Author: admin

Should people follow someone who has not earned their allegiance? You may think your personal life choices have little to do with your job, but they affect your followers’ opinion of you as a person. Whether it is personality issues, character flaws or general ineptness, people are weary of following those they do not trust or respect.

Character matters more than you might imagine. To attract highly motivated, quality workers you must be respectable and worthy of being followed. Charm, charisma and propaganda may attract a following, but integrity, honesty, work ethic and fairness will determine whether those people stay on board. Christ’s style of leadership was not about doing as He said, or even doing as He did, but rather being like Him. A Christlike character in a leader exemplifies everything followers need to know about how to conduct themselves.

Don’t justify your character deficiencies or make excuses for your poor lifestyle choices. Ask God’s Spirit to work in your life so your weaknesses become strengths through which the Lord brings glory to Himself.

Managers assist people to do better and more efficiently what they are already doing. They help implement the strategies and visions of leaders. Good management is necessary in an organization so people can accomplish what they have been hired or enlisted to do. But management and leadership is not the same thing.

Leaders take people to a place they have not been before. Spiritual leaders guide those who follow them to experience fresh dimensions of serving God. Would-be leaders who are reluctant to challenge the status quo may be equippers, facilitators, enablers, or managers, but they are not really leaders. God calls spiritual leaders to take people from where they are to where He wants them to be. It will be a new place, a challenging place, and a place of dependence on God.

As a leader, are you in motion or are you just spinning your well-greased wheels? Do you have a God-given direction or are you force-marching your followers to wander in the wilderness until you find your way? Take time to know where God wants you to lead your people and then take your people on the journey of a lifetime. Seek God in your prayer time, in your worship time, and in your time in His word and you will find Him. Then you will know His ways, and His plans for you and for those whom you lead.

God has infinite ways to accomplish His purposes. Legions of angels are eager to do His bidding. Yet, when He wants to do a great work upon the earth He habitually calls out ordinary people and transforms them into leaders.

Could God have delivered the Israelites from Egyptian bondage without Moses, a man who considered himself in every way to be unworthy? Certainly. Could the people of Israel have been freed from the Midianites without Gideon, or protected from the Philistines without Samson’s services? Of course. Did the Lord have to call Deborah or Esther to help save their nation? No. These were all fallible people who served God imperfectly. If God had wanted perfection, He would have commissioned angels, such as Gabriel or Michael. Instead, He chose unremarkable mortals and helped them to fulfill His purposes.

Just as God fully equipped people in biblical times to accomplish His purposes, so He will enable you to do whatever He asks you to do. If God is calling you to serve Him as a leader, don’t be intimidated. You follow a long line of commonplace people who have enjoyed the amazing adventure of participating in the Lord’s activity.

As time passes, our earlier resolve can begin to wane. In years past, we may have set ambitious personal goals for ourselves as we entered each new year. We established bold resolutions. We raised the bar for our job performance and physical health. But after years of falling short or failing, we may have grown timid, or weary. Perhaps striving year by year to better ourselves has become discouraging, or demoralizing. It may be that we are simply meekly entering the new year without any real plans to advance in our life. But that should not be so.

God has a unique purpose for your life. He intends for you to become like Christ. He wants your life to produce much fruit. What He began in you, He intends to complete. So it may be that you need to buckle down and press on. It could be that this coming year might be a breakthrough year, if you don’t lose heart. It could be that you are on the cusp of a significant advance, if you persevere. So as you enter this new year, take time to consider those things you know God has been trying to do in your life. Has He completed it? What about your relationships? Is God seeking to bring healing? What is God seeking to do in your family? Are you trusting Him for it until God brings it to pass?

In what areas of your life do you need to keep pressing on? Will you commit to do so?

What is in your life that is holding you back from greater fruitfulness for God’s kingdom? What habit or doubt or attitude or fear is limiting your effectiveness for God? What is keeping your Christian maturity in the same place instead of allowing you to move forward to a greater level? Whatever it is, it must die.

You ought to hate anything in your life that is keeping you from being more like Christ. But in actual fact, we tend to excuse and hold on to those issues. We can become so protective of our life that we cling to the very things that are keeping us in bondage. We would be happy to do more for God, or to take on additional responsibilities, but dying is wholly unappealing.

 As you draw near to the end of the year, take an inventory of your life. Are there habits, practices, attitudes that need to be cast aside before you enter the new year? Don’t carry into the next year the same baggage you had in the previous one. Let God weed out any encumbrance in your life that is holding you back. It may well be that this new year is your greatest year of spiritual advance you have ever experienced.

There are many fascinating facts about the birth of Jesus. It is an event that has caused the greatest of Bible scholars to debate and study for centuries. One of those profound details is who the angels of heaven first let know about the miraculous birth of the Son of God.

We would have imagined that Gabriel would have at least sent word to Caesar in Rome. An announcement might have been expected in Athens or certainly in Jerusalem. We might have thought that the religious leaders of that day would have been notified somehow. But they were not.

Instead, as soon as the most famous birth in history occurred, a heavenly host excitedly interrupted the night shift for some weary shepherds, living outside with their sheep, so they could hear the good news. Shepherds were often viewed as social outcasts. As untrustworthy, shiftless thieves whose testimony was not even valid in a court of law. Surely God could have alerted more respectable people of the birth of His only Son!

But it was to working people, in the middle of their ordinary workday, that the angels were dispatched to proclaim the incredible news. God loves ordinary, working people. They are the ones who know of their need of a Savior. They are the ones whose demanding lives remind them daily of their need for hope, and God’s presence.

The young peasant girl had just been told the most amazing thing she had ever heard. It was humanly impossible. It was difficult to understand. It was terrifying!

Ironically, it also meant that the righteous young woman would also be subjected to ridicule and gossip for allegedly having loose morals. What would her tiny village think when this unwed mother began to show that she was pregnant? Would she be stoned to death for immorality? Having kept herself pure her entire life, how painful would that be for the teenager to endure peoples’ stares and laughter and disapproving nods? How hard would it be for this young mother to watch her son be criticized, hated, and brutally murdered? God had assigned her a glorious, yet extremely difficult road to follow.

We might understand if Mary had argued that she was not the one to carry such a load. She might have at least asked for time to think about whether she was willing to undertake such an enormous responsibility. After all, this would disrupt all the plans she had made for her life.

Yet she did not. Instead, she uttered one of the simplest and yet most profound statements of submission to God’s will that can be found in the Bible. Mary acknowledged that she was but God’s maidservant. Hers was not to question or argue or debate. Hers was to humbly obey. In her response, it became clear why God had chosen her in the first place.

You, too, are God’s servant. Are you embracing His will for you with the same willingness and humility? What does your response to Him reflect about your walk with God?

Mary was flabbergasted. The angel Gabriel, God’s special heavenly messenger, had just informed her that almighty God planned to have her miraculously give birth to the Son of God. It was incredible! It was humanly impossible.

In response, Mary asked a question, not out of unbelief, but out of wonder. “How?” She knew she stood at the threshold of an incredible journey with God. Ultimately the salvation of all humanity throughout all of time would rest on what God did through her ordinary life. It was breathtaking to consider.

Throughout our lives we will immerse ourselves in numerous mundane tasks. We’ll wash dishes, drive to work, do laundry, mow the lawn. We’ll put in years at work or spend countless hours raising our children and shuttling them to appointments. But in the course of the mountains of ordinary tasks we will invest our one, precious life in, is there something you can point to that is clearly a work of God? Can you identify one aspect of your life that cannot be merely explained by your own effort and expertise? Is there even one thing you stand in awe of, that almighty God would choose to accomplish through your life? Is your life touching eternity in any way?

It will be those heavenly, divine moments that will be the highlights of your life. Live a life that pleases God and then embrace His will for your life. You may be amazed at what God does.

It is one of humanity’s weaknesses that we desire acclaim and popularity with people. At times individuals will go to enormous lengths to obtain fame, even if it is fleeting. Perhaps it is because we are social beings and we crave the approval and recognition of others. Nevertheless, society often measures people’s status or value based on how much others think of them.

Mary was a teenaged, uneducated, peasant girl who lived in the insignificant village of Nazareth, in the insignificant region of Palestine. No one but her small family and a few friends knew who she was. If it were not for her divine calling, no one today would have ever heard of her. From the world’s perspective, she was a nobody.

But that was not heaven’s perspective. For incredibly, this humble girl from Nazareth had found favor with almighty God. All of heaven knew the pleasure that God found with Mary. It was not because she was wealthy or commanded large armies or that she was brilliant. God saw her heart and was pleased with her faith in Him.

How does heaven see you? You might not lead a large organization or have millions of followers on social media, but God knows you. What does He think?

There has never been anyone, no saint, no religious leader, no martyr, no one, who has lived a more sinless, perfect, God honoring life than Jesus did. No one knew the mind of God the Father more than Jesus. No Bible scholar ever understood Scripture more completely than Jesus did. In every category, Jesus is the pre-eminent example of how to live the Christian life.

That is why it is so profound to realize that Jesus did nothing on His own initiative. Jesus preached no sermon, healed no sick person, and taught no lesson in which His Father had not guided Him. Jesus knew that His calling was not to “make things happen,” but to surrender to His Father’s perfect will. Jesus never prided Himself in his knowledge or understanding. He never assumed that, at least in smaller matters, He could make His own decisions. Jesus did nothing apart from His Father’s guidance.

How is it, then, that we so often take matters into our own hands? Why do we assume we are smart enough, godly enough, talented enough, to “figure things out” on our own? Are we smarter and holier than Jesus? Of course not.