Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (15 page)

Paul would tell us to
never get comfortable
. When you look at all the affliction he went through, you can see that Paul never thought that he had a claim on comfort. When he wrote about being beaten, shipwrecked, and abandoned, he wasn’t asking for pity. He was simply describing his very real experiences. He understood that if comfort is our highest aim, we will miss out on the riches of the kingdom of God.

An American professor was talking to a Christian from the Soviet Union about Christianity in both lands. The Russian woman commented on the difference between receiving Christ in the United States and receiving Christ in the Soviet Union. In America the new Christian is led to a comfortable church and a padded pew, while in the Soviet Union the new believer is prepared for death. Paul tells us not to get comfortable. A person cannot be committed to comfort and at the same time be committed to Christ.

Never allow for plan B
. When I say that, I’m not talking about administration. Wise leaders understand that something may go wrong, and they have to cover their bases with subsidiary plans, but this is not a lesson on administration. This is a lesson on paying the price; there is no plan B in the area of commitment; either you are committed or you’re not. Get rid of the exit signs in your life. As long as there is a way out, a fire escape, you’ll be tempted to take it rather than pay the price. You don’t have to survive. The apostle Paul didn’t have to survive; he was committed beyond the point of survival. He had no plan B to fall back on.

Never fall into a maintenance mind-set
. Nowhere do you find that the apostle Paul was satisfied just to maintain the work. He never settled for the good when the best was a possibility. He pressed on, not leaving it up to his coworkers to carry on the work. What I’m saying here is that Paul did not have a maintenance mind-set; his goal was not just to maintain the status quo. He was willing to make waves and be unpopular at the cost of his comfort. Don’t be content to carry on when you need to press on.

Dissatisfaction is a tool God can use to motivate us to greater things. I’m not saying we will be great leaders if we are unhappy. Miserable leaders have a great capacity to make miserable followers. When we lose our drive and motivation, we’re in danger of losing our vision.

The average church in America, regardless of denomination, has about seventy regular attendees, because that’s about how many people it takes to survive. Generally speaking, a congregation of seventy can afford to buy that acre plot of ground, turn the lights on, and partially pay a pastor. That is the survival level, and once churches get there, many of them stop growing because they can meet their own basic needs. Dissatisfaction doesn’t set in unless they look beyond their basic needs and examine their overall purpose.

John Wesley was one who understood that leadership means dissatisfaction. He averaged three sermons a day for fifty-four years, preaching more than forty-four thousand times altogether. To do this, he traveled by horseback and carriage more than two hundred thousand miles, or about five thousand miles a year. He was greatly devoted to pastoral work. During a later period in his life, he was responsible for all the churches in England. To get his work done, he rose at four every morning and worked solidly until ten at night, allowing brief periods for meals. At age eighty-three he was upset to discover that he could not write more than fifteen hours a day without hurting his eyes. At age eighty-six he was ashamed to admit that he could not preach more than twice a day and he was angry that he would sleep until 5:00 a.m.

Charles Spurgeon was known as the prince of preachers. Like Wesley, he was not satisfied with just being a great orator; he had a passion for the work of God, and he was never satisfied with the number of souls that he had won. At the age of thirty he preached to five thousand people at Metropolitan Tabernacle, and he still wasn’t satisfied. He was once invited to lecture at a university where all of his expenses, his wife’s expenses, and his personal secretary’s expenses would be covered, and in addition he would receive $1,000 per lecture over fifty-day period. Spurgeon, however, turned down this offer, suggesting that, instead of taking their $50,000, he would stay in London and attempt to win fifty souls for Jesus Christ.

I was privileged to meet E. Stanley Jones when I was in high school. My dad set up an appointment with him, and we had fifteen minutes together. He signed a couple of books for me and talked about how great it was to be in the ministry. He was woven from the same fabric as these great men were. In the twilight of his life he wrote these words from his beloved India, where he was a missionary: “I have often said, half jokingly, that when I get to heaven I will ask for 24 hours to see my friends and then I shall go up to my Master and say, ‘Haven’t You a world somewhere which has fallen people who need an evangelist like me? Please send me there, for I know of no heaven beyond preaching the Gospel to people.’ That is heaven to me. It has been and it ever shall be.”

We have been talking a lot about the apostle Paul, a man who was not satisfied and was not about to quit as he pressed toward that high mark. But there are other men and women in the Bible who were driven to greatness by dissatisfaction with their present conditions. Nehemiah was fairly well off as the cupbearer for the king in the royal court. He was surrounded by luxury, but he was willing to leave all of that to go back and help rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. Or consider Esther, the queen who chose to risk death in order to rescue her people from suffering. Joshua and Caleb could have settled for the wilderness with all of the other people, but they were unwilling to settle for second best. Why live in the wilderness when you can live in the land that flows with milk and honey? Moses could have stayed in Pharaoh’s court and enjoyed all the pleasures and the riches of Egypt, but he chose to lead his people out.

You show me a person that is in a strategic leadership position and I’ll show you a person who will be disrupted. We must get used to disruptions because working with people means there are no guarantees of smooth sailing. Just about the moment we think we’re going to accomplish a lot on our agenda, another hurting, needy person comes along.

We have to be like an airline pilot. We know our destination, but we have no control over the weather. Unexpected squalls may make it necessary for us to vary from the flight plan. I was flying from Phoenix to San Diego recently and the weather was pretty bad, rainy and foggy. We started our descent, and I thought we were going to make it until all of a sudden we were in a big cloud. Up we went, circling again. That pilot understood something about flying. He had a time schedule; he wanted to get there at 9:10 in the morning, but he also understood that bad weather patterns may necessitate changes. Instead of 9:10, it may be 10:10 or 10:20 or it may mean going to an alternate airport and reaching the original destination some other way.

Like the airline pilot, we leaders will often have to deal with disruptions—sometimes very unpleasant disruptions. The issue is whether we
respond
or
react
to those disruptions. To react means to act negatively. To respond means to act positively. If you go to your doctor’s office, and he prescribes some medicine for you, your body will either react or respond to that medicine. When you come back three days later, the doctor may tell you that your body is reacting to the medicine—he means that your body isn’t allowing the medicine to accomplish its purpose. Or he may say that you’re responding to that medicine—he means that the medicine is healing your body; you’re getting well.

When we have disruptions, do we react or respond? I continually need to remind myself of the importance of responding. People who are schedule oriented, who have their to-do lists, and who have strong goals will always have some tension over disruptions. We have to remember that leadership is more than taking a pen to our to-do lists and marking off numbers. Leadership is meeting needs. I’m afraid sometimes we’re marking off numbers instead of meeting needs, and that keeps us from being as effective as we could be.

One key to being an excellent leader is not to let disruption throw you: Handle your disruptions but don’t be consumed by them; keep your eyes on the goal. Too many people detour around the need in order to hit the goal, or they meet the need but forget the goal. We have to do both. We must minister to the need as we press on to the goal.

A good example of somebody who knew how to deal with his disruptions positively was the great boxer Gene Tunney, who took the heavyweight title from Jack Dempsey. When Gene Tunney was in World War I, he broke both his hands. His doctor, who was also his manager, told Tunney that he had brittle hands; he would no longer be a boxer. But Tunney decided to try a strategy change. Instead of relying on the hard punch, as he had before, he became a strategic boxer; he learned to move well, to score points, and to be an artful dodger. He changed his strategy but not his goal. That is exactly what we have to do with our disruptions. We have to change our tactics, manipulate our circumstances, but continue to aim for our goal. I have found these three guidelines to be helpful in dealing with disruptions.

Number one: Find out the specific will of God for your life
. Nothing will keep us on track better than knowing what God’s purpose is for us individually.

Number two: Don’t give in to the desires of the flesh
. If you give in to the flesh, you will always take the easiest way out. Make yourself do what has to be done, and you will develop character. As you exercise your character-building muscles, you’ll find they become stronger each time they’re used.

Whenever you are going to do something great for God, there are twenty-seven thousand people around you that will try to tell you why you can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t. All they are doing is testifying to their own experiences. They haven’t paid the price for greatness, so they don’t understand how you can do it. Effective leaders, however, leaders who have paid the price, know the value of character-building exercises.

They know that they cannot give in to fleshly desires, whether their own desires or the desires of other people.

Number three: Don’t try to survive
. Look at Galatians 1:15–17. You will see these three principles in action. Once Paul saw his goal, he looked neither to the left nor to the right for the easiest path; he simply headed in the direction in which God’s finger was pointing. His goal wasn’t to survive—and yours shouldn’t be either. It is amazing what will happen in your leadership when you do not gauge the happiness of your life or the greatness of your day by how easy it was.

Do the circumstances of your day have to be smooth and easy for you to have a good day? Some people’s only happiness comes on vacation—so they can only be happy two weeks out of the year. It’s a sad thing when people can’t enjoy the problems of life. It’s a sad thing when you rise up in the morning and realize that it’s going to be a bad day because you’re going to work, where there are problems that you don’t want to deal with. It’s a sad thing when you start looking for an escape instead of a challenge.

We have developed a society in which people would rather take the easy way out; we have become a relief-syndrome culture. This type of society does not make good leadership training ground. But those who are willing to pay the price will make it, and the world will sit back and wonder how these successful men and women ever got so lucky. Luck has nothing to do with it; they were simply willing to do what all the rest of the people were unwilling to do.

What conditions do you set on your service to God before you’ll be happy in ministry? I would encourage you to put down the book as you finish this chapter and spend some time answering that question. Write down what you need to have before you’ll be happy. Is it a place where you must live? Is it a salary you must receive? What conditions must be met?

Are we really attacking the problems in our personal lives? We’re not in a Boy Scout camp; we’re in the army of God. We need to trust God for the courage to go forth and pay the price to help build the kingdom.

chapter 9

YOUR PROBLEM IS NOT YOUR PROBLEM