Author: admin

How it must vex our Creator to listen to our concerns and worries when He has already made every provision for our success! How foolish for creatures to lecture their Creator on their strengths and weaknesses! God never overestimates our capacity to serve Him. He never asks us to do something that is impossible for us to accomplish with His provision. God never overlooks important details or extraneous circumstances. He is never caught by surprise.

God knows what is at stake, however, if we do not obey Him. God understands how many people are toiling in bondage while we debate with Him about whether or not He has called the right person to do the job. God hears the cries of people desperate for deliverance while He must convince His own people to trust and obey Him.

We are God’s servants; He is not ours. God does not focus on how He can grant us a good day and make us happy. God is seeking to redeem millions of people who are presently toiling in spiritual bondage. God generally has more challenges getting His own people to respond in obedience to Him than He does having unbelievers accept Him once they have clearly heard the Gospel message. Throughout Scripture it was God’s people who were reluctant to believe Him. Despite all God had done and promised; His people still refused to trust Him.

Our problem is that we are far more afraid of people than we are of God. Because we fear what people may do or say to us, we will endlessly argue and debate with God with no thought of what our delay and unwillingness to obey will cost us, or others. When God looks at your present obedience to His commands, is He pleased and honored by your response?

How quickly we assume that God’s work depends upon us! As soon as we begin to sense what God wants us to do, we immediately begin to compile a list of all the reasons we are incapable of obeying! In few areas do God’s people feel more inadequate than when it comes to speaking in public. Public speaking terrifies people! Numerous Christians have discounted God’s call on their life because they could not imagine God calling someone to serve Him who was unskilled as a public speaker.

In actual fact, our effectiveness as God’s spokespeople lies not in our eloquence but in our message. The truth of what we declare carries far more power than does our delivery of the message. Moses need not have worried about his oratorical abilities for God was going to affirm His messenger through ten spellbinding plagues, miraculous guidance through a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, the stupendous parting of the Red Sea and destruction of the Egyptian army, and many other miraculous acts. Those listening to Moses could clearly discern that almighty God was with him!

Ultimately we do not have to convince people that God has spoken to us. God will make that evident in due time. While it never hurts to hone our speaking skills, it is far more important to be sure we have heard from the Lord. If our service for God rests solely upon our cleverness of speech, we must recognize that there will inevitably be someone who comes along who is more eloquent than us. But when we step forth and declare, “Thus sayeth the Lord!” we can be assured that nothing anyone can say can thwart or refute our message. Not everyone may accept what we have said, but neither can they ignore it. Are you relying upon your rhetoric or on your intimate, fresh walk with the living God?

In Moses’ day, if you saw a man with a shepherd’s rod, you immediately knew a great deal about him. You would know his profession. You would discern his basic skill set and experience. You might surmise his business background and contacts. You would know much about the man’s lifestyle and where he spent his time. His rod represented his life and business background.

Just as Jesus told fishermen they would become “fishers of men” (Mark 1:17), so God drew on Moses’ skills and experience in his profession when He called him into divine service. Moses had spent four decades leading sheep through a hostile wilderness. God would draw on that same experience and skill when He called Moses to lead the Israelites in the wilderness for the next four decades.

People often belittle their ability to serve God because they have not earned an advanced theological degree or they do not possess sophisticated skills in public speaking. However, God has been training us for His service throughout our lives. God has led us to develop various skills and experiences in our profession that He intends to use to build His kingdom. Our successes as well as our failures will become instruments in God’s hand. Our business skills and contacts can be leveraged for God’s purposes. Our leadership ability, marketing savvy and entrepreneurial talents can all be maximized to accomplish God’s purposes. Just as the fishing skills Peter, Andrew, James, and John possessed became an asset to their ministry as apostles, so Moses discovered that his years herding sheep had not been a wasted period of his life. Rather, what had seemed like the worst period of Moses’ life had all been used by God to prepare him for the greatest assignment of his life.

God does not distinguish between the secular and the sacred. Everything is sacred when it belongs to God! What is in your hand? What skills, experiences, knowledge, and relationships has God placed in your life that He may choose to use for His purposes? God won’t ask you to use what He has placed in someone else’s hands. He will utilize what He has placed in your hands. Never minimize what God has done in your life. In God’s perfect timing He will reveal to you His perfect plan in shaping your life the way He has and giving you the perfect set of abilities to accomplish His purposes in your day.

Credibility is one of the greatest challenges for leaders. Why should people believe what we say or do what we tell them? It matters not what our vision is if we cannot convince people of the need to go to that place. Our long range goals and most elaborate plans are meaningless if we cannot convince people to embrace them. Spiritual leaders move people on to God’s agenda. Yet one of the greatest frustrations for leaders is being unable to move people from where they are to where God wants them to be.

God may lead us to undertake tasks that seem far beyond our leadership ability. We tend to gravitate toward assignments we feel capable of accomplishing with our own skills and experience. But when we succeed in such undertakings, we are the ones who receive the glory. God is not concerned with magnifying our name, but His. When God invites us to join in His activity, we will inevitably feel inadequate for the undertaking. God tends to position us into situations where our inadequacy is magnified so we find ourselves dependent upon Him.

Not everything God leads us to do will necessarily make sense to us. It might seem ludicrous to attempt something we are woefully inexperienced at doing. It may seem foolhardy to try something when we don’t know where the money or manpower will come from. Some people have become consumed with worry as they over-analyzed and fretted about how to accomplish what God told them to do. Our responsibility is to accept God’s assignment and trust that, in giving us the task, He will also make the provision. We don’t need to devote ourselves to figuring out how to accomplish God’s will. That is His responsibility! Instead of becoming paralyzed by fear and worry at what God asked us to do, we must seize the opportunity to join God in His work and to see God use our ordinary life to accomplish something extraordinary.

We are often closer to a mighty work of God than we realize. Sometimes we only need to turn half a degree to the right or left to discover that God has been at work beside us all along. Moses might never have known the amazing work God was preparing to accomplish if he had not turned aside. Moses was a busy man with numerous responsibilities. He had to singlehandedly monitor a flock of sheep that was prone to wander into danger or difficulty. Predators and thieves were lurking nearby. Locating adequate food and water on the arid slopes of Mount Horeb required his constant attention.

The sight of a burning bush, while interesting, might not have been enough to motivate Moses to turn aside from his multitudinous tasks. Moses could have satisfied himself by glancing at the shrub from a distance. He might have reasoned that being the solitary staff person on site prevented him from satisfying his idle curiosity. After forty years of leading sheep in the blazing Middle Eastern sun, Moses could have been excused if he had planted himself under the nearest shady tree and surveyed his surroundings from a comfortable vantage point. But Moses sensed that this was something he had to turn aside to see.

God could have shot forth a lightning bolt to garner Moses’ attention. God could have produced a clap of thunder that demanded Moses’ focus. Instead, God waited to see if Moses would turn aside. Was Moses so preoccupied with his daily work that he was oblivious to God’s activity in his workplace? It was only after Moses allowed God to interrupt his busy day that God spoke to him. The subsequent conversation changed Moses’ life.

You are, most likely, a busy person. People want your attention. Problems are constantly surfacing. Opportunities demand your response. Yet God may choose to interrupt your frenetic schedule at unexpected or unusual moments. At that point you must decide if your itinerary outweighs the burning bushes you occasionally pass by. Are you sensitive enough to God and His activity to recognize when He has intervened into your day and workplace? How many burning bushes have you raced past because you were late for an appointment?

Moses was going to work just as he had for the last forty years. After four decades of performing the same tasks for the same boss in the same places, one does not generally anticipate encountering anything new or exciting. At eighty years old, this son of a princess was still laboring for his father-in-law. Any dreams of becoming a leader and a deliverer of his people had long since dissipated. Now Moses was simply putting time in until his retirement. The dreams of his youth now seemed like nothing more than a fairy tale.

Mount Horeb was merely a work place. For Moses, it was like going to the office. He had worked there for years. Nothing unusual had ever happened there before. Mount Horeb is better known to us as Mount Sinai. But at this time, the mount did not carry with it connotations of thunder, lightning, smoke billowing up into the heavens, and the awesome presence of almighty God. It was merely a workplace where Moses’ sheep foraged for food.

The reality was that God had always been on that mountain, just as He has always been present in your workplace. God waited forty years for Moses to come to a place in his life where he could be entrusted with a divine assignment. Moses had no idea that those forty tedious years of leading sheep through a wilderness were not a waste of his time or life, but preparation for one of the greatest undertakings in history. His workplace would become a highway over which Moses would lead God’s people to the Promised Land. Having proven himself faithful in leading sheep, God would entrust an entire nation to his care.

Don’t assume that nothing of spiritual significance is happening at your workplace. God is present and He is constantly moving to carry out His purposes. What appears to you to be an ordinary Mount Horeb can be transformed by God at any time to become an awe-inspiring Mount Sinai. Many of the greatest movements of God in history have not commenced from the temple or cathedral but from the workplace. Could it be that God is preparing to launch a movement from the place where you work that will impact the world?

There is some benefit in studying followers, but they can only teach you how to follow well. Jesus did not ask his disciples to set the course for His ministry, nor did he poll the crowds that clamoured to be near him to learn what they wanted, for they were all followers. Christ did not attend business schools, take leadership seminars, or come from a family with a long line of well-known leaders. He did, however, have access to the greatest of all leaders, His heavenly Father, who showed Him how to lead.

Christ was able to command the attention of thousands of people at a time because He was a leader they wanted to follow. He confounded the religious leaders of the day because he led so completely differently than they had ever experienced before. He had studied under the undisputed leader of leaders. Comparing ourselves to other leaders may make us look good, but comparing ourselves to Christ challenges us to take our leadership to another level. Even as leaders, we are to be Christ’s followers. He deliberately left us an example that was for our benefit. Today His Spirit resides within believers to guide them daily. Following Him will influence all of our relationships: family, work, leisure, wherever we are and in whatever position we hold. If we are unwilling to study the life of Christ and the way He walked while He was among people, we will be disoriented to Him when He seeks to lead us today. Christ is your Lord and He is prepared to help you lead today.

Every person has shortcomings. We all live with skeletons in the closet, consequences of bad choices, or memories of events we would just as soon forget. Some leaders, because of past hurts, determine never to get burned again so their natural tendency as they lead is to protect themselves. Others, perhaps from dysfunctional pasts, accommodate their personal insecurities through their administrative choices. For example, a leader who lacks confidence may perceive self-assurance in colleagues as threatening rather than beneficial to the organization, and feel threatened by them.

For spiritual leaders, Christ makes all the difference in this regard. The Holy Spirit is available to free you from a bondage to the past that might otherwise haunt you and limit your ability to lead. The past certainly influences the future, but it should not direct it. For Christians, God determines the future as they walk in obedience to Him. Your future is in God’s hands. Past mistakes do not limit the Lord. The Apostle Paul said that with God, all things become new. There is nothing that is hurtful or negative in your life that cannot be turned around so it brings glory to God. Paul’s past was anything but praiseworthy. He persecuted Christians and thus mocked the very God he thought he was championing. But as a repentant, humbled new creation, Paul was determined to leave his guilt and scars in the past. Was Paul still a passionate, zealous leader? Yes But God took his misguided religious fervor and redesigned and refocused it to build up the church instead of tearing it apart. That is the powerful redeeming nature of the God we serve!

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.