Only do what you can sustain
Apr 22
Psalm 3: 4 To the LORD I cry aloud,
and he answers me from his holy hill.
Selah5 I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, because the LORD sustains me.6 I will not fear the tens of thousands
drawn up against me on every side.
I am going shortly to our church elders meeting. We refer to ourselves as the leadership team rather than elders but essentially that is the office that we function in. It is my turn to do the daily devotion and I have been thinking about concepts of leadership that I could possibly share on. One of the books that I really love on leadership, is that the axiom are Hybels.
One of the things that Bill has a learned over the years of leading the Willow Creek Church are is that anything that they plan to do as a leadership, must be sustainable. One of the characteristics which I find so frustrating about Christians in general and my life too if I have to be honest, is that we are so inconsistent. We actually have a joke in our leadership team that we are consistently inconsistent. Whilst we may joke about that, it is actually not really a laughing matter. We need to learn to be consistent and the lesson of sustainability is one that I’m going to share today.
Christians tend to come together in times of crisis. When we have a personal tragedy or a personal crisis or get into situations where we really need help, with tend to turn to God and we start to get on our knees and pray. And once the tragedy has gone past or the crisis is over, we soon forget about God and we go back to your everyday life and we tend to live in our own strength. And so in December last year and we really hit a crisis in our leadership, and we started to pray. We met weekly to pray and we had many meetings and many coming together is and who aren’t really came through for us. It was as if he was showing us that when we really do start to pray earnestly, then we will see the answers to our prayers. However once the December holidays had come and gone and we were into the New Year and the crisis had passed, and we had celebrated the victory that we had received in God, the pace of our lives started to catch up with us and the prayer meetings became less and less well attended.
The question I have to ask myself is “is this a case of sustainability or is this a case of just pure laziness”? One thing I do know is that God does not release laziness. God requires that if we want to see something happen we need to take the first step. We need to find out what God has promised in his word and then we need to pursue that by faith which is always instigated by action. As we know the word says that faith without works is dead. And so as I consider the case of our weekly prayer, it is not the case that it is not sustainable, but rather that we have just allowed other things become more important. And that as I am going to share with my fellow leaders is not good enough.