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Tuesday, March 19, 2024 - 05:22 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

If you fail to lead in the area where God has made you to be a leader, you are like a seeing person who refuses to open his eyes … or a hearing person with his fingers in his ears shouting, “Njah-njah-njah-njah-njah-njah!”

You are, then, truly like a fish out of water … or a bird with no feathers.

Sent to the game, you fail to check in and you miss your at-bat.

You must find this spot – this area that only you can occupy – by thinking the big thoughts necessary to do so. They are “big thoughts” in that they involve your understanding of the role that God designed for you, which is the opposite of one thinking more highly of himself than he ought to think (Romans 12:3). It is seeing yourself as God sees you – as He made you – to do which constitutes true humility. There is no room in that for your own definitions; only for God’s.

It is a place of glory, designed just for you – the place where you must lead.

And lead you must. It is YOUR spot of leadership, not the place to play second fiddle. If you don’t get to (or you don’t actively, volitionally) sit in the driver’s seat, it’s not your car – i.e., you’re not commanding the role that God assigned to you to captain.

God has called you to lead, to create, in a specific area or areas. If you don’t, you fail. No matter what else you do. Da Vinci the rap artist would likely have been a flop. Pavarotti the mechanic would have been a bum. David the cattle baron would have been a zero. No matter how relatively “good” they may have appeared at honing those particular crafts, those were not their callings. Success for them there would have been “fish out of water” success. (And just think of all of the “good things” a fish can do out of water – fertilizer comes to mind.)

There are those who would deny your calling to lead, to hear the voice of God directly, to behave as one actually made in the image of God and to be himself a creator. This is the danger of extra-biblical religious institutions, of the professional clergy. (Not that all religious institutions or are so evil, but…) to stop this sort of thing from happening, men have been burned at the stake or driven from their homes and shunned as heretics.

A religious institution is an artificial environment that evokes artificial responses / behavior under the auspices of artificial authority that advances artificial rewards. While it may be a useful vehicle, it can only ever be just that – a vehicle – and never be the destination, more important than or the purpose for the trip. So if the religious institution near you is encouraging you and helping you in finding your niche of leadership and then to lead there, great, but if not, perhaps you should re-examine just what it is that you’re doing there. Why? Because Jesus said (Matthew 12:5), “If you’re not for me, you’re against me.” Part of being “for” Jesus is agreeing with Him about the role He assigned you by activating the gift that He placed in you to flourish.

See, everyone has a function, a role to play, an assignment, but few there be that find it. We have been so trained, so indoctrinated, so conditioned, to stand in line, to wait our turn, to sit down and be quiet, to not speak unless spoken to and given permission to answer (and those may be appropriate commands at certain times and in certain contexts) that it is far easier to subordinate ourselves than it is to step up and lead in the area in which we are to shine, individually and alone, that we tend to be dull and dark, each one of us with our lights hidden under a bushel.

Life is a team sport, and we all have different functions on the team. Not all can be the quarterback, though someone must be. If your calling is to be the quarterback, you’d better BE the quarterback! But if your calling is to be the water boy, even if only a temporary or transitional assignment at some maturing stage along your life’s pathway, water boy is far more important in the context of you and your life than quarterback!

And here’s the thing: doing that thing that you’re called and gifted to do is, for you, if done as unto the Lord, worship. You ascribe worth to God (worship) by fully discovering and activating that part of Him that He duplicated in you to make you, like Him, a creator, thus agreeing with God about who / what He made and willingly going along with it as your best and only choice. You do not worship God more or better when you go someplace where you are “led in worship” by some “worship team” or where you “sit under the ministry” of some other person who is fleshing out what he regards as his gifts. Those may well be the gifts of others, and there is an element of truth, I Corinthians 14 indicates, to part of our worship role being as an audience for someone else’s acts of worship, but those others have no authoritative standing under God to define for you what must constitute worship for you – namely, subordinating yourself to their “worship leadership” as superior, as the ultimate, as what God expects everyone to do.

Again, the problem of “the church” is that it deigns to speak as if authoritatively with the very voice of God to say that “the church” reigns supreme on earth as God’s voice, God’s arm, and that church leadership is the highest calling that one may receive. Nonsense. No such idea is anywhere in scripture (the exact opposite is, in fact … but you MUST understand that “church” is NOT ecclesia), though “the church” and “church leadership” continually rend scripture out of context and worse to tell God’s people (the ecclesia) whatever they have to to retain their artificial hold on power.

On the football field, the quarterback calls the shots. But what about on the side of the road at an accident scene in which the guy who just left the game where he played quarterback is just another participant in the accident? Is he in charge on the accident scene just because he was “in charge” on the football field? Of course not. In fact, the volunteer firefighter who didn’t even qualify to be water boy on the quarterback’s team may well be the one calling the shots – and the people who owe their lives to him there will be thankful!

So what are the big thoughts that you are supposed to be thinking? What is the task that God has placed on your mind in which He has enabled you to exercise authority? Will you forever subordinate it to someone else’s big thoughts and artificial control of your life? Or will you break out, today, and step into the big shoes that God has created just for YOU?

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