SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP...

We have a mandate. God calls all men who have placed their trust in Him, to be the spiritual leader in their home. I remember the first time I heard that statement. I was attending a men's conference in Lake Tahoe. The speaker, Dr. Dwight Hill, was giving us a punctuated message on our responsibilities as men. I remember thinking, "RIGHT, I'm called to be the spiritual leader in my home. Now just exactly how is that supposed to happen? First of all, my wife has been a Christian for at least 30 years, and I have been one for 4 years. I don't go to church. I don't give any money to God's work, I don't understand very much of what I read in the Bible. And follow that up with the very real practical fact, that my wife is independent. We started our marriage with the understanding that we would divide labor and responsibilities according to our abilities, not according to traditional male, female roles.

This so called mandate about spiritual leadership was sounding an awful lot like traditional roles, and I knew this would go over like a lead balloon at my house. Needless to say, I never mentioned it when I got home from the conference. But I thought about it a lot. I prayed about it. "Lord, what does that look like, being the spiritual leader? Lord, you know my situation, is that even possible in my household? Lord, does it really matter anyway? I mean, I know I'm going to heaven, you have already made that a reality for me, and I have never read that sentence in the Bible where it says, "YOU MUST BE THE SPIRITUAL LEADER IN THE HOME."

That's because that exact sentence isn't in the Bible, but spiritual leadership is woven throughout the scriptures. And the way to understand this role is through understanding the Bible.
I finally asked a man if he would disciple me so that I could grow in Christ. Through that discipleship process I began to develop a hunger for God's word and a dependence on prayer. All the while I was conflicted between what the world had taught me and what the scriptures were teaching me. Often times the two were harmonious, but when they were not, I ten ded to lean toward the world and what the hard fought lessons of life had taught me. Gradually I noticed that Jesus' promises were real, and that learning to trust and obey Him was the greatest source of peace in my life. I also learned that spiritual leaders lead by being servants. I was to serve my wife, serve my sons, serve my parents and serve my God.
Then one day, several years later, I was having a conversation with Gail, and during that conversation she said to me, "you are the spiritual leader in the home." The words almost knocked me over.

WITNESSING...

Everytime I get on a plane I have prepared through prayer to be a witness for Jesus. My flights are around three hours. That is enough time to establish a dialogue and share the truth of the gospel. Not every time though. Yesterday is a case in point. I sat next to a very congenial man. He was soft spoken, gentle and from what he told me, very generous. His goals were to be healthy and happy, both for himself and for his family. He was quite wealthy. He gave credit to God for his earthly talents and for his prosperity. As we talked I told him that he had everything except hope. He said a curious thing to me. What do you mean by hope? Describe hope. That set me back for a moment, I thought most everyone understood that term. I gave him an example of temporary hope. What he didn't want to talk about was eternal hope.
Our conversation was lively and punctuated with laughter, but the subject matter was directed by him. I did not share the story of God's love for him. He just wasn't willing to engage.
When we arrived at our destination, he offered me a very generous gift, something only he could do because of his position and power. I accepted his gift, I only wish I could have offered Jesus' gift to him in return.

Dead Broke...

How many of you started out your adult life dead broke? I know I did. Entry level jobs were available. Thank God. They made the difference between having food and shelter and not. I was struck the other day by an advertisement showing President Clinton and the title "The Poverty Trap." I didn't follow up on this. I only thought about the title. The first thing that came to my mind is the suggestion that poverty is a trap. One never hears the statement, "The Middle Class Trap." Or even better, "The Wealth Trap." Somehow only poverty is a trap. This statement or some form of it has been floating around for as long as I have been alive. Statements like "breaking out of poverty," or,"caught in the endless cycle of poverty." To me, this perpetuates the idea that poverty, as opposed to any other style of living, has some kind of additional unseen force that holds people in it's clutches. And those forces are regularly defined as external. Lack of education, limited opportunities, substandard health care, discriminative hiring practices, and so on.

In actuality, there are challenges, disappointments, uncertainties and discrimination at every financial level. Most wage earners and entrepreneurs have faced these truths from the time they stepped into adulthood.

People are moral agents. They have the capacity for both good and evil. They have within them the free will to make choices everyday that directly effect their lives and the lives of their families. The central difference between individuals who stay in poverty and those who do not, lies in the willingness of the individual to make choices that will change their lives. Programs are not the answer. Public housing, food stamps, welfare, child care, and educational opportunities cannot in and of themselves end poverty. Actually these things are destructive in many ways because they are dehumanizing. Social engineering by its very nature suggests that there is a technical solution to poverty, denying individuals their human dignity.

It comes back to being a moral agent. If we want to strip people of their dignity all we have to do is deny the Christian world view, and it's teachings on sin and moral responsibility. In its place we embrace the more enlightened or scientific view that fosters social engineering, eventually treating people as less than human. Once that is accomplished, poverty flourishes, particularly poverty of the human soul.

I am basically lazy. I have been ever since I can remember. I did very poorly in school, failing to graduate. I didn't like advice and I didn't want other peoples opinions and I didn't want anyone to train me to do anything. All I ever wanted was an easy life. Just make it easy for me, so I don't really have to put out too much. I think the only reason that I forced myself to participate was the unacceptable results that laziness yielded. Were it not for that I would no doubt still be dead broke.

Do you see what I mean. Poverty, particularly as it pertains to living conditions, is directly linked to our free will. And poverty of the soul has been with us since the fall of mankind.

RESTING IN CHRIST...

I took Systematic Theology a couple of years ago. Our professor gave us a simple illustration. Placing a chair in the front of the room and facing the class, he stood in front of the chair. With his elbows locked and his hands firmly on the armrests, he began to sink slowly into the chair. After being seated for a few seconds, he used his arms to elevate himself from the seat a little bit, then elevated even more. Then he let himself rest in the chair again.

He said this is the way a lot of us live out our trust in Christ. Perhaps the day we were saved, we rested fully in the seat of the chair. Maybe for several days after we were saved we were still resting in Christ. But then after some time we begin to try and rely on our own strength. We use our physical strength in the place of resting in Christ. Part of the demonstration included portraying individuals who never sat down. They came close to fully resting in Jesus, but as soon as the body was near the seated position, the arms would take over and lift the person out of the seat.

I'm using this illustration today to depict my walk with the Lord. The minute I stop looking up, the minute I stop paying attention to my life of promise, I start raising up on my arms and trying to trust in my own strength. I happens so easily. All I have to do is engage in any human activity. Once my mind is distracted, especially if I have a "to do list," I am off on my own. Now not really. The Holy Spirit hangs in there and doesn't let me get lost for long, but I am surprised sometimes at just how long I have forgotten my Savior and thought I was going it alone.

This is why obedience and surrender are the constant challenge in my life with Christ. How grateful I am that I have permission to fail. He renews me everyday. Hallelujah.

FREEDOM

As far as daily devotions go, I have found the best one for me so far. It is written by Walter A. Henrichsen. The title is "THOUGHTS FROM THE DIARY OF A DESPARATE MAN."It can be ordered by sending him an Email to walter@leadershipfoundation.org, or by faxing him at 619-588-5870.

The following is plagerized from Walter. The text centers around 1Corinthians 9:19, "For since I am free from all I can make myself a slave to all, in order to gain even more people." NET Bible.

The Apostle Paul goes on to explain how he would do anything short of sin and violating his conscience to identify with the lost in order to win them to Christ. It's a valuable lesson for all of us, and particularly for men like me who are closet legalists. Avoiding temptation can restrict access to the lost. Don't throw caution to the wind as you venture out. Paul states a little later in the text that he subdues his own body, making it a slave so that after preaching to others he would not be disqualified.

After years of alcoholism, I was delivered from the addiction. Notice I didn't say disease. I have thought it best to not go into bars, primarily because of the alcohol available, but also because I didn't want to contribute to another man stumbling. Now however, I am able to go into a bar. This is an example of the freedom that Paul is referring to when he says he is "free from all." It is being allowed by God to proclaim Him in the places where many Christians simply don't go.

By making ourselves slaves to others our freedoms increase. Ya, I know, I had the freedom to go into any bar I wanted all those years that I wasn't saved. And I could stay all day if I wanted. But I wasn't free. I was a slave to my own appetites and desires. There is no freedom in being able to meet our own expectations, and fulfill our own hopes. This is actually slavery personified.

My encouragement today is to look for witnessing opportunities at times and in areas where your normal patterns of behavior would be interrupted. The hopeless and hurting are all around us. Maybe they are not aware of the hopelessness, but they are aware of the hurt.

Do something practical beyond common courtesy. Study the faces of those who are near you. Even if your are not interested, act like you are. Before long you will be.

God will honor your surrender. And He will also rearrange your time so that what may seem like time lost is actually time gained.

Now What...

I wasn't sure what all of this meant. I was raised in a Christian home, my dad was a pastor for the first ten years of my life, so I knew full well how a lot of Christians lived. I had rejected Christianity partially because I didn't like the restricted lifestyle. So, I decided I had better get some things straight between the Almighty and me. There were three core issues that I was not going to compromise on, one was attending church, the second was, giving money to a church, and the third was not following other Christians around and trying to act like them. I knelt down and prayed, declaring to the God of the universe, that I was not going to attend any of his churches, and I was not going to give any of my money to any of this churches. And as far as the bahavior thing goes, I knew I was just going to be avoiding most Christians anyway, so I wasn't worried about that.

Then I thought about what I did want to do. I had never read the Bible all the way through. I had never had any kind of a prayer life. These two things became the center of my getting to know Jesus. Reading about Him and praying to Him. Everyday at breakfast time I would open my Bible, spend some time reading and then before going off to work, spend some time in prayer. It took me three years to read through the whole Bible. During that time, I found that God was revealing Himself to me through His word. I know it sound kind of funny if this has not been your experience, but the more I read, the more complete picture I was able to piece together of God. At the same time, I was becoming more and more aware of a stark difference between what I was praying for in the morning and how I was acting throughout the day. Again this was God's word, working it's way into my mind and into my prayers.

At this point, it has been over three years since I was saved. It is the summer of 1994. My brother Monty called me and invited me to a men's gathering that was being held at the Los Angeles Colliseum. He also invited our dad to go. I had never been to an event like this. It was called Promise Keepers, and it was a gigantic event. Over 65,000 men gathered to participate. I came away from that event, challenged to start living a Christian life that was visible. My brother and my dad were encouraging me to grow. It was the turning point in my walk with Jesus.

Left Wanting...

So left wanting was where it was at for me. When the larger questions of life loomed, I put the thoughts out of my mind. Drugs and Alcohol are an excellent tool for altering the mind. I reasoned that everyone struggled with these larger questions so why make a big deal over it. Besides, when I weighed out the predicted results of various religions, it seemed to me that I had no choice in the matter. If, as I believed, there was nothing after death, I had no choice. And if the Muslim was right, he couldn't find out his fate until it was too late, so he had no choice. And if the Hindu was right, he would continue to be recycled, so he had no choice. The most that any man could do was try to be good and hope for the best. Other than that their fate was sealed.

Christianity is different. It starts with the premise that you can never be good enough. I liked that, because I knew it was true about me. Second, it contends that man's only hope is in God. And third, it claims that God made it possible to be with Him after death, because He sent His son to die as a sacrifice for mankind's sins.
Imagine that. By believing that Jesus is who He says He is, and willfully placing my trust in His claim, I could be guaranteed life with Him, in an eternal place where there was no evil. And He claimed that He would accept me just as I was, if I would only trust Him.

At this point I would like to quote C.S.Lewis again in his reference to Jesus' claim.

Jesus: God, Lunatic, or Evil Man

Jesus.....told people that their sins were forgiven. ......This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.
......I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God."
That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic----on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg----or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

The choice was mine to make. I asked Him to come into my heart and my life and be my Redeemer. And He took me just as I was. He forgave me all my sins. Decades of pride and arrogance, vile thoughts, hurtful deeds, and all the other things I've mentioned. I remember being overwhelmed and afraid. Afraid of what others would think. Afraid that this might mean that I have to attend church. Afraid that being a Christian was a lifestyle I could not do. I decided not to tell anyone. I was alone when I prayed and asked Jesus to come into my heart. So, I could keep it a secret and then I wouldn't loose all my friends. I went home that night, smoked a joint and thought about what had happened that afternoon. Here I was, still a drug addict, still an alcoholic, pornography all over the house, still living like I had always lived, and yet, I was granted the same gift that a Saint would receive. How was this possible? It was possible because Salvation comes thru faith, not thru good deeds.

Dying and Death...

My Mom passed away last night. She died peacefully at the care facility. Several family members were with her just hours before her passing. I am relieved that mom has gone home. It was her request not to have any heroic measures taken and upon death, to be cremated.

While this loss is foremost in my mind I want to talk a little about dying and death and funerals and such. Before I decided to place my trust in Jesus as my Savior, I spent decades living with no assurances and no hope. I went to funerals where the majority, if not all of the attendees, were just as lost as I was. We would console each other, genuinely caring that one of our close friends had lost a loved one, and often cry and grieve the loss. There were any number of nice gestures. Once, at the funeral of a woman who was killed in an automobile accident, we were all given helium balloons. And at the proper moment we released them in unison and all watched them go skyward in a kind of quiet pensive moment. This kind of activity was followed by reassurances of the dearly departed being in a better place. Being in a better place!! What in the world does that mean, I thought? And how do you know it's true? Well, we were making it up as we went. No one ever talked about the Biblical notion of Ultimate Justice. Several, mostly women, thought that we come back and do this again. Ugh!! Do this again? Oh yes, they would say, several times, until we get it right. Get it right? Get what right? Live a perfect life? Not this guy. You could give me a thousand lives, and once I began I would chuck the whole notion of living a perfect life and save it for the next time.

Because I did not want to dwell on dying, and because the very topic made me uncomfortable I didn't spend much time engaged in these conversations. I read a bumper sticker one day that became my motto. It said, "since I gave up hope I feel much better." I thought to myself. Just get over it, there is no hope and people who think there is are delusional. So give up and live for the moment. And living for the moment seemed to work best. I kept the nagging emptiness at bay with distractions and future plans. As long as I had a vacation coming up, or a new purchase, or a new interest, I could go along quite nicely. I tried to ignore the age lines in my face and my sagging gut. I consoled myself with thoughts of selfishness and pride. And in the end, the emptiness was still there. Someday I was going to die and I was getting tired of pinning my hopes on the next new truck or the next vacation. They all fell short of my expectations and left me wanting