus route is exactly what God needs to expose other places that your life may not be as “together” as you would like it to be. Don’t run from the source of your solution, run to it. Once the dust is exposed … clean it up… don’t just run and try to hide it. Satan wants to keep you from the light source God has for you… don’t let him succeed. Run to your solution!
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Tags: boss, challenge, destiny, exposed, heretic, Leadership, light, seperation, solution
Does your Bible Haunt you?
I’m full of angst. Some of you say I’m full of something… but you’re not sure about the angst. But let me assure you it is angst. The Bible can be so vexing sometimes to my flesh. Or maybe it’s that my flesh is so vexing to my Bible. Either way when I read the Word of God I am grieved in my spirit at my own inadequacies. Verses like Mark 16:15-18 HAUNT ME. They drive spikes into my flesh and torture my apathy. In those verses it doesn’t leave any qualifiers that give me a “way out”. It says these signs WILL FOLLOW them that believe. Yet I can’t create those signs in my life. THAT MAKES ME MAD, IT GRIEVES ME, IT DRIVES ME BATTY! If a believer can do those things… what part of me doesn’t believe?
Too often I think we read the word passively. Listening for someone else’s benefit or looking for a “good story”. Instead, of allowing it to rend our heart at the dominance our sin nature still has over us. Why can’t I reproduce the miracles from the New Testament, why can’t I see people supernaturally transformed everywhere I go, because some part of my sin nature is still in control and that part of my sin nature rules from a place of stronger belief in itself than in the Christ that is in me.
What vexes you? What creates an angst in you that begs for resolution? What grieves your spirit? Until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change, you won’t change.
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Tags: angst, grieve, haunty, pain, rend, sin, spirit, word
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