Month: May 2017

Last weekend, I preached a message on the “deadly” sin of sloth or laziness. We have been working our way through a series on the Seven Deadly Sins and last week was sloth. In preparing the message, I recognized once again that sloth is my most challenging sin of the seven. While I work hard much of the time, I’m prone to bouts of laziness. After finishing a message or some other significant task, I used to “reward” myself by playing a game of spider solitaire. If I lost the game, I’m competitive enough that I would play again. When I would win, I would sometimes say to myself, “I’ll try that again.” The result was often wasting half an hour or more. I stopped doing that after a message I preached several years ago on spiritual disciplines.

That didn’t eradicate sloth from my life. Again, I get as much done as most pastors, and likely more than many, but that isn’t the standard by which I get to judge sloth in my life. The standard is my own potential, what God has planned for me. By that standard, I often fall short. Yes, we’re all saved by grace through faith, so none of us can boast. And a verse later we’re reminded we were created to do good works. The connection between work and rest is a vital one, one to which God dedicated significant space in the Bible to address. The standard is to work six days and rest one. Of course we’re also to rest each day at the end of the work. So where does sloth come in?

For me it comes in the ten minutes after I complete a project. Certainly, after completing a project taking a few minutes to rest or refocus makes a great deal of sense, but I often find myself not refocusing so much as losing focus, as indulging in an a time-wasting activity. It won’t be an activity that is necessarily sinful, but it will distract me from the work of the day or the moment of rest I need. The power of those ten minutes is vital.If I do, indeed, rest and re-focus moving on to the next task, then my day is exponentially more productive than if I get side-tracked.

Have you experienced this? Do you experience the power of those ten minutes, or are you disciplined enough that they don’t impact your work and rest cycles? I have been much more intentional about using those ten minute opportunities wisely from Saturday through today, and I am amazed at how many more important tasks I have started and completed than usual. As I remind us so often: The unexamined life is not worth living. This is definitely an area that’s worth examining and adjusting if its an area that’s keeping you from the effectiveness God created you to have as a leader.

Here’s to leading better by managing the power of the ten minutes–today!

One of the most frequently neglected aspects of prayer for many of us is listening. I’ve often thought how strange it would seem to someone if we walked up to them, engaged in a conversation, asked them some advice about a certain challenge we were facing and then walked away. Yet, that’s exactly what I have done so often in my times of prayer with the Lord. I have engaged Him in a conversation, then told Him about a major challenge I was facing personally or in my leadership at the church, asked Him what to do and then walked away, thinking I had just engaged in a “quality” prayer time with Him.

How strange is that? I just asked the God of the universe for His help and then walked away without waiting to see what He had to say on the matter. Recognizing this as a weakness in my daily times of prayer, I committed some time ago to always include a specific time of listening when I pray. The amount of time varies. For a while I would invest at least 1/3 of the total time in prayer in listening. Right now, I’m using a variation of Dr. Dick Eastman’s “Hour That Changes the World” model of prayer, which has twelve elements, listening being one of them, so my listening time is about 10-15% of the time I’m investing in prayer. The key is: I’m listening.

Yesterday during my time of listening, God offered a phrase concerning our upcoming series: Living in the Spirit, which will be a five-week message series in June and the first week of July. The phrase was brief, but helpful–Deeper not Weirder. As I pondered the phrase throughout the day yesterday, and this morning, I kept saying, “Yes!” After all, when it comes to the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church universal we find everything from a basic non-acknowledgement the Holy Spirit is still working to a radical weirdness that scares most of us. I wouldn’t say God was calling me to “balance” when it comes to the Holy Spirit, but that as we present the messages we are to focus on a deeper relationship with God in our lives through the ongoing presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

Listening isn’t easy for me, but it always has some important result. Many times I don’t hear or receive anything other than the sense of God being with me. That’s enough when it happens, because it reminds me God is with me. At other times, God has given me the seed of a message or teaching, or a prompt to visit a person or an affirmation of a direction I was already heading, or a command to stop going in a specific direction. In my entire life, God has spoken to me in an audible voice only a couple times. He has spoken clearly to me many times. The key commonality in those times is: I was listening.

I remember many years ago when I was driving home from a leadership conference led by John Windber. All day long he had been saying, “God told me…” “God directed me…” “God guided me…” I was reflecting on all the times he had made such statements through the day, and I said, “God, why don’t you talk to me like that?”

As clearly as God has ever told me anything, He said, “Because you don’t listen.” Whoa. That set me back. I realized it was far too true. I was so “busy” doing the Lord’s work, that I often shot up prayers throughout the day, and then went and did something about whatever it was I had just asked the Lord for wisdom, guidance or help. Seldom did I stop to listen.

In that moment I said, “Okay, I’m listening now.” In the next five minutes or so, God gave me three specific instructions. Each of them related to a man who was part of the church I was serving at the time. It was nearly 10:00 pm, but I drove to his house. When I knocked on the door, and he came to answer it, I told him this was going to sound strange, but that God had given me three messages to give to him. As I spoke the messages–all of which have happened over the years–the man started crying. He told me he had been angry at God and that although everyone thought he was a believer, he had never trusted Jesus as his Savior and Lord. He committed his life to Jesus in that moment, and has served him faithfully ever since.

You would think that would have been enough to cause me to invest time every day listening to God, but it wasn’t. I have invested a good deal of time in listening over the years, but the answers have seldom been so immediate, clear and compelling. Recently, I realized once again that as a leader of a large and growing church, the most pressing need in my life is to be listening to the God who put me in the position. I need to stop and listen daily. Thankfully, God is extremely patient and has been honoring my renewed commitment to listen, by guiding me more and more.

Where are you when it comes to listening in prayer? Are you intentional about listening to God when you pray? Do you turn to Him in exasperation at times and ask, “Why don’t you speak to me like you do ________?” Do you even believe God is still speaking or is there to speak? These are vital questions, and how we answer them will determine how close our relationship and union with God becomes. After all, it’s tough to have a one-way relationship. Take a moment sometime today, or more than a moment and listen.  God is still speaking…

Here’s to leading better by listening to God when we pray–today!

On Friday, I focused on the power of prayer and mentioned that Dr. Dick Eastman’s book, The Hour That Changes The World has been impacting my prayer life significantly. I’m finding that one of Dr. Eastman’s recommendations that is impacting me the most is “waiting” on the Lord. Dr. Eastman recommends we start our prayer time with praise, which is something I have done ever since I was a teenager and learned the “ACTS” model of prayer, which is an acronym for Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication. He then calls us to “wait” on the Lord.

Waiting on the Lord is just that. We wait. We let God know we are available, that we aren’t going anywhere, that we are investing this time with Him. Dr. Eastman points out this is not “listening” prayer. It isn’t a time when we intentionally call on God to speak to us, or listen for what He has to say to us. Of course, if God wants to speak to us during this time of waiting, that’s great. The point is to pause and make sure we know that God is first in our lives.

I’ve been finding this aspect of prayer extremely powerful and refreshing. As I tell God I’m waiting on Him, that I have nothing more important in that moment, or in my day for that matter, than waiting before Him, waiting on Him, something has happened each day–I have realized nothing is more important in my life than God. My schedule is not more important than He. No other relationship is more important than He. In those moments of waiting if my mind wanders to the tasks of the day, I simply say, “God, thank you that you are more important than any of that. I’m waiting on you.”

The difference those few minutes of waiting on God each day over the past  week is vastly disproportionate to the time invested. It has set the tone for each day. It has literally made me realize God’s presence is more important to me than anything. The freedom of experiencing that has been powerful. At other times throughout the day, when life gets hectic, I’ll remember, “God has this.” It’s a moment of waiting on Him once again. It may seem counterintuitive to pause and wait on God in order to be more effective in getting things done, and that isn’t the primary reason for doing it, but this past week has been more productive in the tasks that matter than many.

If you already include waiting in your times of prayer, praise God. If you don’t, I encourage you to add it. The first couple of days I did it, to pause and wait seemed a little awkward. Now, I look forward to it, because it focuses me on the most important one in my life–God, and lets Him know He’s in charge today, and I’m waiting, pausing, to remember that. He already knows!

Here’s to leading better by waiting on the Lord–today!