More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Sayers
Read between
February 7 - March 6, 2024
For those of us seeking to discern the difference between the Spirit of God and the spirit of the age, Mark is a trusted guide with a timely message.
The formless earth we encounter in Genesis 1 exists in an in-between state, waiting for birth seeded by the divine hand.
We are moving into our in-between moment, in which the usual rules do not apply. The markers and measurements that we use to find a sense of place and direction do not operate in this phase. This creates anxiety.
History shows us that an era tends to be dominated by influential individuals who shape its thinking, key events that determine its direction, movements that embody its longings, and artists who capture its mood.
It is undeniable that the surrounding culture can warp churches and believers.
We feel the gap between the vision of the church we encounter in Scripture and the reality on the ground. This gives rise to a deep desire for God’s church to be refreshed, empowered, and renewed.
God distributes the seeds of renewal via leaders who carry the seed of renewal. Leaders who, by stepping into the process of renewal, find themselves renewed. A renewed leader is a leader who then leads others into renewal. These leaders become carriers of the seed of renewal, embodying the next season God is birthing among His people.
Instead of the overflowing waves of revival that had previously swept the world like the shockwaves of Krakatoa, a worrisome introspection became normative as believers became more focused on their inner worlds than on a world to be reached with the gospel.
“God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”
The architectural plans for strongholds are first drafted in the anxious human heart.
a capital city becomes dominant in a nation. It draws talent, trade, and tourism to itself.
Their key finding, their new model of understanding reality was this: the world was a system—a complex, connected network.
To be an isolated node with no connections is a dangerous place. This means connections create power in a network.
The future is a decentralized world.
The digital network is now our primary formational environment. It shapes our opinions, values, and worldview.
The presence of God transforms challenge into spiritual growth.
As significant strongholds lose legitimacy, they birth smaller strongholds. As this happens, a transfer of power and authority occurs downwards, explaining how individualism can be understood as the creation of small strongholds of the self in our day.
We create a kind of stronghold based on feeling comfortable, at ease, and unchallenged by external distractions, disruptions, and intrusions. Success is maintaining the emotional balance of the comfort zone.
Christian leadership is leading people into growth so that they may grow in Christlikeness. Growth, however, involves understanding that discomfort and pain are part of life and can be used by God to grow us.
Anxiety leads us to look for approval. Thus, leaders in anxious systems can find themselves susceptible to flattery. We can fall into the temptation not to lead people toward growth but rather manage their good feelings.
To get the gold, you have to go into the wilderness.
The most comfortable of environments from a temporal and earthly perspective are the worst environments for the seed of the kingdom to grow.
Viruses are warriors from the wilderness—small but powerful predators.
Nature reminds us of our limitations and the complexity of creation, destroying any hubris that we can conquer the world in our strength. Our weakness in the face of nature offers us the chance of a strategic reset. No longer can we assume we are in control—now we must learn to adapt.
The frontier myth has been reinvented, moving past the archetypes of the cowboy, the explorer, and the frontiersman to contemporary incarnations such as the entrepreneur, the social media influencer, the maverick CEO, and the activist.
humans “came to love our freedom from God with a passion that we give to few other things.”8 It is this drive for freedom from God that is the true source of the relational anxiety that infects human relationships:
many leaders fail to succeed because they observe their environment and view challenges through faulty lenses, seeing what they want to see rather than the actual shape of the environment in which they operate and the obstacles they face.
The waters represent the world’s primal chaos, wild and unformed, waiting to be brought into its heavenly order.
The presence of God is always present, offering us the pattern of heaven. The plans, the heavenly blueprints that signal the renewal of any moment, and the reordering of the most chaotic environments. Every moment, every action, every thought, every problem contains the renewal potential of remaking that moment according to the pattern of heaven. This is hope.
You were made in the image of God to bring chaos into order, as you act as a channel of God’s will on earth. The Spirit manifests the pattern of heaven in the world, and we mediate that pattern as God’s workers in creation.
There are power laws that are active within the kingdom of God. Oriented to heaven’s pattern, the apostle Paul writes, “For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). Paul was a tiny input within the complex system known as the Greco-Roman world. However, his impact was gigantic. Paul was a walking example of a kingdom power law, writing, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2 Cor. 12:9). The armies of Rome were no match for a tiny man who was a leader oriented to God.
He knew that God was his strength. The Lord was his stronghold, his most decisive asymmetrical advantage. David’s battlefield orientation was not set with earthly eyes but with spiritual vision.
The ancient Hebrews were not individualists. To be away from family and kin was a terrifying prospect in terms of one’s vulnerability to attack and the elements but also in terms of one’s identity. In tribal societies, one’s entire sense of self comes from those you are in a relationship with. You are your people. They are the marker, which informs you of who you are, what your role is, and where you belong.
Corey Russell writes of the biblical wilderness that it is “throughout the Bible we see that God chooses again and again to form His people in the wilderness. It is the furnace of transformation. The place where our facades, illusions, fantasies, and props are removed and we come face-to-face with our nothingness. In the wilderness, God strips us of our independence and rebellion and teaches us to depend on Him.”
The only presence that can calm our anxiety is the peace that transcends all understanding and flows from giving our whole life to Christ, as we depend on Him for everything.
Only spiritual authority can cut through in our gray zone moment. The world is overdosing on hype, intelligence, cynicism, and charisma posing as leadership. What the world hungers for is leadership born of spiritual authority.
“Where Mount Krakatoa stood the sea now plays.”
