Caring for Yourself as a Leader
Seminar at a missions staff conference 2006
Seminar Aim – to identify practical steps to take to grow in:
- Your own walk with the Lord
- Pastoral care / investment in yoursef
- Development of your ability as a leader
Reflecting on your leadership
- What sorts of situations do you naturally enjoy leading in? Why? Which ones fail to excite you as a leader? Why?
- Do you
get enough opportunity and space to reflect on your own and with others about
developing your leadership?
Growing your walk with the Lord
Read Col.1:6
The
gospel is truth-laden, truth-saturated grace. God’s grace has come to us in all
its truth. v18 says that the reason he has poured his grace on us is for his
own pre-eminence. So the first thing we want to say about growing our walk with
the Lord is that it is always about
- accepting his grace
- in order to walk in his
ways
- for the sake of his pre-eminence.
We could call that worship.
2 Questions:
- how do you personally set about receiving and living in God’s grace?
Righteous in Christ
The question of growing our walk with the Lord as leaders
always takes into account that it is a long term strategy. We are here for the
long haul so we need to keep regular check on it. How do I sustain myself and
keep my own heart rejoicing?
The most important thing I can say to you is to remind you
that you are righteous in Christ. You have been given royal white robes to wear
as children of the King. He loves you and delights in you regardless of
anything you have done because of his son, and regardless of whether you are
currently seeing any fruit in your ministry
If you are in Christ, God proclaims over your life the
verdict “righteous in Jesus.” That doesn’t mean we are no longer tempted to
sin. It is his verdict on us because the infinite worth and right standing of
Jesus is applied to our account. When we become Christians righteousness is a
done deal. God considers us perfect, end of story. Hebrews 10:14 says that by
one perfect sacrifice Jesus has made perfect for ever those who are being made
holy. That is our identity. That is who we are.
So we don’t do things to make ourselves righteous.
Specifically we don't earn our standing with God by whether we think we are
doing successful ministry. Even here you might have felt a peer pressure. That
you ant to tell the good stories but not the struggles and sin that you have
known this year, We don't earn anything by whether we consider our ministry
successful. We receive righteousness as a gift.
Question:
how easy do you find it to connect your sense of your
value to whether you are seeing success? What are the dangers when we do?
We teach about God's grace, some of us teach about it a lot.
But the business and frustrations of doing pioneering ministry are often a good
way to forget that we need to keep receiving it ourselves as we are leading.
But Romans 5 says that receiving grace is the way that we reign in life, not by
being motivated to simply try harder.
3 Applications
Now I have three very practical applications of this.
1. Receive his grace. How do we do that? Pray for it. Ask him for it. He is a
never-ending fountain and he will give it to you. If you haven’t yet asked him
for the first time, what is preventing you coming to him. You will reign
in life through the one man Jesus Christ.
2. Don’t think of your identity or your acceptability to God
to be dependent on your works. He has already given us Jesus and every blessing
along with Jesus when we were not worthy. This is the heart of everything.
Being a Christian, living by the Spirit, making the most of the rest of my
life, isn't about works it is about worship.
3. It is only in enjoying being in Christ that we discover
power over sin. That is the tactic of the Holy Spirit. We will never turn away
from the lures of our culture and the insinuations of our sinful nature and get
rid of the rubbish in our lives simply because we are commanded to. We will
only do it because we have discovered our God is better, better by far, than
the world around us. Why would you unless you find God’s grace gripping and
thrilling?
Receiving God’s forgiveness and His enormous gift of Himself
leads to huge enthusiasm for the Lord and His ways. It leads to us wanting to
hate evil. It leads to us offering Him our time, our ambitions, our
possessions, what we see with our eyes and say with our mouths. It makes us
want to offer Him ourselves because He has given us Himself. And we start to
see sinful rubbish for what it really is. We live by the Spirit.
Reflection question 1:
Am I enjoying God’s
grace today? Am I adoring Christ? Am I worshipping him? That is what it
means to enjoy him. Or am I still trusting yourself?
Pastoral Care / Investment in Yourself
There is an unbreakable link between your life in
leadership, your flourishing and enjoying leadership, and the care that you
receive for your soul.
Question:
What are your current sources of soul-care? Do you find
it easy or difficult to receive nurture? Are you currently being nurtured
sufficiently?
A colleague of mine wanted to write a book on the Church. She asked me how to begin it. I suggested this question: in your church, apart from the pastor, who is actively concerned with you for your spiritual growth? Her answer was that by that definition almost nobody belongs to a real church - especially not the leaders!
- How are you spiritually / physically in the work?
- What do you identify are your
current sustenance needs?
- How would you most like others to support your growth in godliness, personally and at work?
- Do you have support needs that you secretly wouldn't like from others? (eg. being challenged about sin?)
- What are
the joys and challenges for you at the moment?
- How would you describe your current walk with the Lord; your attitudes; your sin patterns?
Can I ask how willing you would be to share what you
perceive to be your current needs in these areas with others and ask them to
help you? If you find yourself reluctant, why?
Getting the care you need for yourself spiritually is vital
to your joy in the Lord. A key factor is receiving encouragement. When it is present it is easy to
know when we were doing a good job or when we needed to adjust. Without external investment we always wonder if we were doing enough, and then
get into peer pressure and conscience work, trying to look good in our own
eyes, and those of our colleagues and prayer supporters.
Our work is not time- and pattern-specific and carries a
number of unusual dangers:
1. nobody
knowing where we are or what we are doing a lot of the time
2. (unusual)
laziness
3. over-busyness
4. a
combination of the above two where we oscillate between them both fluctuating
between overdoing it and then pulling back but feeling guilty
External help is the best way to avoid all of these
Personal Reflection Question 2:
What further external investment would encourage and sustain
you this year? Will you share this with supervisor, pastor and friends
Developing Your Ability as a Leader
We could talk about all sorts of areas of leadership
development, but where I would like to concentrate is on the spiritual gifts
that God has given you and is giving you for leading.
Q. What Does it Mean
to Live by the Spirit?
But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the
righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing
itself through love.
Gal.5:5-6
These verses teach that we don’t yet have all the fullness
of being made right with God. There is still a lot more to come when we get to
Heaven. In the meantime we have to wait. This wait is not frustrating, however,
but full of excited anticipation because God’s Holy Spirit is producing faith
in us, making us certain of our hope and eager to receive it. The Spirit
characterises the wait with faith expressing itself through love. This is the
heart of what it means to live by the Spirit, that we live by faith, trusting
the Lord for things we haven’t yet received, and that our faith is worked out
in love to others.
How are we led by the Spirit? It has to do with our desires.
Paul says:
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the
desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to
the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in
conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are
led by the Spirit you are not under Law.
Gal.5:16-18
And in Romans 8:5:
Those who live according to the sinful nature have their
minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with
the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful
man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.
Gifts for Serving in Love
The Spirit also gives to Christians for serving each other
in love. Consider the following verses from 1 Corinthians:
There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit.
There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different
kinds of working but the same God works all of them in all men. Now to each the
one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
1
Cor.12:4-7
Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts…
1
Cor.14:1
What is the connection with leadership? It is that
leadership is a spiritual task and that you are given spiritual character and
spiritual gifts to lead by serving one another in love. When we do this, that
is being led by the Spirit as Christian leaders. The Holy Spirit creates the
desire to serve in us and exercising that service leads to growth as Christian
leaders. Paul says to Timothy:
Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and
great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.
1
Tim 3:13
The reason they gain great assurance and excellent standing
is that the Holy Spirit is at work producing that service. They are conscious
of the work of the Spirit in their lives and ministry. Spirit – Service –
Growth - the pattern for leadership. Leadership is serving others in love in
the power of the Holy Spirit. I want you to put it in your note pad and pray it
for yourself and your co-leaders every day that God will produce this more and
more in your character. It is godliness.
- What
would you identify as the three clearest gifts for ministry given you by the Holy
Spirit?
- What
would most help you to grow in using these this year?
Personal Reflection Question 3:
What would most prevent you from growing in using your
spiritual gifts for leading this year? How can you avoid this?
Helping each other to know and love the Lord, to receive
grace, to receive external investment in our ministries and encouragement to
know and use our gifts creates a climate where our leading flourishes and
grows. The danger of not having such a context is that we stagnate. And there aren’t
really any middle positions. We can fail to grow in exercising our leadership
because we don’t plan and pray to.
Let it not be true of us this year