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November 13 - December 7, 2019
It did not yet occur to me that my problems might have their roots in something to do with me.
For nearly two decades, I had ignored the emotional component in my spiritual growth and relationship with God. It didn’t matter how many books I might read or how much I devoted myself to prayer, I would remain stuck in repeated cycles of pain and immaturity unless and until I allowed Jesus Christ to transform aspects of my life that were deep beneath the surface.
I began to measure ministry success by the quality of people’s transformed lives rather than by attendance and giving alone.
learned that being misunderstood and having a few people leave the church as a result of my decisions was less important than losing my integrity.
The emotionally unhealthy leader is someone who operates in a continuous state of emotional and spiritual deficit, lacking emotional maturity and a “being with God” sufficient to sustain their “doing for God.”
Spiritual deficits typically reveal themselves in too much activity. Unhealthy leaders engage in more activities than their combined spiritual, physical, and emotional reserves can sustain. They give out for God more than they receive from him.
When we devote ourselves to reaching the world for Christ while ignoring our own emotional and spiritual health, our leadership is shortsighted at best. At worst, we are negligent, needlessly hurting others and undermining God’s desire to expand his kingdom through us. Leadership
deficits of emotionally unhealthy leaders impact virtually every area of their lives and leadership. However, the damage is especially evident in four characteristics: low self-awareness, prioritizing ministry over marriage/singleness, doing too much for God, and failing to practice a Sabbath rhythm.
Emotionally unhealthy leaders tend to be unaware of what is going on inside them.
They ignore emotion-related messages their body may send — fatigue, stress-induced illness, weight gain, ulcers, headaches, or depression. They avoid reflecting on their fears, sadness, or anger. They fail to consider how God might be trying to communicate with them through these “difficult” emotions. They struggle to articulate the reasons for their emotional triggers, their overreactions in the present rooted in difficult experiences from their past.
He knew better than to compare and be competitive when it comes to ministry, but he couldn’t help but resent the new pastor and his success. Though he can’t admit it even to himself, he also felt insecure
Emotionally unhealthy leaders tend to compartmentalize their married or single life, separating it from both their leadership and their relationship with Jesus.
If you were to ask them to list their top three priorities for how they spend their time as a leader, it’s unlikely that cultivating a deep, transformative relationship with Jesus would make the list. As a result, fragmentation and depletion constitute the “normal” condition for their lives and their leadership.
Emotionally unhealthy leaders do not practice Sabbath — a weekly, twenty-four-hour period in which they cease all work and rest, delight in God’s gifts, and enjoy life with him.
Or they may make no distinction between the biblical practice of Sabbath and a day
off, using “Sabbath” time for the unpaid work of life, such as paying bills, grocery shopping, and errands.
If they practice Sabbath at all, they do so inconsistently, believing they need to first finish all their work or work hard ...
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Most of us have been taught to measure success by external markers.
There is a wrong way to deal with numbers. When we use numbers to compare ourselves to others or to boast of our size, we cross a line.
who you are is more important than what you do.
Your being with God (or lack of being with God) will trump, eventually, your doing for God every time.
Just because we have the gifts and skills to build a crowd and create lots of activity does not mean we are building a church or ministry that connects people intimately to Jesus.
Lasting change in churches and organizations requires men and women committed to leading from a deep and transformed inner life. We lead more out of who we are than out of what we do, strategic or otherwise. If we fail to recognize that who we are on the inside informs every aspect of our leadership, we will do damage to ourselves and to those we lead.
The foundation in this case is your inner life. The quality and durability of the building — the team or organization you lead — will be determined by how carefully this foundation is laid.
Mature spiritual leadership is forged in the crucible of difficult conversations, the pressure of conflicted relationships, the pain of setbacks, and dark nights of the soul. Out of these experiences, we come to understand the complex nature of our inner world. Moreover, as we develop new practices and rhythms robust enough to withstand the pressures that leadership exerts on the inner life, we naturally become stronger and more effective leaders. And we move on from simply affirming truth and wisdom to owning and applying what we know.
Your shadow is the accumulation of untamed emotions, less-than-pure motives and thoughts that, while largely unconscious, strongly influence and shape your behaviors. It is the damaged but mostly hidden version of who you are.
If we buy into the lie that the shadow is what is most true about us, we may well be overwhelmed and potentially throw up our hands, believing there is nothing we can do. And this has grave consequences. Yet, we can’t ignore the shadow without paying a price.
If our desire is to lead and serve others, we have to come to grips with this plain, hard fact: the degree to which we ignore our shadow is the degree to which our loving service to others is limited.
God offers us wonderful gifts when we choose to courageously face our shadow.
You cannot change what you are unaware of.
strength:
Focus on the weaknesses and play to them
when it comes to the shadow. We can ignore it until we hit a wall, with pain so great we have no choice but to face up to it. Or we can be proactive, courageously looking at the factors that contributed to its formation.
negative script is an internalized message from the past that shapes our conscious and unconscious behaviors in the present.
If you want to lead out of your marriage, then you must make marriage — not leadership — your first ambition, your first passion, and your loudest gospel message.
The first ambition for married Christian leaders must shift from leading our church, organization, or team to loving our spouse passionately.
the first item on your leadership job description is to conduct your life in such a way that your demeanor and choices consistently demonstrate to your spouse that he or she is loved and lovable.
We are to love our spouse as God does — with commitment and passion. In doing so we model the love of Jesus for our teams and those we serve.
How do we cultivate a passionate marriage, especially in the context of leadership?
Affirmations heal wounds, cover shame, and communicate how God sees us — as infinitely valuable and lovable. A steady stream of criticism, on the other hand, sucks the life out of us and out of our relationships. It is one of the great killers of passion.
Surrendering to God’s love and will is not a once-and-for-all event.
self-care is never a selfish act — it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others.
it has become part of our default thinking that external markers of success are an indication that all must certainly be well at the leadership level.
The force of the biblical word used for the verb know refers to the intimate, personal knowing of relationship; it is similar to the oneness of Adam and Eve in the garden when they were naked and without shame (Genesis 2:25).
Bearing fruit requires slowing down enough to give Jesus direct access to every aspect of our lives and our leadership. Just because God has access to everything that is true about us does not mean God has access to us. Loving union is an act of surrender — giving God complete access — and we can’t do that in a hurry. We must be humbly accessible, with the door of our hearts continually open to him. Jesus doesn’t force that on us; it is something only we can do.
You Know You’re Not Experiencing Loving Union When You . . .
Hmm.
The church and the world desperately need leaders, but we will only make things worse if we don’t lead God’s way.
Jesus spent over 90 percent of his life — thirty of his thirty-three years — in obscurity. In those hidden years, he forged a life of loving union with the Father. The observable greatness of his three-year ministry is built on the foundation of the investment Jesus made in those unseen years.10 And Jesus continued to make this investment in his relationship with the Father throughout his three-year ministry, regardless of the ministry pressures he faced. From his first days in Capernaum, waking up early in the morning to pray (Mark 1:35), to his final hours in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36 – 46),
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am convinced that a significant reason so many Christian leaders lack the qualities Jesus modeled is because we skim in our relationship with God. Instead of contentment and calm, our leadership is marked by discontent and anxiety.
Then Bob dropped the bombshell. “They can’t stop. If they stop, they’ll die. They’re terrified. They’re frightened to death of what they’ll see inside themselves if they slow down. And you want them to immerse themselves in things like solitude, Sabbath, and silent reflection?” He chuckled again. “Do you have any idea how foreign this is for any leader — Christian or not? Something so much deeper is driving them; they just have no idea what it is.”
This is how I feel. What if I stop and find something I dont like within?
“The terror of stopping reveals the depth of their emptiness,” Bob continued matter-of-factly. “Pete, you’re inviting them into practices that might well obliterate their entire sense of self — the self that’s rooted in their work performance. Can’t you see the magnitude of that?”
