Everything rises or falls on leadership. No organization, no ministry, no church, no family, no school, no business can go any further than the leaders who are leading it. If everything rises or falls on leadership, then the quickest way for the opposition to halt any project, any family, any business is to neutralize the leadership. When the shepherd is removed, the flock scatters.

That’s true today in our churches. When Satan wants to cripple a church, he takes on the leadership. And this is not just about the pastor and the paid staff, but the church leadership’s — the lay leadership. If you want to be a leader, some people aren’t going to like you, and they’re going to attack you. Some people are going to try to make you fail.

Here are four characteristics of leaders who last long enough to accomplish big things in spite of the challenges.

1.  Leaders who last have a compelling purpose.

This is the very first element of leadership. A cause. A vision. A dream. An objective. A goal. It doesn’t drive you, it draws you. You have to have a compelling purpose.

Until you have a compelling purpose for your life, you’re just existing. Nehemiah said, I have a great project! What are you exchanging your life for? Jesus said, “What will a man give in exchange for his soul?” When you give your time for something, you’re giving your life. That’s what life is made up of — your time. We tend to think that the most important thing we can give people is our money. But money can be replaced. But when you give people your time, that’s irreplaceable. The mark of a great leader is first of all, to have a compelling purpose — an over arching goal in life that motivates me to keep going. Paul says, “Love compels me to keep going.”

Great people are just ordinary people who have made a great commitment to a great cause. That cause draws them out of themselves and makes them more than they could be on their own. You need a compelling purpose for life.

2.  Leaders who last need a clear perspective.

If you’re going to be a leader, you’ve got to have perception, or wisdom. James 1:5 says, “If any man lacks wisdom, ask God.” When you spend time in the word of God you begin to take on the mind of Christ and you’ll be a more perceptive leader. The thing that clouds our perception is fear. A definition of FEAR — False Evidence Appearing Real.  You need to have a compelling purpose and a clear perspective.

3.  Leaders who last develop a life of continual prayer

In Luke 18:1, “Jesus told his disciples that they should always pray and not give up.”  In your life you’re always doing one or the other. You’ll either pray or you’ll give up. John R. Rice once said that “all of our failures are prayer failures.” When the heat is on, when the pressure is on, you’ll either pray or you’ll panic. You need a continual prayer life.

4.  Leaders who last need a courageous persistence.

One of the great keys to success is the ability to hang in there! Keep on keeping on! Keep on doing what God wants you to do! If you were to study all the sermons I’ve given at Saddleback I basically have two themes — one for unbelievers and one for believers. The theme I have for unbelievers is “God cares about you. You matter to God.” I say that in many different ways. I have one basic message I have for believers and that’s “Don’t give up!” We all get tired in the battle and God says “Don’t give up!” You need a courageous persistence.

How can you be fearful and courageous at the same time? Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is moving ahead in spite of your fear. Galatians 6:9 “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

How persistent are you in doing God’s will? Do you just do it when it’s convenient? Have you ever made the decision in your life, “I’m going to follow Jesus 100% no matter what else happens, no matter what it costs, no matter what it takes, regardless of what people say about me, sidetracks, danger. I’m going to do the right thing.”

photo credit: Βethan

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Source: http://pastors.com/4-characteristics-leaders-last/

General church attendance has been on the decline for the past decade and nearly one-third of Millennials who grew up in the church have dropped out at some point. Yet many continue to return two days a year: Christmas and Easter.”It’s part of a religious hangover,” says Jon Tyson, founding pastor of Trinity Grace Church in Manhattan, New York, and author of the Barna FRAME, Sacred Roots. But, he points out, it’s also sign of a continuing spiritual hunger; Christmas and Easter offer people “access points to transcendence.” And so they return to church for a morning. In this conversation with Barna president, David Kinnaman, Tyson talks about the pastoral pressure of Easter Sunday, the different generational questions of Boomers and Millennials and how Christians—both pastors and lay people alike—can renew their vision for church.

David Kinnaman: We’re coming up on Easter, which means a large Sunday morning crowd. Why do you think people are still drawn to church on Christmas and Easter when they aren’t attending very regularly at other points throughout the year?

Jon Tyson: I think there’s some level of religious hangover. People grew up attending church; it’s still celebrated quite largely across our culture. It remains a reference point for people. The more secular our story gets—the more consumeristic our story gets—the more hungry we, as spiritual beings, get for moments of transcendence. People know traditionally the Christian stories of Christmas and Easter, so I think people come to both holidays because they provide access points to transcendence—to hope and meaning that society is not offering them.

DK: That’s a lot of pressure on the church—on pastors—for those two holidays. I grew up as a pastor’s kid, we work with pastors a lot in our work here at Barna, do you think that’s the right kind of pressure they should place on themselves?

JT: Pastors [recognize] they have a reduced social and cultural platform to speak the Good News into people’s lives, so they feel the pressure to maximize on those increasingly rare opportunities. So I think the heart behind it is a good heart that says, “I don’t know if I’m going to get another chance all year to really articulate what God has done for us in Jesus. I want to make sure that I get that right.” I think that’s a good pressure. I would say however, that pressure should not just be channeled into programming and excellence of events. It should be put into prayer, it should be put into fasting, it should be put into creating ways for people to continue on in exploring the Christian faith.

DK: The top reason people give us in our research for why they don’t attend church is because they find God elsewhere. It’s something you hear a lot in popular phrases like, “I’m spiritual but not religious”; “I love Jesus but not the Church.” As a pastor, when you hear that kind of reasoning—that God is available and findable outside of the church—how do you respond?

JT: It’s too simplistic. I’ll try to explain why quickly, and it will be hard. There’s three kinds of spirituality: mono-, di- and tri-spirituality. Mono-spirituality is what I would call secular spirituality. It’s basically saying: secularism isn’t working, there has to be more to me than just chemicals and brainwaves; I will look for a spiritual force or God within myself. That sort of spirituality is used as a cloaking mechanism to stop you from having to depend on some sort of God.

Then you’ve got di-spirituality, which basically says: No, I need something outside of myself. I need a relationship with a deity of some kind. And this, I think, is what is wrong with evangelicalism—which can minimize my relationship to other people as incidental or secondary—everything exists so I can have a personal relationship with God.

Tri-spirituality is myself in relationship with God and in relationship with others. This is the spirituality Jesus taught—and actually cares about. So I think people are deluding themselves to think that outside of the body of believers—and I say that carefully, not church programs or Sunday events—that outside of the Body of Jesus Christ, people can find God. You will have a limited, immature, shallow spirituality if you think you can find it on your own. We are called to practice the way of Jesus with other people.

My guess, though, is that’s not really what people are saying. What I guess people are mostly saying is that [they find] Church to be pretty mediocre—that it is about guilt, condemnation and hypocrisy, and [they] find the Christian faith in other means. And if people get together regularly with a big group of friends to live the way of Jesus, if they’re laying down their lives in sacrificial love, I’m fine with that. It’s my experience, though, that most people don’t want to do the second part of that.

Watch the full-length Sacred Roots video for free for a limited time only.

DK: You know, it’s interesting, after reading your FRAME, Sacred Roots, a friend of mine said she hoped this little book would challenge pastors to change their view of what it means to be an effective church. That the problem is not just the consumer, individual church-goer, or culture, but it’s also church leader’s own expectations of what it means to be a community of faith.

JT: I completely agree. There are two forces at work. There is what people do to form people, and then there’s people’s response. It’s not a pastor’s primary job to create events that are better than other churches so their consumers are happy. It is their job, whether people like them or not, to preach the Word, to sacrificially love, to care about the poor, to focus on relationships over events and programs. It is their job to see the church be the Body of Jesus—a tangible trinity on earth in a local place.

DK: As you said earlier, most pastors’ hearts are in the right place. It’s probably something of a slow mission drift, shaped by culture and a history of certain expectations of church. So how can they avoid falling into some of those traps—of becoming a consumer-driven church or of setting expectations too low?

JT: I think the issue is what evangelical culture focuses on as success and what evangelical culture holds up as the model of success. Every conference you attend, the speakers are, for the most part, charismatic, disproportionately gifted, un-reproducible anomalies. And they lead churches that are, for the most part, in unique contexts at unique cultural moments and cannot be scaled or multiplied easily. So we are holding up the anomaly and trying to make it the expectation. We live in an evangelical culture that robs us of our pastoral joy by repeatedly telling us to compare ourselves to people we can never be like.

Very practically, [as pastors], we must first claim a biblical definition of success and root that in our own hearts. According to the Bible, success is faithfulness (“Well done, good and faithful servant.”) So we need to have a vision of faithfulness and obedience as true, biblical success. Number two: sacrificially laying down your life for your people in love. Which means focusing on the relationships that are actually before you, and asking the question: How can I more tangibly manifest the love of Jesus in the actual relationships God has brought to me? And number three, keeping our lives focused on the need of the world rather than striving for success or notoriety in any sort of Christian or ecclesiological platform.

DK: When you think about Millennials and young people in particular, what do you think is unique about their criticisms of church—what do you think is unique about their cultural context that is different than the way a generation of Boomer skeptics approach church?

JT: I think for Boomers—this is a massive generalization—it was about making church credible intellectually, and relevant culturally. I think those were the two great challenges post-WWII. There was a lot of apologetics and trying to make the Christian faith credible in light of history. Millennials wrestle with completely different things. They are wrestling with issues of authority; a distrust of authority has basically leaked into everything. I think consumerism is a default. Millennials want access, not ownership. They tend to use things rather than own things. Marketing has been telling them their life has to be exceptional—so they’re always trying to go on that journey of trying to be exceptional. I think that’s a very, very real generational shift. I would say this: The culture of distraction we wrestle with is unprecedented in human history. And the implications of getting people to focus, to be still, to walk with God, to hear form God, to think, and read, and have convictions on any sort of deep level are just incredibly hard.

DK: And what would be your advice, then, to a Millennial pastor who is dealing with that culture of distraction? Or to a Boomer pastor who’s trying to reach Millennials?

JT: To a Boomer pastor I would say, you should offer the gifts you have from your own story, journey and experience. So another generation doesn’t have to make those same mistakes. People are craving mentors to give them not just trends, but wisdom on how to live. I think there should be a massive increase in terms of mentoring—that’s an incredible gift Boomers can give. To a Millennial pastor, I would simply say, follow the path of wisdom, not the path of trends in a worship experience. We can’t let all these intrusions continually make their way into our lives. We have to put boundaries in place. In some sense, silence, solitude and stopping are the essential disciplines a Millennial pastor has to practice.

DK: I bet most people would be surprised to find out you trained to become a butcher. In your FRAME, you tell the story of how, back in Australia, you left school at age 16 to become an apprentice to a butcher and indentured yourself to that industry for four years. It’s a great story, and I just really loved reading how the Lord’s hand has been on you, bringing you from Australia and spicing meat, to one of the world’s most influential cities.

JT: It’s also, I think, in many ways a very New York story. Which is why even though I’m from another country, I feel like I’m very well received here in New York. New York is a meritocracy. It rewards you primarily on achievements, and in God’s kindness, things have gone well for our church plant. We have some level of credibility here in the city in terms of church presence.

And it’s an immigrant’s story: to move from one culture to another with a dream of being a part of something greater. That was certainly my story. And I’ve tried to take the best parts of my story, try to make sense of it and then help other people make sense of theirs. I love it.

DK: And I think some of the things you argue for in your FRAME: calling the church and Christians to move from dabbling to devotion, from transience to permanence, from preference to proximity, from beliefs to practices, also reflect some of those elements of what you’ve learned both in Manhattan and in your own story.

JT: Yes, definitely. Let’s ask the question: How do we need to live in order for God’s dream for the Church to be realized in the world? What do we actually have to change about the way we live our lives, not just about the way we think? And not just one or two of our practices. What, in our actual lives, has to change so God’s dream for the Church and the world can be realized. You have to evaluate not just the surface levels or practices or habits, you have to examine the framework. So I think much of what’s in that FRAME is my best thinking, best real-world experience about the future. In a transitory, secular, suspicious world, how does the Church need to live, think and act in order for it to gain credibility again? I think those shifts are a step forward.

Comment on this research and follow our work:
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About Barna Group
Barna Group (which includes its research division, Barna Research Group) is a private, non-partisan, for-profit organization under the umbrella of the Issachar Companies. Located in Ventura, California, Barna Group has been conducting and analyzing primary research to understand cultural trends related to values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors since 1984.

If you would like to receive free e-mail notification of the release of each update on the latest research findings from Barna Group, you may subscribe to this free service at the Barna website (www.barna.org). Additional research-based resources are also available through this website.

© Barna Group, 2014

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Source: https://www.barna.org/barna-update/faith-spirituality/662-david-kinnaman-and-jon-tyson-q-a#.UzxJdGRdV5A

29 Ways to Increase Your Creativity 

You are good, You are good
When there’s nothing good in me
You are love, You are love
On display for all to see
You are light, You are light
When the darkness closes in
You are hope, You are hope
You have covered all my sin

 

You are peace, You are peace
When my fear is crippling
You are true, You are true
Even in my wandering
You are joy, You are joy
You’re the reason that I sing
You are life, You are life
In You death has lost its sting

(Oh) I’m running to Your arms
I’m running to Your arms
The riches of Your love
Will always be enough
Nothing compares
To Your embrace
Light of the world
Forever reign

You are more, You are more
Than my words will ever say
You are Lord, You are Lord
All creation will proclaim
You are here, You are here
In Your presence I’m made whole
You are God, You are God
Of all else I’m letting go

My heart will sing
No other name
Jesus, Jesus (repeat)

by GenerousChurch  |  March 26, 2014

 

An anonymous commenter asked:

What does it mean that God hardens human hearts? And will he do that to a believer?

We posed the question to Tony Reinke, content strategist for DesiringGod.org in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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This is a serious and important two-part question, but it is really six questions in disguise. Though human speculation could not touch it with a javelin pole, God’s revelation helps to unfold the answer. None of us is made modest by tiptoeing past this question if the Bible offers us answers.

I’ll try to unfold the six questions and answer them briefly in this (woefully short) article.

1. What is a hard heart?

A hard heart is an obstinate and calloused heart that fails to respond to God or obey him. A hard heart is blind to the precious value of the gospel and refuses to embrace Christ (Rom. 11:8). Most precariously, a hard heart is synonymous with spiritual ignorance and alienation from God (Eph. 4:18).

2. But does God actively harden the hearts of sinners? And if so, why?

Without question, the answer is yes, he does. The Bible speaks of God’s active agency in hardening hearts with unmistakable bluntness.

Maybe the clearest example is Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus. God hardened his heart in obstinacy on purpose. “Not once in Exodus 4-14 is the assertion of God’s hardening of Pharaoh grounded in any attitude or act of Pharaoh. Instead, again and again the reason given for the hardening is God’s purpose to demonstrate his power and magnify his name,” as Paul explains in Romans 9:17 (John Piper, The Justification of God, 174).

We find another example in John 12:36-43, showing Jesus unmistakably connecting unbelief in his day with the hardening of God. But before we go much further it’s vital to hear four key qualifications from D. A. Carson on this text:

If a superficial reading finds this harsh, manipulative, even robotic, four things must constantly be borne in mind:

(1) God’s sovereignty in these matters is never pitted against human responsibility;

(2) God’s judicial hardening is not presented as the capricious manipulation of an arbitrary potentate cursing morally neutral or even morally pure beings, but as a holy condemnation of a guilty people who are condemned to do and be what they themselves have chosen;

(3) God’s sovereignty in these matters can also be a cause for hope, for if he is not sovereign in these areas there is little point in petitioning him for help, while if he is sovereign the anguished pleas of the prophet (Is. 63:15-19)—and of believers throughout the history of the church—make sense;

(4) God’s sovereign hardening of the people in Isaiah’s day, his commissioning of Isaiah to apparently fruitless ministry, is a stage in God’s “strange work” (Is. 28:21-22) that brings God’s ultimate redemptive purposes to pass. [Carson, John, 448-9]

God has his ways and his prerogatives in divine hardening, and those prerogatives are just and right (Rom. 9:14-24).

At the same time, a hardened heart always reflects the willful, self-hardening, and rejection of God by the sinner (Rom. 1:26-28). Pharaoh hardened his own heart (Ex. 8:15). God also hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. 7:3) for God to display his wrath and power.

But this answer raises another question: is the hardening work of God now passed? Was it only a stage in redemptive history to bring out the cross and the ingathering of Gentiles? Or, to ask the question another way:

3. Does God harden Gentile hearts, and does he still harden hearts today?

Further evidence in the epistles leads me to answer yes and yes. We know God’s hardening will one day manifest in the Gentile world on earth at a future point leading up to the return of Christ (2 Thess. 2:1-12).

But even more tangibly, the hardening of God is made manifest in two ways: in the continued rejection of the Messiah by ethnic Israel (Rom. 9-11), and in the celebration of homosexual sin by Gentiles (Rom. 1:26-28). In both cases, broadly speaking, God’s hardening is made visible to modern eyes.

4. So whose hearts are hardened?

As the New Testament makes clear, the whole world is ultimately divided into two groups, the gospel-embracers and the gospel-rejecters, or more specifically, the elect and the non-elect. In the end, these categories divide the entire population. There are vessels of mercy and vessels of wrath (Rom. 2:5). There are “elect” and there are “the rest” (Rom. 11:7). God “has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills,” and those two categories cover all human beings. The hardened in this passage include a Gentile Pharaoh (Rom. 9:17-18).

Taking this point even further, based on the contrast in Romans 11:7, I believe we can say every one of the non-elect will experience God’s active hardening at some point, to be shut up in a condition that excludes one from salvation. God’s hardening is a feature of his activity with the “vessels of wrath.”

5. So does God harden the heart of a believer?

Now we get to the main question, one where even Reformed theologians seem to disagree. Some say yes, God could harden the heart of the pre-converted elect in their sin but then reverse that hardening later in regeneration. The case of David is cited as an episode where a child of God may have experienced a circumstantial divine hardening (2 Sam. 24:1).

And this possibility raises questions about what ultimately happened to Pharaoh. Did he convert after the Exodus? Possibly, but this would seem to contradict Paul’s use of Pharaoh as an example in his discussion of election in Romans 9-11. It seems more likely that Paul uses Pharaoh as an example of a “vessel of wrath” who was never converted.

But I think the best answer to this question is no, because in the argument of Romans, God’s act of hardening is permanent. As one commentator puts it:

It is unlikely that the hardening to which Paul refers is reversible (Rom. 9:18, 21-23; 11:1-10). One is the object either of God’s mercy or of his hardening (9:18), and there is not the slightest hint in 9:21-23 that the vessels of wrath may become vessels of mercy. Instead, Paul argues that the vessels of mercy will appreciate God’s mercy when they see his just anger inflicted upon the vessels of wrath. (Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, 618)

Based on Romans, it seems best to say God hardens only the vessels of wrath (non-elect), never the hearts of the vessels of mercy (elect), either before, or after, conversion. God’s hardening of a heart is a judicial act that is never overturned. Therefore I think it’s best to say, no, the true believer is never the object of God’s hardening.

6. But has my heart been hardened?

Often this question comes from Christians suffering spiritual numbness in their heart. They don’t feel joy in God like they want, or like they did before. Their Bible reading plan is less fruitful on a daily basis than they desire. But all believers feel and lament this sort of coldness in their hearts. All believers struggle with occasional callousness in their affections—but this feeling is not the same thing as a hard heart. A truly hard heart cannot feel or lament its own hardness, and there’s the key difference.

Hardness of heart leads the non-elect to feel increasing confident in their sin; hardness of heart in the redeemed makes us feel weak and needy.

So how do you know if God has hardened your heart? Well, have you hardened your heart to God (Heb. 3:7-19)? The beauty of God’s divine drama is that we don’t immediately know who is a vessel of mercy and who is a God-hardened vessel of wrath. The Jewish man who currently rejects Christ may eventually come to faith in Christ by an act of God’s sovereign grace overriding his self-hardened heart. And the practicing homosexual sinner may turn from her sins and live by an act of God’s sovereign grace overriding her self-hardened heart.

This is why gospel preaching is so amazing. We offer the gospel to all. We let the gospel-lion out of its cage to do its work in separating sheep from goats, vessels of mercy from vessels of wrath. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing (non-elect), but to us who are being saved (elect) it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

In the end, each of us must answer one question above all regarding the condition of our heart: Do I embrace Jesus Christ as the greatest treasure in the universe?

Tony Reinke is a content strategist for Desiring God in Minneapolis. He is the author of Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books (Crossway, 2011). He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children.

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Source: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2014/03/19/you-asked-does-god-harden-a-believers-heart/