This blog will be short and sweet (and late) this week. I just want to convey what the Lord is doing in my life right now. He is in a long-term process of creating in me the desire to move to the next level. First he had to show me that there was one. Then he had to get me to even want to move to it. In my mind and somewhere deep in my heart I understood there always has to be a greater level, but in my experience I felt I was as far as I was able to go. Well, at least in this life.
However, a few years ago as I prayed earnestly for the Lord to make me into the Pastor Calvary needed, he began to show me there was so much more to possess than I had yet experienced in my Christian life and ministry. Bluntly, he asked me if I wanted more. Did I want a new level of ministry in my life?
Now I know some of you would eagerly say yes to such an offer, but for me it was something I had to think about. First, I had no idea what he meant by a new level. Secondly, there is always a cost involved and many times the cost is suffering (read your Bibles). In essence I had to muster all the trust I had to say “Yes,” to the Lord, “Take me where I have never been and show me what I have never seen nor understood.”
Nothing dramatic happened at the time and I basically forgot about our conversation. Severe attacks came upon me and the church afterward, but so, what else is new? However, a different kind of anointing came upon me also. One of frustration and stress.
Many times in ministry I’ve had to deal with stress. In the past it has caused my blood pressure to get out of whack, I’ve resorted to eating for comfort, and I’ve had long periods of sleeplessness. Over the years I have learned to manage stress and cast my cares upon the Lord. Yet, this season of frustration was different. The Lord had sent this unsettling in my spirit to give birth to change. I realized in the midst of this frustration, I did want more.
Wanting something more than what you currently have is the seedbed of change in your life. Suddenly my frustration became a quest to find out what the Lord was drawing me into. I actually began to seek the Lord in new areas in my life. To my amazement I was seeing and understanding new things I had never seen before. Suddenly, all of the authors of the books I was reading began to say the same thing. Maybe I was actually hearing what they were really saying for the first time. My eyes and ears were open to things I had not been hearing.
My inner frustration has now turned into a stirring in my spirit. That means instead of thinking about what I have lacked in the past, I have begun to look forward with expectancy to what the Lord is showing me now. Also it has created in me a greater desire to express this stirring to others and get them to desire a greater level with the Lord too.
My focus over the years has always been to be the best at preaching that I can be. Study and sermon preparation has never been a problem for me. It excites me as the Holy Spirit guides me through my studies and brings applicable verses to my mind. Typing up my notes and preparing the presentation feels like winning a battle in the spirit each week and I live for it.
However, this new level the Lord is revealing to me is one of greater influence. He wants me to be a leader among leaders. He wants to bring me to a level where I can influence the people who influence others. He wants to create a multiplication process here at Calvary. However, until he opened my eyes to this I had never seen the resource material available to leaders for this purpose. My whole area of study shifted from presenting the Word to growing in my role as a leader. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of just preaching the Word, which I still do, but now with the added dimension of training a new generation of leaders among us.
As God shifts my ministry from equipping the saints to training new leadership, the prayer I prayed when I first came to Calvary is finally being realized, “Lord, we need leaders.” We have birthed them and are now in the process of training them to be fruitful in ministry.
This is the beginning of a new level of ministry in my life and our church. To tell you the truth, I did not see it because I did not want to do it. Knowing that “to whom much is given all the more will be required” used to make me shy away from additional work. Now knowing this additional labor will produce more fruit for God’s kingdom gives me the same excitement about training leaders as I get from preparing messages to preach.
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
Luke 12:48, NIV.
There is one last thing I’d like to share this week. It may sound stupid to some, but it has been a live-giving revelation to me. I finally know the difference between management and leadership. I am embracing all of this new territory the Lord is showing me with all the excitement of a little child. Pray for us at Calvary. yes sir.