“A Work of Heart- Understanding How God Shapes Spiritual Leaders”

I have asked the following questions several times, but here I go again:

            WHAT MAKES A PERSON A LEADER???

In your lives you will meet all kinds of leaders:  The “cool” kid at school, a boss, a teacher, a minister or a parent.  But God designs DIFFERENT kinds of leaders.  God calls us also to be SPIRITUAL LEADERS.

A Spiritual Leader is different from your everyday leader.  What makes one a spiritual leader?

 We are going to spend several weeks seeing what it takes to be a successful SPIRITUAL LEADER.  The world will tell us what it takes and how to measure up.  It will say that in order to measure spiritual success we should measure things like: church attendance, church worship, extracurricular activities etc.  We should find a church who seems to be thriving and simply do what they are doing and measure ourselves against that.  This model says:

            “If we do what _____________ (insert any successful church name here) is doing, we can see the same results”.  Well, that MIGHT be so, but probably not, because what ______________ did grew out of THEIR OWN WALK WITH GOD.  Their leadership has more to do with THEIR heart issues.  Simply copying and mimicking them will not bring a spiritual breakthrough, UNTIL it first happens at our HEART LEVEL!  And as a result what we have in America is a recent trend where we can see tons and tons of bodies meeting together expressing Christianity, BUT THEY LACK ANY SPIRITUAL VIBRANCY OR ANY SENSE OF MISSION!!! 

 We try to find ways to “do church” and “be spiritual” before we EVER attend to issues in our own hearts!  And although we may have the best and nicest churches that anyone has ever built, in far too many of them God is strangely absent!!!

 So before we decide to move the world and be its’ leaders, we first need to prepare and shape our own hearts!  Leadership is in fact a “work of heart”.

 So we are going to study biblical models of “heart shaping”!  It involves both divine and human activity.  Can these two activities coincide together?  As we all know God made us to choose.  Humans can and do make our own choices as part of the expression of the image of God given to us.  And God will never override that power to choose.  However, he is not merely a passive observer.  God’s providence shows us that he will lovingly superintend EVERY part of our lives.  So, our choices never render us helpless or beyond God’s intervention!

Our heart shaping will occur in 6 areas:

·        Culture- all of the environmental influences that shape our life and ministries. (ex: historical, political, traditional etc.)

·        Call- a feeling of destiny, the awareness of a call to serve God.  A personal conviction of having received an assignment or mission.

·        Community- those around us that shape our development: family, friends, church etc

·        Communion- a conscious choice to commune & develop a relationship with God.

·        Conflict- the natural combatant forces that come from working with the Lord. (personal, interrealtional etc.)

·        Commonplace- the everyday, run-of-the-mill activities; when “no one is looking”.  The ordinary and routine.

Most Christian leaders do not recognize all of these areas in their lives.  Most of us don’t understand our developing life and leader stories.  So, we are going to learn how to cultivate and enrich each of these areas in order to develop ourselves into Spiritual Leaders!

Often, we can see spiritual development easier in others than ourselves.  But, once we learn to see God at work in others, we then could learn to look for it in our own hearts and lives!  So we are going to look at the “heart-shaping” patterns of four major Biblical players:  Moses, Davis, Paul and Jesus.  Just maybe their lives will be able to give us some sort of clue as to how God works in our own hearts!

HOMEWORK FOR NEXT WEEK:

1-     List (actually write them downJ) the major influences you’ll face in developing each of your personal “heart arenas”:

a.       Culture (times & environment you live in)________________________________________________

b.      Call (personal call by God to a mission)__________________________________________________

c.       Community (people who shape and sustain you)___________________________________________

d.      Communion (personal relationship with God)______________________________________________

e.       Conflict (your engagement of destructive forces)___________________________________________

f.        Commonplace (daily choices of living)___________________________________________________

 2 -     Read as much as you can about Moses and look for events that must have shaped his heart as a leader.  Focus on his early development (Exodus) and read what you can and want to through Deut.  Be prepared to discuss it all next week.