Message #1, I Am Here to Lead as God Directs
I am placing these messages on this blog as an aid to those of you who attended the 2024 ZBA Leadership Conference. These documents are my preaching notes, with only a little cleaning up. I’m confident you will find typos. You are welcome to make use of this material in your ministry. I ask that you not copy and disseminate this material without my permission. Howard Merrell, January 2024, hmerrell@liebenzellusa.org
You can find the handout for this message here.
Message #1, ZBA, 2024
How many of you, on a regular basis have the responsibility
of sharing God’s word to a group of people, preaching, teaching, or leading
discussions that are intended to help people gain a better understanding of
God’s word and apply it to their life.
If so, you are responsible to learn what the Bible says, teach it, and
encourage people to obey it.
That’s my passion.
In a church context, that is often a large part of
exercising leadership. When I am working with the Word of God, I always need to
begin with me. I cannot lead others where I’m not willing to go.
Have you ever preached, or taught something from the
Scripture and realized that what you were teaching was primarily for you?
Around 30 years ago, I was preaching through the Gospel of
Luke. I’m not sure if I have a favorite book of the Bible. Luke
clearly is one of my favorites. One of the things I noticed as I
worked through the book is that Jesus never missed an opportunity to get in a
fight over the Sabbath.
Luke uses the word Sabbath 18 times in his Gospel. More than
the other Gospels. Mark and John use the word 11 times each, Matthew 9.
The first mention of the Sabbath in Luke is ch. 4. We won’t
take time look there. I’ll just give you the result.
All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29
They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the
hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. 30
But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way (28-30).
Since God hasn’t given me the gift of walking through angry mobs, that’s a
result I hope to avoid.
The last time Luke mentions the Sabbath it was in reference to the day
between Jesus’ death and His resurrection. Every other time that Luke mentions
the Sabbath there was a confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish religious
leaders. One of those confrontations is found in Luke 14.
Luke 14:1–5 (NIV84)
1 One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a
prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. 2 There in front of
him was a man suffering from dropsy. 3 Jesus asked the
Pharisees and experts in the law, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?”
4 But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he
healed him and sent him away. 5 Then he asked them, “If one of you
has a son or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not
immediately pull him out?”
Beginning that time 30 years ago when I was preaching that
series from Luke, and a number of times since, this passage has grabbed me and
shook me. This passage has powerful lessons for us in regard to the question
that is before us, “Why am I here?” Why has God put me in this position of
leadership?
1)
We are here to lead where God wants us to lead,
and sometimes that is hard.
I already mentioned that good
leadership must be aligned with sound Theology. Something that alarms me is
that too many Christian leaders draw their leadership model from secular
sources. I’m not saying that we can’t learn from leaders in government,
industry, and secular education. We can, but what we learn from them needs to
be submissive to what we know from God’s word. I’m not alone in my concern.
Listen to what John Piper has to say.
We pastors are being killed by the professionalizing of
the pastoral ministry. The mentality of the professional is not the mentality
of the prophet. It is not the mentality of the slave of Christ. Professionalism
has nothing to do with the essence and the heart of the Christian ministry. The
more professional we long to be, the more spiritual death we will leave in our
wake. For there is no professional childlikeness, there is no professional
tenderheartedness, there is no professional panting after God.
Brothers, we are not
professionals. We are outcasts. We are aliens and exiles in the world. Our
citizenship is in Heaven, and we wait with eager expectation for the Lord
(Phil. 3:20). You cannot professionalize the love for His appearing without
killing it. And it is being killed. The world sets the agenda of the
professional man; God sets the agenda of the spiritual man. The strong wine of
Jesus Christ explodes the wineskins of professionalism.
BTW, you can get a copy of Piper’s book for free. The web
address is in your notes.
We don’t need leaders to lead
people to do what they want to do.
The desperate need in the church and beyond is to lead people to do what
they need to do.
In Jesus’ day the Pharisees and
teachers of the law had made an utter mess out of the Sabbath.
Alfred Eidersheim says about the
nearly endless details to which the rabbis of the day took the Sabbath law, “in all these wearisome details there is not a single trace of anything
spiritual—not a word even to suggest higher thoughts of God’s holy day and its
observance.”[1]
You couldn’t carry a burden
on the Sabbath, so the question had to be answered, “What constituted a burden?”
The accepted answer was, anything that weighed as much as a dried fig.
Well if you carried a half a fig two different times?
If a man were standing in
one place, and his hand extended into another place, and in his hand, he held a
piece of fruit, and the sunset marking the beginning of the Sabbath took place while
he was in that pose, the rabbis said he had to drop the fruit, because if he
pulled his hand in he was carrying a burden from one place to another on the
Sabbath.
In Luke 6 the Pharisees
accused Jesus of doing that which was illegal on the Sabbath.
One Sabbath
Jesus was going through the grainfields, and his disciples began to pick some
heads of grain, rub them in their hands and eat the kernels. 2 Some
of the Pharisees asked, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” [2]
It wasn’t that taking grain
from a field they didn’t own was illegal. The OT law said that was absolutely
legal. One could eat. He couldn’t harvest and then haul away. (Deut. 23:25)
What the Pharisees were accusing the disciples of was.
(Do motions) Reaping . . .
winnowing . . . and grinding.
Concerning the situation at
hand the Rabbis had come up with all sorts of rules and regulations about
whether one could practice medicine on the Sabbath.
·
Drink, but not gargle.
·
You could only do what was necessary to help a
person live until the Sabbath was over, nothing more.
Mark 2:27 (NIV84)
Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man
for the Sabbath.
The religious leaders had obviously
turned this on its head
If you look into this further,
you’ll find that in their minute rules and regulations the Pharisees and
teachers of the law had made things easier on themselves and harder on others.
So, when Jesus confronted these
leaders over the Sabbath, He was not being picky. He was not merely trying to
win an argument for winning sake.
He was leading in keeping with Good Theology.
Note in Luke 14:1, “He was being
watched carefully.” I think the watchers are identified in v. 3, “the Pharisees
and experts in the law.”
As I said, leadership is
sometimes hard.
2)
We are to lead in the way that is for the
ultimate Good of those we are leading.
Please note, here. I did not say in the way that is easy, or in the way
they want to go.
Just as the Lord sometimes leads us into difficult places, there will be times
when we will need to lead others into hard situations. Always it is to be done
for the welfare of those being led. We have to think about this based on sound
Theology.
Jesus asked these leaders who were watching Him a question. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or
not?”
If you are going to understand this passage you have to feel the
tension.
The Pharisaic answer was to consult the rules—and by the rules I don’t mean the
Scripture, I mean the teaching of the Rabbis by which they lived. They sought
to have a rule for everything. Everything needed to be done by the rules.
But before them stood someone who outside of their rules. Here was
someone who could heal without any work. Here was a man that undeniably needed
to be healed. I don’t think these leaders were devoid of compassion.
“Yes, we would like to see this man healed, but his condition is chronic.
It doesn’t look like it’s going to kill him today. We should tell him to come
back tomorrow. Yet . . .”
In asking this question, I think the Lord was giving these leaders an
opportunity. What if they had said, “Jesus, we aren’t really sure . . .”
I think if they had said that . . .
But they remained silent[3]
3)
We are to
Lead.
Write down—just on the corner of
your notes—some important event that took place in the Bible or church history.
Example: The Exodus of the People of Israel from Egypt.
One side against the other. One side serve an event. The other side return with
a leader God used.
Do you see a pattern here.
Note the Matt. 28:20 portion of
the G.C.
Rom 12:8,
Eph 4:9-13
Hebrews 13:7 & 17
2 Tim. 4:2 (make sure to consider the context,
where Paul was when he wrote this, the end of ch.3)
“Preach the Word; be prepared in
season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and
careful instruction.” (2 Timothy 4:2, NIV84)
There are 4 words here which seem
to me to obviously be aspects of leadership. Clearly, they apply to pastoral leadership,
but I think they also apply to other aspects of leadership
Correct:
(Reprove, NASB, ESV): It is a strong word, “elencho.” It’s the word that’s used
to describe what John the Baptist did to Herod when he condemned him for taking
his brother’s wife.
It is what light does. It’s why men love darkness rather than light . . . (John
3:20)
It is the ministry of the Holy Spirit, John 16:8.
Rebuke: It’s what Jesus
did when he calmed the storm.
It’s what Jesus did to demons.
“Stop!
Encourage: It’s the
word that describes the Holy Spirit’s ministry. If you look at the places where
parakaleo is used you’ll see it’s broader than to encourage
All of this is wrapped in the
first word in the list “Preach the word.”
Knowing which to do when is not
always an exact science. 1 Thes. 5:14 isn’t addressed
specifically to leaders and the words aren’t the same, but I think you’ll see
the overlap.
“And we urge you, brothers, warn
those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone.”
(1 Thessalonians 5:14, NIV84)
3 different conditions, 3 ways of confronting. No wonder the text says to be
patient.
An OT passage,
“Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him
yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own
eyes.” (Proverbs 26:4–5, NIV84)
Pray for wisdom. 😊
“I recently attended a funeral in a church I
had visited nearly thirty years ago…From what I could see, little had changed
in thirty years. According the bulletin…there was still one Sunday morning
service, where 175 people filled about two thirds of the available seating in
that sanctuary. I can’t tell you how it grieved me to realize that there are
approximately 10,000 more people in the community immediately surrounding that
church than there were thirty years ago…These good people, and hundreds of
thousands of others like them in churches all over the world, have never been
led. They’ve been preached to and taught. They’ve been fellowshipped and Bible-studied.
They’ve taken courses on prayer and evangelism. But with no one to inspire
them, to mobilize them, and to coordinate their efforts, their desire to make a
difference for Christ has been completely frustrated…Hebrews 13:17 reminds
church leaders that we ‘must give an account’ for what we do with our
leadership gifts” (66-68). Hybels, caution, see link in notes.
Here in Luke 14, why do you think
these Jewish leaders remained silent?
When you have failed to lead—not
when you actually tried to lead and then failed, but when you knew you should
lead and didn’t, what compelled you to be like these Jewish leaders who failed
on this day?
Let me tell you about my failures
in this regard:
Fear
·
Fear of failing
Sometimes being right will mean being alone.
Ezekiel 33:33
Fail by what standard?
·
Fear of what my colleagues would say.
I grew up in the faith as a Fundamentalist. They were (probably still are)
excellent at policing their ranks
I see the same syndrome in other circles. “X” (formerly twitter)
Depression
·
The dark time I experienced some time ago. I
came to the point where I just had to decide. . . That was the beginning of my
climbing out of the hole I was in.
Laziness,
complacency, being in a rut
When I look at how the religious leaders of Jesus’ day
handled themselves in the matter of the man with dropsy, I see marked parallels
to the way too many who claim to be Christian leaders lead.
We lead in a time when God’s people desperate need
leadership in making decisions about problems that didn’t even exist 25-50
years ago. How do we handle these new issues, or even a resurgence of old
problems?
The Pharisees had the writings of the rabbis. If you quoted
the right passage, from what the right rabbi said, you had the answer. They
tended to downplay compassion for the person in need and elevate the importance
of the rules, like not carrying anything beyond the weight of a dry fig on the
Sabbath.
(You can relate that to current practice on your own.)
In our day, there are the cutting-edge interpreters who find
new meanings in old Scriptures. They adopt the relativism of our world. In the
end, they end up with no rules at all—anything goes.
I believe Jesus in his ministry established a third way.
·
He was absolutely committed to the absolutes
of God’s word (Mat. 5:17-20) We should be committed to those absolutes as
well. However, as I once heard, “We should be absolutely sure that we are sure
about our abosolutes.” The Pharisees failed on this matter. The author of the
absolutes was before them and they were not willing to dialogue with Him.
The contemporary “leaders” I spoke of above, fail as well. They ignore or
explain away the absolutes.
·
Jesus by His actions, in Luke 24 and throughout
the Gospels shows that He was committed to the needs of others. In this
regard His practice was in keeping with Micah’s word, “He has showed you, O
man, what is good. And what does the Lord
require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your
God. (Micah 6:8) The Apostle Paul taught along the same line
(Titus 3:1 & 8, for example).
·
Jesus did not consider Himself bound by the
extra-Biblical, manmade additions to the Word of God. In fact He pointed out
that sometimes those additions actually negated God’s absolutes (Mark 7:9-13
& Matt. 23). So, in Luke 14, Jesus being committed to (and able to) meet
the sick man’s need, and knowing that in doing so He was not violating God’s
absolutes. He healed the man, even though He knew that the religious leaders
would object. I apply this this way: Everything else is negotiable.
I am proposing that the standard we
should apply in leading in the confusing times in which we live is summarized
this way.
An absolute commitment to the
Absolutes of God’s word.
A commitment to the needs of others.
Everything else is negotiable.
[1]
Edersheim, A. (1896). The Life and Times
of Jesus the Messiah (Vol. 2, p. 778). Longmans, Green, and Co.
[2]
The Holy Bible: New
International Version (Lk 6:1–2). (1984). Zondervan.
[3]
The Holy Bible: New
International Version (Lk 14:3–4). (1984). Zondervan.
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