Video Transcript: Lesson 21 Character
Hello, Friends, welcome back to Christian leaders Institute. We're talking about you today, as we have in the last couple of lectures about what God's calling you to be your absolute very best for him for his honor and his glory, and also for the sake of your people. So the last couple of lectures, we've been talking about some really key things about one, your relationship with Jesus Christ, the vitality that you have, how important that is, you're not going to be able to help your people have a deeper knowledge and understanding and love for the Lord. You know, if you're not there yourself, and so putting that first. And then just then also talking about just kind of your role as kind of a spiritual leader, and taking charge of, you know, being the shepherd to lead and guide and not not worry about being like the strategist so much. But really being reclaiming that office of a holy man or a holy woman who can get a sense of what it's like to be with God, because they've been with you. There's a prayer that I have on my wall, in my office, and it says, May those who know us, not at who don't know, God, may they know God, because they know us. I know, I just jumbled that up. But the idea is like, if people don't know God, but they know us, they'll come to know God, because they know us. And that's part of that, like, spiritual directing, and being close to the Lord in our own life, and having those things kind of work together in tandem. Today's lecture, we're gonna play an absolutely critical thing. No, it's just as important as those other two. I think all three of these kinds of we might think of these as like the trinity of spiritual leadership. Today, we're really talking about character, in what is character and why it is so important in ministry. Because I, kind of starting right off here, I think the single most important personal quality of a Christian leader is character. Now this is different, you know, so Well, I thought you said it was being spiritual direction, reclaiming the role that well that's more like your vocation, and the other one on your relationship to the Lord. That's kind of a spiritual connection you have with the Lord, this is kind of like, you know, quality characteristic about you. And that is truly, I believe, Christian character. So let's get into this. Let's talk about character then. Father. When we think of character, we need to look no further than you Lord to see the ultimate perfection of holiness and morality. And all that is good Lord, within you, there is no corruption, there is no darkness. Lord, we pray that within us Lord that Your Holy Spirit is doing work, to take away those things that we might become more and more like your son, and bear his image to this world. So Lord in areas where we need to develop our personal character. I pray that you would, even in the words of lecture that I speak, you would be challenging and confronting and building up for a new character that brings honor and glory to your name, amen. Okay, so let's talk about character. And kind of this claim that I have here that the single most important personal quality of a Christian leader is character. Well, this isn't my opinion. I think this is this is a biblical truth. So Paul writes to Timothy and he gives him in I Timothy an outline of what he thinks, you know, his, the kind of leaders that he needs to get
around him. So he's Timothy, you need to build up your leadership team. And these are the kinds of people you're going to be looking for. And so in I Timothy 3, there's a long list of things. There are 17 of them. Okay, so Paul was set and I'm not going to read them. Now you can look in First Timothy 3, Paul has 17 qualities of leaders in the church. 15 of the 17 items are character related. 15 of the 17 are character related. It doesn't have to do with how competent they are. He doesn't say go out and find the most the greatest Bible scholars and the most charismatic teacher And if there's all character related, you know, somebody who is not into quarreling, the husband, of one wife, somebody who doesn't drink, it's the character issues 15 out of 17. So truly the model we have here, just from I Timothy 3 is the overwhelming weight, of quality of leadership is character. Scripture provides a number of other examples to affirm the priority of character and leadership. Again, Paul writing to Timothy in I Timothy 4, he says to him now, not who you're recruiting, but he's talking to him, he says, Timothy, watch your life and your doctrine closely. Watch your life that matters and your doctrine, I think it matters that he says, Watch your life, that comes even before doctrine, you have to walk the walk, in order to be a leader. So you've got to watch your life, as well as what you believe. And to Titus, who was another one of his upcoming protegees. He says, in everything, set them an example by doing good. Again, talking about church leadership, set an example do good, be the right kind of person. And we talked about we touched on this in last lecture in talking about Acts 20:28, Paul's farewell address to the elders in Ephesus. And he says, you know, take heed, or keep watch over yourselves, and the flock that God has given you charge over. But again, he begins with, keep watch over yourself, that comes first, it wasn't keep watch over everybody else. And then yourself, it's no First, keep watch over yourself, your character, the kind of life you're living. And when you do that, you can then watch over others, I think we might even be able to say, you know, keep watch over yourself, and in doing so then keep watch over others. And I think that what what we see here in these texts is that apart from exemplary moral character, character, ministry is really a meaningless venture in the eyes of God, regardless of the results that you could be seeing great things happen. But if you're kind of moral, kind of lowlife or dud, it's really meaningless. And you know, this might be a challenging thing. For some people listening, because on the outside, as you can see, like, all these great things are happening, but nobody knows about kind of the secret side of my life. Brother or Sister, you know, the Lord knows all about you, you're not hiding anything. All right. And if that's where you're at, I just call you to repentance. You know, the Lord is gracious, there is no condemnation for those in Christ. And if there are character issues, I mean, there's character issues for all of us. And so whatever character issues that the Holy Spirit brings to your mind, brother and sister just repent, know that the blood of Jesus Christ covered that, and that the Holy Spirit will work to in you, yield to that, to change your
character, in this and just how important that is. So let's talk about character and we can really understand character in one of two ways. Probably the first is what we would naturally think of as being morally in right standing with God consistently honoring God with our lives. That really is the cornerstone of our ministry. And as I'm recording this, just, we could probably say this at any time any videos are being recorded, just within the last several months are some really significant megachurch. Pastors who've been their whole ministries that they've had for decades, have been compromised and has a big black mark on it. Why? Because of compromised character, because they made choices that did not reflect the moral law of God. And so everything they did, now God used them, not because of who they were. God used them in spite of who they were and God's purposes just were accomplished. But these people, particularly these men, have so much like a because their character just was never where it needed to be, and they lost it, so we want to have ives that are consistently honoring God and reflect the God who we serve. Going back to my good friend, Richard Baxter, our buddy from the 1600s, this is excuse me, Philip Jacob Spener. We talked about him a number of lectures ago, in his book Pia Desideria, the pious desires or pious longings, or holy longing, or something along those lines kind of or for translation. Again, he was calling he lived at the same time, Baxter did. And they were writing about the same time and about the same sort of thing. So this is what Spener observed about the moral character of pastors, he says, Since ministers must bear the greatest burden in all these things, which pertain to the reform of the church revitalization. And since their shortcomings do correspondingly great harm, it is of the utmost importance, that the Office of the ministry be occupied by men who above all are themselves true Christians, and then have the divine wisdom to guide others carefully on the way of the Lord. So, Spener is really basically saying, nobody's going to bring more damage to a congregation than a pastor who lacks moral integrity and character. Now, I serve at a church where three of my previous predecessor, my predecessors as pastors, there was great moral scandal and failure. And I can tell you, that destroyed the church in it just fractured the church in so many ways. Now, since I've been the pastor of my church, there have been people who have made really bad choices in their life. And it's been difficult to work through and they either left the church or they've had to seek some kind of repentance and renewal. And each of those are very difficult, and it's been a blow to the church. But I can tell you, nothing to the scale of when the pastoral leader fell into great sin. That just is just, it has just a tremendous impact on on the life of the church. And so we should all think that as as leaders, that there is a bullseye on our back that, that the enemy the devil seeks will seek to take us down, because if he can, you know, bring down the leader, you know, Jesus, you know, strike the shepherd, all the sheep will scatter, and Satan tries to do that very thing. So there's this inseparable link between pastoral leadership, and
character. More recently, another guy, kind of in our lifetime right now, Dan Dumas, D-U-M-A-S has written this. God is less concerned with what you know, as a leader, or with what you do as a leader. Because he's primarily concerned with who you are, as a leader. The character of the one leading God's people is most vital. The good of those under authority depends on the faithfulness of those in authority. If the leader's character of one of leading God's people is most vital, the good of those under authority depends on the faithfulness of those in authority. If the leaders are unfaithful in their lives in ministry, their people suffer. So, in the end, I think our our, our ministry is only going to impact others as much as our character will allow. Alright. That's just kind of like a straight up sort of a thing. And I agree with Dan Dumas wholeheartedly that God is not nearly as concerned with what you know, or what you do as with who you are. And you can you can just be a shining light for the, for the kingdom of God just in your character. Okay. So are any of us perfect? By no means, as Paul would say in Greek, Me kanena tropo, by no means are any of us perfect. Do we all make mistakes? Yes. Are we all hypocrites at one time or another? Of course we are. But we don't want to have these deep seated patterns. We don't want to have all these blind spots. We don't want to be dealing with secret sins. Because sooner or later your sin find you out it will be exposed. So deal with it and be the kind of person others inside the church and outside the church can look at and just admire, were given that admonition in the New Testament and live you know, just such holy lives that people within and outside of the church will kind of be drawn to you and be have affection for you because of your character. Okay, so that's often what we think of with character on second. In terms of character, we want to define it as a kind commitment to do the right thing, regardless of circumstances, okay, so this is kind of like the inner fortitude kind of a character, not that just you're kind of what we say, a good person and you're trying to follow God, but there's, there's, like, internal strength, a commitment to do the right thing, no matter what. So that's kind of the other side of character we're talking about. Now, this is really important and revitalization. Because church renewal is hard work, it takes a long time, and you're gonna have many difficult and unpopular decisions along the way. And, and under those kinds of conditions, you know, that kind of constant pressure and force, the resolve of a leader can be, can be compromised. And so obviously, we don't want to, we don't want to be in in put ourselves in that sort of a situation. And I think of Paul in, I believe it's chapter 2 in I Thessalonians. He's talking about his ministry when he was in Thessaloniki, because, you know, when I was very good, it wasn't to please people, it wasn't to make people happy, like I was there to serve God, I was there to do the right thing, I was there to honor the Lord, not just you know, you know, scratch people's itches and tickle their ears, so they would hear what they wanted to hear, I did what God called me to do. That's the kind of character we're talking about here. Now, my friend, my mentor, Harry
Reeder, who I've often referenced throughout this, he has a wonderful book on leadership called the leadership dynamic. And in the leadership dynamic, he uses this wonderful illustration of two different kinds of leaders. And if I'm not mistaken, a number of people have used this, and I believe it. Martin Luther King, Jr. may have been the first one to use it. I'm not sure on that. But I believe Martin Luther King jr. did in fact, use this as a way to talk about quality of character in the leadership. And so but in his book, we'll talk about Harry because that's where you can read about it and the leadership dynamic. He says, there's two kinds of leaders. One is a thermometer leader, in one is a thermostat leader. So let's talk about those. What does a thermometer do? We put a thermometer up on the wall, it tells you what is the current temperature in the room. So if we put on air conditioning, the temperature would lower if we turned on the heat, the temperature would go up. So a thermometer is very responsive to the atmosphere to the conditions that surround so the thermometer doesn't stay the same, it's kind of going up and down all the time. Now, the difference with a thermostat is it doesn't respond to the temperature, a thermostat sets the temperature, it dictates what the temperature is going to be. Now, we think about this in terms of leaders. So a leader is going to either act in one of two ways. They're either going to be kind of like a thermometer temperature and and kind of be moving and changing with the atmosphere and with whatever's going on. Or it's going to be the thermostat leader who sets the tone sets the direction, you know, sets the temperature in and kind of leads from that. So obviously, hopefully, if you're hearing this, you can demise or you can discern not to demise, you can discern that we want to be thermostat leaders, right? We want to be leaders that set the directions set the temperature set the atmosphere, rather than just responding. Because if you're a thermometer kind of leader, you it's not about like you have that inner fortitude in you, it's you, you're going to try to appease your congregation by by doing whatever they want. Now, most often probably with revitalization. It's going to be about maintaining the status quo traditionalism, you know, because that's what the thermometer in the room says, Hey, this is what we all want. So we're going to try to make everybody happy. So we look at the thermometer to see what what everybody wants and what we're supposed to do. And I think there are just countless people who've been in ministry, who who've made that choice. They're just unwilling to call the congregation to repentance and change. And it just leads to the death and the decline of the church. I mean, the the thermometers at a place where it's just cooking the church and they're just dying and there's an unwillingness to make a change. The change. But it's not just within the church. It's kind of outside the church. And I see this in many churches today that the leaders, what's not the thermometer inside the church? But what's the thermometer out in the world? And what's the what's the readings, what's the temperature in secular culture. And so the church begins to compromise the
integrity of doctrine, or practice. For just the sake of numbers, in you're driven more by kind of trying to get a crowd or numbers or to be well liked or something because we have the right temperature. We have the right kind of atmosphere, the right kind of environment, we adopt these certain beliefs or whatever or these kinds of practices. I don't care what the results are. You've kind of abandon your your post, you know, you, you're failing to glorify God and you you might have drawn a crowd but or you might become popular in your community, but like, who cares? I mean, like, really, who cares? Like you now seek the the praise of men, rather than the praise of God? Right. That's what a thermometer leaders doing and trying to seek the praise of men, rather than the praise of God, which is, again, the complete opposite of what Paul says when he showed up. He's like, I didn't seek your praise, I sought I sought to honor God. So it takes no character to be a thermometer leader, right? You're just kind of like a mirror, you're just reflecting back what everybody wants. But it takes character to be a thermostat, sort of leader willing to make difficult, unpopular, yet biblically grounded decisions that will bring the church health and vitality. A thermostat leader is one who was confident in their calling. They're confident in their identity in Jesus Christ. Thermometer leader is seeks really to only honor God. And they understand what what is required of that. Thermostat leader is willing to absorb losses in order to achieve a God given goal, and yet is unwilling to take shortcuts to get there. This is godly character friends, and this is the sort of thing that gives birth to true revitalization, this kind of character lead leadership, I hope you're just like, a lot of yeses, and a lot of amens as you're going through this. And maybe you've been challenged to, to lower your character or to take shortcuts or to do Oh, no, you know, God is going to honor you. You will never regret taking the high road, following the Lord, you know, it may not end well in the worldly way. You know, it didn't end that great for John the Baptist, it didn't end that great for Peter, it didn't end that great for Paul, but they were faithful to the end and how the Lord honored everything they did. And again, that's our audience is the Lord. It's not, it's not the crowd around us or the, in our churches or the crowd out in the community that we're trying to connect to. It's always for the Lord. So I'd like to just wind up with a couple few bullet points here, on kind of what is this integrated vision for leadership? We've got to kind of wrap up the last three lectures about what does it mean to be a revitalized leader? What what do you have to do? What do you have to be? We'll hit that in a second here. Okay, number one. We covered this in the first lecture, I'm not going to pound on it. The pastor has to have a strong and vital relationship with Christ, you must know Christ, you must love Christ, you must regularly be engaged in spiritual disciplines. Not only do you grow through that, but you model it to your congregation, you truly become a living example that others can see and and aspire to be. Okay. So we've, we've talked about that enough, I'm not going to say any more on that. Two, an uncompromising commitment to preach the
gospel. The pastor, so if you're a pastor, hearing this, you are the primary instructor for the people of God in your ministry. And if they do not to hear you preach the gospel, then who are they going to hear it from? And if you offer a lukewarm or an only an occasional gospel message And if somebody does that, well, then they're no pastor at all to the people under their charge. So a commitment to just preach the gospel to just, you know, grind that down into the deepest places of their brains, who Jesus is what he has done and who we are in him. Okay? And the all the implications of that. If you're not doing that, then then you need to start doing that, right? I mean, we have to make the gospel, the center of all things, right. There is no real visionary, gospel leadership apart from the preaching of the gospel. second, or third, I should say, a God fearing leader who understands who knows the call and the urgency of gospel ministry. This is a thermostat leader kind of thing. So you're not swayed by the demands of the congregation or the whims of the culture, you're a servant of the Lord, and you're actively bringing the congregation to God's agenda, you know, you know what needs to happen and you are driving them to that, you know, unflinchingly. Okay, so, keep on going. Number four, in our integrated vision for leadership is you need to be able to personally evangelize and disciple not just be able to, but you are doing it. Again, you are responsible, I'm sure, in some ways for the general oversight of the church. But your primary role is not that of Executive Administrator, your first call is to tend souls, and to vacate this responsibility is to vacate the office of pastor or whatever leadership role that you are in. So you need to be sharing the gospel with those who don't know it, and you need to be building and training up those who do know it and what the gospel means for them now, helping them in their sanctification and, and their ministry as a as they grow. So that's, you need to be doing that. If you're not engaged on that level, you're not doing ministry at all. And then finally, last one, you need to be continually growing in sanctification, and skill. The demands of ministry, just just ministry are complex and demanding. And then you throw revitalization on top of that. And it's really, really hard. And if you're going to be in this for the long haul, which I hope you are, you're going to need to have a deeper experience of Christ, and you're going to need to hone your skills, you're going to need to do classes like this, you're going to need to do other CLI classes, you're gonna need to read spiritual classics, you're going to need to, you know, go to conferences, read books on preaching better, and, you know, all these kinds of things. So you just need to kind of keep on growing, keep on developing, as a person and as a leader. So I think if you can kind of work on these five things kind of as your model for your own life, and it's direction you're going and who you want to be, you're gonna be well on your way to what God's called you to be. And I can't promise any results because I have no idea what the outcome will be other than the Lord saying to you well done good and faithful servant, and brother and sister. That's all the applause you needed all the praise you
need. And so with that, I'm going to just close out the prayer. And just give you a hopefully some of these things to kind of think about and linger on as you prepare to lead in revitalization. Father in heaven, once again, we turn to you in prayer, we give you thanks and praise for the blood of your Son, Jesus Christ that has taken away all our sin. Lord, as we consider our morals and our character Lord, we do confess that we are not perfect. And we do believe we plead the blood of Jesus Christ. And we thank you that we may enter your throne room with boldness and confidence, knowing that we have been made right with you. So Lord, I pray for all my good friends, watching this right now. That you might build in them. A character that is in the image of Jesus Christ, that they would no longer be conformed to this world but that they might be transformed by the work of your son in a renewing of their minds and heart and character Lord. As others see them Lord they would see they would see your glory and and your love and your mercy radiating in and through them. Lord many have seen that their lives become just a sign pointing to your glory. And we pray this Lord, all in your name, amen.