Allen Jackson - Great Leaders Bring God's Blessings - Part 1
This little series we've been working through really started, we spent the better part of the last two weeks in the land of Israel. There were 80 of us that traveled together for, on one level, a tour, on another level, to do our best to encourage the people of the land. Tourism is one of the leading industries in the land of Israel and it has ceased to function for more than half a year. The hotels are empty, the tour buses are parked. Many of the places we visited, they opened for us because they haven't had any tourists there. We would visit the some of the traditional sites like the Mount of Beatitudes or Caesarea and where we would normally see 50 or more buses, we would be the only bus.
By the time we've been there a couple of days, even the street vendors would stop us and we would arrive someplace, and they'd say, "Are you the group? Are you the group of 80? We understand there's 80 people here from Tennessee. Is that you"? And we'd say, "Yeah, that's us-ins," but it was, I don't think at any time we felt threatened or unsafe or... it was a remarkable time, but it's an important time. If you're not in the habit of praying for the peace of Jerusalem, let me encourage you to do so. It's a very difficult time. They're trying to complete the response to Hamas in Gaza and it's proven far more difficult and they have an impending struggle on their northern border with Hezbollah. Hezbollah is another Iranian proxy.
If you don't pay careful attention to the news, Iran takes their petroleum dollars and are doing their very best to secure nuclear weapons. And they have told the world that as soon as they do, they will eliminate Israel and the United States. You should believe them, and inexplicably our government has given them billions and billions of dollars, has removed the sanctions and they're using the wealth that's flowing to them through their petroleum resources to sponsor terrorism around the world. And very specifically in Israel and in our own nation, we have an open border. There's no question, I've interviewed too many national security experts in the last month. There's just no question that we have terrorist and significant threats within our own borders today in an unprecedented level, never in history.
I talked to a man while I was in Israel who was an expert on the topic and he said, "The Taliban in Afghanistan is stronger than they've ever been". They're better armed and they're better equipped because of the gear we left behind. So it's a tenuous time in the world, which brings me to this topic that I wanna continue with you, "The Great Leaders bring God's Blessings". I suppose over the course of my life, I don't know how many books on leadership I've read, many different authors, some religious, some Christian, some secular, from a lot of different perspectives and there's a lot of different ways of evaluating leadership.
Depending on the arena I suppose you're in, in business, you know, it's about the bottom line, corporate growth, or the value you add to your shareholders or whatever that may be, but I would submit to you that at the end of the day, the best leaders are those individuals who bring the blessings of God upon a family, upon a community, upon a business experience. If you gain the whole world and you lose your soul, Jesus said you gained nothing.
And so I don't want you to imagine that leadership is about being a titan of the business world or someone who accumulates enormous influence. I think it's a person who uses the sphere of influence that God has given to you to invite the blessings of God. I believe that will qualify you in the eternal kingdom of God for significance. We're not all ten talent people, we're not all called to the same thing, we're not all called to be Moses. Thank God, amen. You missed a really good opportunity for an amen there, but we are called to the purposes of God. God is doing something in the earth and he invites people in every generation to join him.
The land of Israel always ignites that within me, it is a living example of the Spirit of God bringing something to life that has been inert for centuries, millennia, and if he's doing it amongst the Jewish people in the land of Israel, I assure you he's doing it in the midst of the rest of his people in the church and the earth. And I for one want to be a part of that. I have no intention of sitting in the bleachers and talking about what's happening amongst those who are doing something. I'm quite contented to play whatever role he invites me to, but I intend to be busy about it and I hope you are too.
I'm weary with Christians that talk to me about their conversion experience decades ago and it's dusty. You at least, when Jesus extends a hand with a nail print in it to you, you at least want some calluses. Just a thought, you meditate on that. Let it kind of percolate on the inside of you. The last few days we were in Israel, we had some communications problems, our cell phones quit working. The first indication we had was that all of our GPS's said we were at the airport in Beirut, not someplace I would encourage you to visit. Like we had more than one call from home of concerned friends and family members, why were we in Beirut?
And then the next day our cell service quit working. It was a little intermittent, it might not work for three or four hours and then you'd have three minutes where your phone would be hot again, and it was very disruptive, more disruptive than I imagined it would be. We were dependent on it for the maps to navigate our way around the city of Jerusalem.
We were dependent on the texts to coordinate our activities and meet where we wanted to meet with the people we were looking to meet with, and in ways that I really never thought about it being disruptive, it was a problem, and it became really clear to me how interdependent we are upon some technologies, that without them, it changes all of our habits of behavior: It makes us less efficient and less effective, it changes how we schedule things and how much we can accomplish, and I climbed on the plane to head home with that just kind of bouncing around inside of me, and I came away with the commitment that I wanna be more interdependent upon the Spirit of God than at any time in my life.
You know, I don't know what the future will look like. I know the world is changing dramatically, cataclysmically at a rate that we've never seen before, and I have a very pressing awareness that we're gonna have to be more engaged with the Spirit of God than we've ever been. I do not believe we will flourish in the season ahead with the spiritual skill set we've had in the previous seasons. I'm not saying that they were wrong, I'm not saying that there was anything inappropriate about them, I'm saying it'd be like trying to do business in the 21st century with 19th century technology.
And I think if you imagine that your prayer life and your pattern of reading scripture and your pattern and habit of interacting with your Christian friends and what you do with your discretionary time, if you think you can hold those patterns and flourish in the face of the spiritual intensity that is in front of us, in my opinion, you're confused. We're gonna have to forge some new habits and some new patterns and some new routines. We're gonna have to recognize the significance and the relevance of being with the people of God and we're gonna have to be more dependent upon the person of the Holy Spirit than we've ever been.
You know, with our phones, we need them for GPS and communication apps and instant answers and location awareness. They give us resources to make a purchase anywhere at any time, we can shop global markets and have things delivered to us in almost real time. It's a remarkable set of tools. Well, I would submit to you that the Spirit of the living God lives within you, and that's far more important than our access to any technological innovation that's coming to us. My spiritual formation began in the Charismatic Pentecostal side of the church world.
As a child, I grew up in the Methodist church, but I wasn't a Christian. You know, you can sit in church and not be a Christian. I'm not indicting the Methodists. You can sit in this church and not be a Christian. I mean, I don't wanna make you uncomfortable but you could. Being in the building or being affiliated with Christians, there's no such thing as guilt by association of our Christian faith. And my family faced some real challenges, in the midst of those challenges some cried out to God and he answered their prayers and we had a revelation of Jesus that changed our whole family and our whole family system, and our spiritual formation took place outside the church.
I accepted the Lord in my parents' kitchen. I was baptized in the Atlantic Ocean in Fort Lauderdale, that explains a lot. And so things like the baptism of the Holy Spirit or spiritual gifts or manifestations of the Spirit or praying for the sick or anointing people and inviting the Holy Spirit into the lives of other people, deliverance from unclean spirits, the reality of curses or the realities of the blessings of God having tangible benefits in your life. That whole menu of things was a part of my spiritual formation since I was a child. And in spite of that, I'm aware of a need for a dependence upon the Holy Spirit that exceeds anything that's been a part of my journey.
Again, I'm not saying those things are wrong, I just simply believe we have to develop a greater awareness and dependence upon the helper which the Father has provided. We've had so much freedom and so much liberty and so much abundance and so many opportunities and we really didn't have to think about it. Maybe at a crisis point or a tragic moment, we would turn to God with a little more intensity, but for the majority of our lives, we would look at our children and say, "What do you wanna be"? We wouldn't even imagine asking them "What has God called you to"?
And I think we're going to have to change our cadence. I'm not suggesting something new or extra biblical, I'm just suggesting a different pattern, a different type of trust, a more personal awareness. I'm suggesting that the current season demands of us spiritual growth. Maybe a better way of saying it is greater spiritual maturity. And if I get really honest with you, at every juncture in my life where someone said to me it was necessary for me to mature, I have not liked it.
My parents used to say that to me, you know, it's time for you to grow up a little bit. And I, universally, I remember my response, I was like, "No, I'm good. I don't wanna be more responsible. I'm happy for other people being more responsible and me being less responsible, irresponsible is good with me". And I believe one of the things that God is inviting his people towards these days is a different kind of spiritual maturity. The disciples had the experience. They spent three years with Jesus, they followed him, they left everything. They pushed all the chips into the middle of the table to follow Jesus, and at the end of three years, he said, "We're gonna renegotiate," and they freaked out.
I gave you a series of passages from John's Gospel. Jesus is describing this change to his closest friends. He's telling him what's ahead of them, and they're very resistant. John 14, and verse 16, Jesus said, "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever," another helper. They've had a Helper, who's the Helper they've had? Jesus, but he's leaving, and he said, "I've asked the Father to give you another Helper". They're going, whoa big fella. Really? We're happy, we're content, we like this, we kinda got a system worked out, we kinda do what we can do and we get in over our heads, we come to you and then you help us out with the big stuff. "I'm gonna ask the Father to give you another Helper; that's the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it doesn't see Him or know Him".
One of the things that is ahead of us is a greater distinction, a greater separation from the spirit of the world. We have been, for the most part, a covert operation. You can sit in the church, you can go to the business place, you can go into academia and imagine you're a Christ follower and kind of blend in if you choose to and go along with the crowd, and I don't believe that will be true in what's ahead of us. I believe we will need the help of the Spirit of God in a way that will make us distinctive both in the marketplace, in academia, and how we conduct our lives and how we spend our time. The distinction is going to grow.
In Jesus's language, the world does not know him, cannot know him, cannot see him. You're going to be dependent upon someone that people who don't know the Lord cannot see and cannot understand. That means you're gonna be making life choices and life decisions and investment decisions and time decisions that people who are not serving the Lord cannot understand. If your secular friends commend you for your wisdom and think they understand the choices you're making, I think you have reason to question them.
John 14, same chapter, verse 26, he said, "The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and He will bring to your remembrance all that I said to you". The passages I've given you here from the New American Standard translation, they translate the word "helper," the NIV translates it "comforter". They're both appropriate, I like the word helper a little better. The Greek word behind them both is Paraclete. It means, "one called alongside," kind of as if you had a guide, someone to help you, to give you information, to remind you of what you need to know, to inform you of what you haven't learned. I know the value of a good guide. I've been traveling with groups to Israel for a long time and when before you go, you think the most important person on the trip is me because I've been there before.
By the time you've been there 36 hours, you could care less if I'm along. You wanna stay close to the guide because you realize the guide is so much smarter than your hillbilly pastor. The guide speaks the local language, the guide knows subtleties and details and has access to information that are not a part of my own journey. I constantly meet people who say, "Pastor, I wanna go to Israel but I don't wanna go with a group. I don't want to be bothered with the guide". I thought, "Oh, that's wonderful. Just go and double down on your ignorance. You won't know what you're seeing, you won't know the history".
See, I lived in Jerusalem for about a year studying at the university. We went exploring almost every day, my brother and I, and we saw things, then we have to go back to the library and do the research, trying to figure out what it was we saw. It's a painfully slow way to learn. Or you can have a guide. This is, "Let me tell you the story about what you're standing in front of". I'm thinking, "Oh, I didn't know there was a story in any of that pile of rocks".
Well, trying to navigate this world and trying to navigate your spiritual life and trying to navigate the choices that are before you without being dependent upon the help of the person that God has given to us just makes no sense. And Jesus is working hard to awaken his disciples to that in John 15, "When the helper comes, whom I will send to you from my Father, that's the Spirit of truth who proceeds, He will testify about me," John 16, "I tell you the truth, it's to your advantage that I go away. If I don't go away, the Helper won't come to you". Jesus said, "You'll be better off," we don't believe him.
I brought you a couple of examples, Acts chapter 16, Paul and his team are busy with ministry traveling. They're on the road from community to community, and in verse 9, it says, "During the night Paul had a vision of a man from Macedonia standing and begging him, 'Come over to Macedonia and help us.' After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia". We would have spent a week fasting and praying. Well, you know, last night I had a dream and I kinda think maybe we ought to go check out Macedonia. Does anybody else have a dream?
You know, out of the mouths of two or three witnesses, I'd like an affirmation. Maybe we should put a fleece out, maybe it was too much spicy food last night, maybe I just didn't understand the dream, maybe we should just wait. What do you think we should do? We've already bought tickets and they're not for Macedonia. It simply says that in the morning they changed plans. They have an interdependence, a reliance upon the direction of the Holy Spirit. I don't think depending on the Holy Spirit means you avoid planning or strategies or intentionality. I don't find God to be random at all, our world and universe is very orderly.
You know, again, because some of the segments of Christian I've lived in would argue that spontaneous is spiritual and a plan is carnal. I smile at that at this point in my life. You mean, like the prophets who tell us hundreds of years ahead of time, what God intends to do? That feels kind of like a plan to me, that does not feel like hyper-spontaneous. I think sometimes we use spontaneity to cover our lack of preparation, that's another sermon. In that same chapter, they get to Philippi as a result of supernatural intervention and they're in the marketplace on the way to prayer and there's a girl who's demonized who's harassing them. Remember, God led them to this place.
"We're going to the place of prayer, and we're met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future". Do you believe unclean spirits have awareness and insights beyond what we do sometimes? It's very biblical, there were any number of instances in the New Testament where an unclean spirit, an evil spirit, a demonic spirit had more awareness about Jesus than the rabbis did. "She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune telling. The girl followed Paul and the rest of us shouting, 'These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.' She kept this up for many days. Paul finally became so troubled that he turned around and said to the spirit, 'In the name of Jesus come out of her!'"
The girl was set free. There was a dramatic enough change in her that those profiting from her behaviors recognize a forfeiture of their revenue and they started a riot and Paul and his companions end up at the center of a riot. Imagine that, God directed them to a city, they helped a woman be free, and they're in the midst of a riot. So by all of our metrics, we call that bad, "I thought you heard from the Spirit, knucklehead. It's the last time we let you make travel plans for us".
We thought that the goal of good Christian ministry was being quiet and polite and timid and never causing any controversy. In almost every place Paul and his team goes, there seems to be a riot or some sort of physical punishment, an interdependence upon the Holy Spirit. Is it possible that we could mature beyond where we have been? I'll tell you a key to that is having the desire, the intent, the willingness to begin to say to the Lord, "I would change, I would grow, I would like to know you better".
Just quietly but persistently begin to say that to the Lord. I think you'll be amazed at what he will do. I gave you a couple of essential characteristics. We worked on them in some earlier sessions. I suggested to you in some detail, I'm not going to take the time to recapitulate, that if I had to look for one essential characteristic, it would be humility. If you're gonna sustain spiritual growth over time, and I mean over more than over a day or two or a month or a year, humility is an essential component. Proverbs 15 says, "The fear of the Lord teaches a man wisdom, and humility comes before honor".
It's worth taking the time to listen to the previous session. If you didn't, we went into a good bit of detail about how you can cultivate humility, and as powerful as humility is in opening your life to the the blessing and advancement of God, on the other side of the equation is pride, arguably the most destructive force that has been ever directed towards a human being. It's just corrosive. In Proverbs 11 and verse 2, it says, "When pride comes, then comes disgrace".
We have a common expression that says, "Pride comes before the fall," but the Bible says, "Pride goes before destruction," and in this particular verse, it says, "Pride precedes disgrace". You just can't afford to tolerate pride. It's not an easy discussion because not all confidence is pride. It took a great deal of confidence on Moses's part to walk into Pharaoh's palace and say, "Let these people go". The Bible says he was the meekest man on the face of the earth, but it doesn't mean he was timid or frightened or cowering. To say to all those Hebrew slaves that have been slaves for hundreds of years, "Follow me, I'm gonna lead you to the Promised Land". That was not the statement of someone who was cowering in his shadow. So answers to comments on pride are not simple, but what the Bible tells us is you simply cannot afford it. Don't excuse it, don't tolerate it.
More than seven times, God told Joshua to be strong and courageous. That was his commissioning, not go to theology school to read your Bible more, or do a Greek word study. "Be strong and courageous". I think strength and courage are more necessary for you and me as Christ followers today than any other set of attributes I can think of. I wanna pray:
Father, I thank you that we have Bibles and churches and fellowship and community, but we need your help to be men and women of strength and courage. Holy Spirit, we ask you, let a boldness for God grow in us, in Jesus's name, amen.