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May 3, 2025
So as long as there are artifacts of sin still resident in our hearts, we will be vulnerable to the temptation to make life about us—what
your Savior has rescued you from you, is rescuing you from you, and will continue to rescue you from you until that rescue is no longer needed.
Jesus’s response is at once wise and artful. He essentially says, “Yes, you’ve been called to be great, but the pathway to greatness is not power and position; the pathway to greatness is servanthood.”
Leaders who do not serve aren’t actually leaders.
There are times when I am tempted to wish that ministry was more a throne than a cross.
But Jesus says more. He makes it very clear that we must not take the normal human models as our own.
Your complaint about schedule is never just about schedule, your complaint about exhaustion is never just about how tired you are, and your complaint that you never seem to get the break you think you need is never just about time. All horizontal complaints have a vertical component. Even though I may not be aware of it, my complaint about the bad service at a restaurant is not just a complaint about my particular server but also about the manager who trained her and watches how she does her work. Grumbling about horizontal difficulty is at once a complaint against the one who lords over those
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What is the church? It’s a chosen gathering of unfinished people, still grappling with the selfishness of sin and the seduction of temptation, living in a fallen world, where there is deception and dysfunction all around.
You simply won’t have joy in being part of this plan unless you find joy in living a lifestyle of self-denial and willing servanthood.
The call to a life of joyful servitude and willing suffering is itself a grace.
In calling me to deny myself, God is freeing me from my bondage to me.
Now I want to be honest with you here. The gospel of Jesus Christ allows us to be honest about things we hesitate to talk about or want to hide because the things we want to minimize, hide, or deny have been fully addressed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Looking for people to troll on Twitter is not what occupies the heart of a servant.
“I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to preach any more sermons. I don’t want to lead any more meetings. I don’t want to talk to anyone else about their problems. I’m not even sure that I want to be married.
“What is it about this leader and the leadership community that allowed this to happen?”
A spiritually healthy leadership community is spiritually healthy when it is a safe place for struggling leaders to speak with candor and hope.
Leader, are you comfortable with this level of personal candor? Does your leadership community welcome confessions of weakness and struggle?
Hiding in fear, silence, denial, defensiveness, and a vacuum of humble candor is more of the culture of broken Eden than of victorious Calvary.
Leaders who confess tend to be tender and kind when people they are called to lead mess up and need to confess.
It is in the soil of the devastation and humiliation of confession that servant leaders grow.
What silences
humble gospel candor in our leadership communities?
Pride
The humble, gracious, servant attitude wanes as knowledge, success, and prominence increase.
As long as sin is inside us, we all carry with us a dangerous ability to participate in our own spiritual blindness.
We are skilled at calling our impatience a desire to move forward with gospel mission. We are tempted to call gossip the sharing of prayer concerns. Being power and control hungry gets recast as exercising God-given leadership gifts.
Must Have the Respect of Others
I am too concerned with being spoken well of. I overly desire that fellow leaders affirm my ideas and give weight to my plans.
If I care too much about what they think of me, I will put forth my strengths while hiding my weaknesses
If ministry leadership is your identity, then Christ isn’t,
Too many leaders struggling with issues in their hearts, lives, and relationships have their responses shaped more by a catalog of doubtful “what ifs” than by the hope-producing promises of the gospel.
The gospel promises us that the good things God calls us to will produce good in our lives, even if that good looks different from what we hoped for. The gospel reminds us that hardship in the hands of the Lord is a tool of rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace.
come out of hiding produces good, to admit what you have denied produces good, to confess sin produces good, to own where you are weak produces good, and to say no to pride and cry out for help, even if there is wreckage along the way, produces good.
Will we let functional gospel doubt silence us when our Savior is calling us to confess and be healed?
leader who I looked up to and wanted to be like was confessing stuff I wouldn’t have thought of confessing.
loathe.
he wasn’t afraid of admitting his imperfection
I was more focused on building an identity than sharing my heart.
Rooting my identity in ministry leadership would cause me to hide important details about myself, control conversations, compete for position, deny weaknesses while projecting strength, and a host of other spiritual dangers.
we are wired by God to be constant interpreters.
all our responses are the result of how we have interpreted those facts.
So the disobedience of Adam and Eve was profoundly more than the eating of forbidden food. It was a rejection of their identity as creatures of the Most High God
wherever you look for identity will then exercise rulership over your heart and, in so doing, will direct the way you live your life.
Things that were never meant to be sources of human identity become just that,
Likely no one goes into ministry saying, “I am going to make ministry my identity,”
Somewhere, without a conscious rejection of his gospel theology, he has exchanged the stability of vertical identity for the instability of horizontal identity. Because he has made this exchange, his heart is exposed to a variety of ministry idolatries (e.g., knowledge, power, control, position, success, acclaim, lifestyle ease),
When you look horizontally for your sense of self,
You look too intensely at how people are responding
to you, and you listen too carefully to what people are saying and how they say it.
Your hyperattentiveness crushes your peace
