Making Transformation Easy

When we first understand all the factors involved in true change (repentance and transformation) at first it seems impossible. The heart, which is the place all transformation occurs, resists change. It is always working to preserve our sense of self and protect the identity we have come to accept; therefore, homeostasis is the number one reason people do not change.
The beliefs of the heart which have accumulated over a lifetime have forged a sense of self that concretely defines our “normal.” Once our sense of normal is established the boundaries are firmly planted and difficult to move. At first this seems like an incredible weakness, a possible flaw in God’s creation; but actually it’s just the opposite.
When you consider that the heart is designed to keep us from being controlled by outside influences we realize that resistance to input apart from evaluation and intentional choice is part of what the heart is supposed to do. In other words, we are designed so that circumstances and corrupted logic received from the outside cannot easily change our boundaries or our sense of self. When your heart is fixed and stable this works for instead of against you. This protects a healthy heart from the corruption in the world.
Ps. 112:1-6 is the picture of a man whose heart is established in God’s love and really does trust and delight in His Word. Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, Who delights greatly in His commandments. His descendants will be mighty on earth; The generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches will be in his house, And his righteousness endures forever. Unto the upright there arises light in the darkness; He is gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous. A good man deals graciously and lends; He will guide his affairs with discretion. Surely he will never be shaken. The only word that adequately fits this person is IMMOVABLE!
Once your heart is steadfast in the realities of God the only way you can be moved, destroyed, or conquered is to change your beliefs. This is the real secret behind those who always get up, who always endure, and who always overcome. They may not really even understand it. They may attribute it to their faith, but the reality is it’s their heart!
This is the ultimate secret to living a life that keeps getting better and better and better. Years ago I preached a series called The Boiling Point. The principle of our boiling point is to do what we do until we cross an invisible barrier that suddenly shifts the balance in our favor. Some people call this the tipping point! When we cross the tipping point in our efforts it causes a shift, but that shift isn’t holistic. It only affects the area where we have focused our efforts, not our life.
When we cross the tipping point in our heart everything changes. When success happens on the inside we not only succeed but we have the capacity to enjoy it, feel safe in our success, and even rest and relax. Success that is only circumstantial brings anxiety and fear of possible loss. That’s why God’s wisdom says, the prosperity of fools is their destruction. But with a change in heart everything changes.
This brings us to the ultimate factor for producing heart transformation: We have to want it, choose it, and apply it. This is the labor that brings us into rest. In Mark 4:24-25 Jesus told us how to get the Word into our heart so it would bear fruit. The measure [of thought and study] you give [to the truth you hear] will be the measure [of virtue and knowledge] that comes back to you — and more [besides] will be given to you who hear. For to him who has will more be given; and from him who has nothing, even what he has will be taken away. (AMP)
The Bible makes it clear that ministry to our heart belongs to us and us alone. God speaks to our spirit and people touch our soul, but only we can take input from either of these sources and write it on our heart. Then, and only then, does it bring about the automatic responses like those mentioned in Prov. 6:22 When you roam, they will lead you; When you sleep, they will keep you; And when you awake, they will speak with you.
One of the key ingredients to transformation (change that occurs from the heart) is passion. Passion makes things happen fast. The degree of passion determines the speed of transformation. In the parable of The Pearl of Great Price we see one of the laws of the Kingdom. Matt 13:46 says …when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. This man wanted the pearl more than he wanted anything else.
When you want to step into a new way of living more than you want anything you think you’ll have to give up, the transformation is easy. This initial passion usually occurs in a moment of inspiration. Inspiration can be the voice of God calling us to a better life or it can be the new “you” breaking through the mediocrity and crying out to live up to your potential (the promises of God).
Based on the teaching in the parable of The Sower and the Seed (which is confirmed by current research) when that inspiration occurs you have from a few minutes up to 12 hours to take ownership of it before it is lost. But the great thing is that if you “strike while the iron is hot” the transformation is incredibly easy! Mark 12:30 tells us to involve our heart, soul, mind, body, strength, understanding – all that we are in our involvement with God. This is what I call the multi-modality approach.
The more of you that you involve in any change the faster it happens. If you are dealing with sickness, deal with your heart, change your emotions, work with your body; bring every part of your into alignment with the promise of God that inspired you to hope. And never wait. Waiting is simply a form of resistance; it’s your heart trying to preserve what you have accepted as normal. Resistance will show up in many forms, but understand from the start that what seems like insurmountable obstacles is simply the heart trying to keep you in this place that you’ve accepted as normal for you!
It is this desire to bring a multi-modality approach that has lead me to develop dozens of tools for transformation over the years: The Prayer Organizer, The Releasing Series, Heart Physics, Meditations, Prayer, Mini-meditations, exercises relating to Pain and Pleasure, Put Off/Put On, Casting Down Vain Imaginations, Interrupt Destructive Patterns, Faith and Works and dozens of other powerful exercises. These all have one ultimate goal: harmony between mind, thoughts, emotions, feeling, behavior, and words!

Enduring Hardship

Every life has hardships, and every success story is filled with obstacles and near disasters. Nearly every financially successful person has lost everything at least once, and many several times. No one has made it to the place of success without facing and overcoming difficult odds. And all too often those that succeed do it at a tremendous price. Everyone who succeeds may point to a particular strength. But, the one strength common to all success is endurance. Because no one wins without hardship, everyone who wins must endure!

Paul’s writing to the Ephesians seems almost simplistic, “After you have done everything to stand just stand!” Sometimes I know I’ve done all I can do to bring about a success. All that is left to do is keep standing. Standing and enduring may be the hardest part. Activity makes us feel safe. It gives us the sense we are accomplishing something, whether we are or not. But enduring is what takes place when there is nothing left to do. When it seems that everything is beyond our control, it will be the strength to endure that keeps us holding on until success comes.

Endurance comes from many sources. It is the fruit of discipline, vision, hope and faith! In the parable of the sower and the seed, Jesus said those who lost the word through tribulation and hardship, lacked root. The truth was not rooted in their heart. “These likewise are the ones sown on stony ground who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with gladness; and they have no root in themselves, and so endure only for a time. Afterward, when tribulation or persecution arises for the word’s sake, immediately they stumble” (Mark 4:16-17, NKJV). Enduring hardship is directly related to having an enduring vision. An enduring vision is one that is rooted deep in the heart. It is the unshakable certainty that the end is sure. If the vision is not rooted in our heart, we will give up when the hardships arise. If we lose sight of the vision, the hardships become exaggerated. They become bigger in our mind that they really are. But the person who is focused on the vision has little awareness of the hardship. Few people exemplify this more than the Apostle Paul. Paul, who had been beaten, imprisoned, betrayed, shipwrecked and maligned, referred to his suffering as “light affliction.” Paul experienced something that influenced him more than his hardship.

He had a vision to take the gospel to the world. It was his calling, his destiny. It was rooted too deeply in his heart to by plucked up by life’s hardships. When giving the secret to his capacity to endure incredible hardship Paul said, “we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen” (2 Cor. 4:18, NKJV). The person who sees the end from the beginning will endure hardship. The person who sees the end, experiences strength beyond what others can see or perceive.

Those who see the end are immovable. They always have a light in the darkness. The hardship is minimized by the joy of the goal. Sometimes the only difference between the incredible success and the failure is the ability to endure. Many times we have the right idea, the right plan and the right opportunity. But if we do not see it through, all the way to the end, we never know! We are left in that vague tormenting uncertainty; was the problem me or was the problem the plan? We must always be ready to walk away from a bad plan. We need to know when it is time to quit. A bad plan will never work regardless of how long and hard we work at it. But we should never quit because we lack the character to endure till the end. A person of character does not equate a bad plan with being a bad leader. Great leaders know when to walk away. Their ego is not bound to a particular project. But they never quit just because they lack the personal strength.

I enjoy the story of Wally Amos, a man who succeeded late in life. It is said that he lost everything he had, several times but he never lost faith. Late in life he became known as the father of the gourmet cookie industry when he found success with the Famous Amos Cookies. Wally Amos faced and overcame hardship so many times that he embodied the saying, “when life gives you a lemon make lemonade.” He so embraced this philosophy that in his official portrait he holds a pitcher in one hand and a glass of lemonade in the other. He endured until he could turn the lemons of life into lemonade. As one person pointed out, he didn’t just make lemonade; he sold it back to the people who handed him the lemons.

Colonel Sanders was another man who continually faced hardship and failure. As a child he learned to cook by taking care of his siblings while his widowed mother worked to provide an income for the family. Over the course of the next 30 years, Sanders held jobs ranging from streetcar conductor to insurance salesman, but throughout it all his skill as a cook developed. It was actually while operating a gas station that he began to develop the chicken dinner that would eventually become KFC. He kept trying until he found a way to succeed at the thing that he loved.

Then there is the story of Og Mandino, a homeless man who found refuge from the cold winter of the streets in libraries. Looking for little more than a warm dry place to survive he was only allowed to stay in the library as long as he was reading. So, he began reading books on success. The self-trained, homeless man overcame what must have been insurmountable obstacles and went from a homeless street dweller to a millionaire.

One of my favorite stories of endurance is about Bob Carlisle who sang and wrote Butterfly Kisses. It is said that everyone had given up on him. His record label had dropped him. Nothing he was doing was working. No one believed he would ever make it. When he recorded Butterfly Kisses it happened because of an act of kindness by someone who had allowed him the use of a studio. This person had so little hope for the project that he didn’t even want any claim to the royalties. This would be his last shot at any kind of success.

According to those that knew him, Bob Carlisle was sleeping in his van when he got his first royalty check on Butterfly Kisses, which was the number one song in the world at that time. It is said that his first royalty check made him wealthy. He went from poverty to wealth in one moment, from failure to superstar. All his success came when everyone had given up on him and advised him to give up.

The list of success stories that occurred when people were at the end of their hope is endless. The world has been changed by people who just didn’t know how to give up. And most of them had a string of failures that preceded their success! Anytime I hear the phrase “over night success,” I know this is usually someone who spent years becoming that “overnight success.” I know this is usually someone who would not quit! My good friend and fellow minister, Jimmie Bratcher talks about the gift of “showing up!” Sometimes that’s all we know to do, but there is virtue in the fact that we keep showing up.

Sometimes, facing adversity is like walking in a freezing wind on a winter’s day. You just lean forward and try to walk. When facing adversity, James 5:11 says, “Indeed we count them blessed who endure.” You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord — that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful. In one of the worst hardship stories in the Bible, we see that God’s plan for Job was always a better life. No matter what you are facing, God has a good ending prepared for you! The more clearly you see that end in your heart, the greater your capacity to endure.

Do whatever it takes to keep you goal alive in your heart. The mark of a winner is not that he never falls or fails. He or she just keeps getting up. Maybe all you can do today is show up. But that’s better than any other option. The person who keeps showing up, eventually shows up at the right place, at the right time.

The words of John Osteen, the founder of Lakewood church, now pastored by Joel Osteen, have encouraged me so many times. John was a pioneer in so many ways. But his early days were filled with constant challenge and opposition. According to Bill Deerman, this super-church never had more than 200 people for over twenty years. At the time of his death more than 10,000 people per week were attending Lakewood church and tens of thousands were watching his services on television. I once heard John say that the secret to his success was that he kept preaching good news until he found the people who wanted it!

Don’t quit! Tomorrow you may become the next “overnight success!”

Kingdom Builders or Church Builders

Jesus came on the scene proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God! To the disappointment of many, it was not an outward kingdom that would manifest itself with the overthrow of nations and governments. It would not force everyone to live godly, nor would it impose punishment on the wicked. There was nothing about his Kingdom that fit into the anticipation of the religious mind. According to Jesus, the Kingdom of God was “within.” Instead of a geographic location that could be ruled by power and might, it was a realm that could be entered by faith. This realm could be accessed by any person, anywhere in the world, any time, regardless of external circumstances. No longer would people go to Jerusalem, a temple, or another holy location.

This new Kingdom is an issue of the heart! The idea of a centralized power controlled by the edicts of leaders was non-applicable. People would weave in and out of this Kingdom based on the values and beliefs that guided their decisions. Those who trusted God’s word and applied those values to their decision making process would experience the Kingdom with all its benefits. Those who did not, regardless of how good they were, would not experience the Kingdom of God with all its benefits.

The message of the Kingdom was an intellectual struggle for everyone, the least of which were no doubt the apostles who were being discipled to live, preach and model this Kingdom reality. Nothing about it worked like other Kingdoms. The King was open to the common people. There was no hierarchy of power. There wasn’t a lot of “pomp and circumstance.” There were no political agendas. It took a total shift in thinking to understand how to lead in this new Kingdom. But this belief system would give access to all the promises of God!

Contrary to the way other kings built their kingdoms; Jesus invited sinners, tax collectors, Samaritans, Gentiles and enemies of Israel to join Him in the Kingdom of His Father. When they followed Him, in pursuit of this Kingdom, He taught parables, worked miracles, expressed mercy, and stilled the guilty conscience. Many had a heart to hear, believed God and entered in. Others walked away disillusioned and disappointed. His idea of the Kingdom did not fit what they were looking for. When speaking to those who assumed they would be first in line for this new Kingdom and all its benefits, Jesus said, “Assuredly, I say to you that tax collectors and harlots enter the Kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31-32). Or, as He so often said, the last shall be first. To enter in, one simply had to have hearing ears — ears that listen with a heart of faith, instead of a critical intellect. Thousands of people came close to the Kingdom of God, walked away empty, and never had a hint of what they had missed, or how close they were!

This same message of the Kingdom is offered to us today. This Kingdom message holds forth a promise of a life better than anything we had ever heard, anything we had ever seen or anything we had ever imagined. The Holy Spirit will teach us what we need to know, He will lead us into this incredible realm, if only we will surrender our personal agendas, cultural concepts and embrace the teachings of our Lord and Savior! (1 Cor. 2:9-10).

As new believers we are to renew our mind. (Rom 12:2). It is the top priority for the new convert. This is a process where we throw off our former way of thinking. We surrender our every thought, opinion and preference to the teaching of the Lord Jesus. In the early days of faith, we should embrace a new set of values and standards. Our life paradigm should shift from that which was imposed upon us by our culture, to the view and opinion of God. Maybe no one has to renew his or her mind more than the leader. We are called to lead people to live this Kingdom life. We are called to build churches that accomplish the agenda of the King, while following the principles He set forth. Our leadership style, regardless of the gifting, must be motivated by Kingdom values and goals!

This realm called the Kingdom of God is entered into by the values and beliefs that drive our decisions. When we harmonize our motives and goals with those of the Lord Jesus, we harmonize with the life and power of God. We experience God’s power for God’s goals. We experience the righteousness, peace, and joy of the Holy Spirit regardless of external circumstances. When we work our own agendas, we simply succeed by the sweat of our brow. Kingdom living makes no sense to the carnal mind. And Kingdom leadership probably makes even less sense! The carnal mind has spent a lifetime developing values and life strategies. It has created methods for survival and success that it trusts more than it trusts the principles of God. In this very struggle, the teaching of Jesus is fulfilled, “Through your traditions (culture) you make the word of God of no effect.” (Mk 7:13). Many success stories are simply great natural ability that meets the world’s standards, but does little to further the goals of the Kingdom. It looks like success and godliness but denies the power thereof!

There is probably no place where Kingdom thinking seems upside down as much as in the mind of a leader. None of the traditional laws of leadership fit the new model. Guilt, control, force, manipulation, political agendas and all the typical corruptions associated with power have no place in this Kingdom. All the rules have changed! All these carnal methods can no doubt get results but they do not endear the follower to the Kingdom of God. In fact, they alienate him. When leaders use carnal methods they reinforce the carnal mind of the follower. Carnal leadership builds organizations; spiritual leadership builds people. The religious leaders of Jesus day saw the multitudes as their servants. They used them to fulfill the agendas of their religious party. But Jesus showed an interesting paradox. He had a passion to reach the multitudes, but never at the destruction of the individual. Many great leaders of our day have learned the secret of building great organizations that serve the needs of the people. They have stayed true to Kingdom values. Carnal, leaders however, build organizations just for the sake of their personal glory and failing ego. They look successful because they are large and powerful, yet, their people are dying for a lack of Spiritual reality.

Jesus’ leadership style tended to defy logic. So very often He did for people what seemed to hurt the overall cause. Prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners often accompanied him. Their very presence offended the upper echelon of the Jews. This tendency to allow these people shared access, and equal value caused many to be offended and turn away. While Jesus, no doubt, regretted the loss of every potential follower, He never tried to satisfy the cultural standards to keep people, who would only be high maintenance, divisive controllers in the end. Remember the same people who wanted to make Him King by force, were the same ones who wanted to kill Him when he failed to meet their expectations.

James, the brother of Jesus, later addressed this very issue when he warned against showing preference to the wealthy by giving them special seating in your congregations. As he pointed out, it is these very people who in the end turn on you and persecute you. This new Kingdom was not prejudiced against the wealthy or the powerful; it was just not biased in their behalf.
The Kingdom leader needs to be ever aware that wealthy people tend to trust their wealth, powerful people tend to trust their power, and so on! Regardless of what a person trusts – other than God’s Word – money, power, sin, etc., it renders them carnal minded. Never deceive yourself in this; carnal minded people will never harmonize with Kingdom values. There will always be a source of friction. And in the end, when the Word of God contradicts what they trust, they will align themselves against the principles of God and become the source of strife and division.

“For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 6 For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. 7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. 8 So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God “(Rom 8:5-8, NKJV). Yet, these are often the very people we place in power! We falsely assume that those who succeed in the world’s system can succeed in our system. And they can, if our system is built on the same principles and values!

The leader who has a heart for the Kingdom has to ask, “Will I help people even if it hurts my organization?” That is a tough question for any leader. Jesus no doubt dealt with this issue. Once, a man who was suspected of a heinous murder began to attend my church. Word spread through the community and it cost me some church members. In the end the man got saved, confessed to the crime and was sent to prison. In this life all I got was a smaller church attendance. But how did the Kingdom benefit? And was that enough for me? Were the loss of some church members and financial support more important than a soul being saved and the murderer being removed from society?

Our church was one of the first integrated churches in our city. We had the first bi-racial staff and leadership team. And I may have performed one of the earliest integrated marriages in our city. After I performed my first integrated marriage I asked a friend of mine his position on the matter. He warned me against it. He was sure it would hurt my church. In fact, he had refused to perform interracial marriages for that very reason. He was right; I performed the wedding and lost a few of my biggest givers! But what did the Kingdom gain? What was modeled to the world and our church about the Kingdom of God? There was no difference between what I faced and what Jesus faced for preaching to the Samaritans.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus seemed to strike at the very core of this exclusion of ministry based on social factors. He was maligned because of his inclusion of the poor, the sinful, the outcast and those of racially rejected backgrounds. Yet, this simple parable stabbed at the hypocrisy of the racial heart.

The way the carnal mind keeps score; Jesus was not a good leader. To the carnal mind growth of the organization is the true earmark of success. But it seems that Jesus had something else in mind. In the beatitudes Jesus seemed to say that the very people that were considered the losers of the day, by the religious community, were the very people who had a heart to grasp the Kingdom of God. Jesus didn’t seek out those who had the power and resources to help him build a large affluent following. Instead He sought those who had a heart for the reality of this new Kingdom!

We will all be faced with those hard Kingdom questions at one time or another. “Will I do what is best for the person, based on the word of God, even if my church benefits nothing from it?” I believe we could all answer in the affirmative on that question. But what if we take it a step further? “Will I do what is best for the individual, based on the word of God, even if it hurts my church, or ministry?”

In John 6:53 Jesus made the statement, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” From that time many people stopped following Him, Even His disciples had trouble with this. At this point, I¹m sure there were those who thought Jesus had no clue how to be effective in growing a congregation. After all, one day He would have a following of thousands and the next day He was being run out of town! But was He motivated by something greater than the size of His crowd? Remember, He desired to reach the multitudes; but he kept everything in perspective with Kingdom values.

One of my early realizations in ministry brought me to this opinion, “If you compromise to reach people, you have nothing to offer them once they follow you.” Jesus gave an interesting perspective to the ones who stayed to listen to His explanation. They would not be able to grasp resurrection realities if they could not bear with such difficult statements. He did not want to drive the people away, yet he knew they had no capacity to enter the Kingdom. If He compromised the message to keep the people, He would have people but no message that actually gave life!

Those who could not see past their own opinions were often offended and walked away. Those who minimized his teaching and argued their point of view were too busy being right to grasp a new understanding. But to those who chose to consider His words, stay and be taught in private, Jesus said, unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom! As A leader I want to know how to do both, reach a lot of people and stay true to the only thing that will give them life.

The ultimate in carnality is when someone’s beliefs don’t really work for them, but their need to be right drives them to force their view onto others. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day did not have peace, joy or righteousness in their heart. Yet, they insisted they were right. But in their insecurity, they would often orchestrate the death of those who opposed them. Early Christians burned people at the stake for disagreeing with their theology. How likely is it that they were motivated by Kingdom values? It seems the more intense the dogmatic reaction the greater the evidence toward a life that is not working.

I have often wondered how many sermons are being preached by people who have very little of the joy of the Lord. How many leaders are having nervous breakdowns, yet leading others down the same path they are walking. How many sermons simply regurgitate information that has never been made to work? Or, how many sermons are geared for control instead of helping people connect with God in their heart?

Jesus said to the leaders of His day, you won’t enter in, but you won’t let others enter in. The way into the Kingdom is blocked by religious people who won’t go in but won’t let others go in. “You’re hopeless, you religion scholars! You took the key of knowledge, but instead of unlocking doors, you locked them. You won’t go in yourself, and won’t let anyone else in either”(Luke 11:52, TMB).

We live in a day when there seems to be a call to return to the Kingdom of God. As leaders we must assess what that means in light of the way we treat people, how we build organizations, and what motivates our actions. We must question our every motive and answer one question. “Do I do what I do for the Kingdom of God or for my own personal goals?”

The way of the Kingdom may not produce everything the world calls success. It certainly didn’t for Jesus. But to stand before God and hear, “Well done my good and faithful servant,” will surely outweigh any sacrifice we made in this life.

I am so thankful for those who have built large churches and ministries while holding on to Kingdom values, and I hope to learn from them all. At all cost I hope to follow the way of Jesus for the sake of the people for which He died, and the great mission we have of ministering this message of the Kingdom of God!

Eight Guiding Factors for Successful Teams

You can do everything you want to do, live your dreams, reach your goals, fulfill your call or simply attain success, faster, more effectively, with less stress and more peace with an effective team!

If this is true, why aren’t more people building teams, you ask? Team building seems to be among the most difficult of human feats! Team building is like starting a savings account. Even though it ensures a great tomorrow, the need for instant gratification drives us to fulfill the immediate and ignore the long range!

People would rather buy on credit than layaway. On layaway, there is no interest; there is no real debt or risk. You just have to wait for the gratification. On credit, the interest makes the product cost more. In fact, leadership that does not build teams is like paying the minimum payment on a credit card; you never get it paid off! Plus, when you build/buy on credit you could lose it all at any time.

In the beginning of team building, the common cry is, “I could get this done faster if I did it myself!” And that is true! On the other hand, the person who doesn’t train and develop a team is also the person that continually complains because no one will take initiative, no one knows how to do anything!

The end for the leader who does not build teams is always BURN OUT! And be sure there are no exceptions! No matter where you are in your journey to success, you can shift your paradigm and begin to build incredible teams. If you have a plan, if you know where you are going it is time to start building the team.

In the Critical Factors for Success, after creating a plan, the most important factor is staffing. You are not ready to do anything else, until you have determined who you need on your staff. Staffing is where you build the team that can build and sustain the success.

We call this The Dream Team. Your Dream Team may not be the people who are the very best at what they do. But they have to be the people who have the skills to bring your dream to pass.

The Dream Team is not really the “who” as much as it is the “what”! The question is not, “Who do I need?” The question is “what” skills do I need on my team!

This is usually where you need the input from a consultant, or someone who has effectively done what you are trying to do! When you need an expert, don’t try to be one, hire one! Remember, you’ve never done this before. You’re going where you’ve never been. Get good advice!

Teams thrive on several things. The following may be the most important guiding factors for team building:

1. A common Goal – This is a deal breaker. There is no room on a team for secret or hidden agendas. Anyone not fully committed to the common goal will eventually cost you more than they bring you.

2. Symbiotic Relationships – The relationship cannot be one sided. Everyone must benefit and everyone must fulfill his or her personal goals. If you work on my team, your personal goals must be fulfilled in the process of fulfilling the goal of the team.

3. Comparable Professional Skills – If professionalism is not comparable, you will realize what the saying means; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It is demoralizing when one or two team members are constantly the cause of reduced results. Over the long haul, the professionalism of a team always settles in at the lowest common denominator.

4. Healthy Communication Skills – Teams thrive on positive, open, honest communication. When people do not talk, dissension is close at hand. When people do not talk honestly, chaos abounds.

5. Mutual Respect – You cannot lead a person you do not respect. Likewise, you will not follow a person you do not respect. When a team member looses respect, a concentrated deliberate effort must be launched to heal the breach. If not, the team member must leave.

6. Congruent Philosophies – Our philosophies of life and business must mesh. They may not be identical but they have to be compatible. When speaking in terms of mathematics congruence means: Coinciding exactly when superimposed. That is exactly what must happen when we superimpose our philosophies one upon the other. While not identical, one will always support the other.

7. Shared Values – Values are the make-and-break point for most relationships whether personal or professional. If all else is in agreement but values are in conflict, it is only a matter of time before destructive disagreement emerges.

Values tend to define our sense of right and wrong. Right and wrong touches one of the deepest motivations for conflict in the human psyche. People cannot violate their values without a deep internal conflict that eventually erupts into relational conflict

8. An understanding and commitment to systems – Apart from well-defined systems, every effort is a guessing game. Systems say this is how we do it. every time! Teams cannot interconnect; there can be no integration of effort, there can be no consistency without systems. Without systems every project is harder, more costly, and is bound with more conflict.

Ask your team members questions. Determine if your teams are built on the eight guiding factors. You may find the hidden cause for low productivity and high conflict. But most importantly, you will find solutions!

For more information about building teams, see The Lost Art of Leadership, or Building Your Dream Team.

Grasping the Truth

I get emails nearly every day from someone who is sincerely asking what a particular Scripture means. While on one hand I am appreciative that so many people are seeking to understand the truth, I am also aware of how limited I am at helping anyone understand the truth.

Truth is never known until it is experienced. Jesus said that you shall know (experience) the truth and it shall set you free. That word for “know” is an experiential knowledge, not an academic definition. Information cannot set anyone free. Truth experienced is freedom!

Understanding is a heart capacity, not an intellectual one. The intellectual mind gathers data. It leaves us with little more than an equation, or at best, a rendering. But in the end our heart “bends” that data to fit our beliefs and perceptions. When we can’t make information say what we need for it to say, according to James 3:16, we fall into confusion. Confusion is the result of selfish ambition, i.e. we already know what we want. Therefore, any opposing view is confusing.

Because understanding is a capacity of the heart, when we understand something we don’t just gather and assess information. We understand information as it applies to application. Likewise, when we believe the truth it isn’t a mental acknowledgment that it is true. When we believe the truth we believe it as if it is our own. It changes our sense of self. We see ourselves with the truth as our reality!

The primary function of the heart is to believe about ourselves. Understanding, faith, and all other factors of faith are about believing it’s true for/about us now. For instance, salvation occurs when I believe in my heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. That means I believe it as it relates to me. It’s not the belief in a historical fact; it’s the belief about something that alters who I am! Believing on Jesus isn’t the acknowledgment that Jesus lived; it’s the belief of Him and what that means to me!

The Greek word for believe is synonymous with the word obey. There is no New Testament concept of believing one thing and doing another. Obeying, congruence, and harmony are always the fruit of believing!

We tend to seek for definitions of truth hoping that our intellectual grasp will bring the empowerment to live that truth. For many who have really good intentions, life becomes an endless, frustrating pursuit of information – information that never quite works as we expect! Definitions are not reality; they are simply the closest thing we can come to explaining reality. It’s difficult to actually explain or define the eternal realities of God. There are always subtle nuances that we hit or miss. In the end, those who have a heart for truth will get it and those who don’t… well, they just don’t get it.

The question then begs to be answered,”How can I know I have a heart for truth?” It’s all about intention. Is it your intention to intellectually know the truth or do you have the intention of living the truth you know? Jesus said it like this, If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. (John 7:17, NIV) The only way to know if He was telling the truth was if you tried to make it work!

The intention of application is the supreme difference. It’s the difference between a student and a disciple. It’s the doorway to truth that can be shared but never fully explained. It’s the difference between experiencing grace and willpower. It’s the difference between reality and theory!

I don’t know how many times I’ve been struggling with something and my mind would say, “You need to read a book on this!” Then I would hear another voice from deep in my heart saying, “No, you need to put what you already know into practice.” There is an ancient proverb that says, “If you think you can learn it from a book, don’t buy the book.” There’s nothing wrong with reading and studying; in fact, it’s commendable, but in the end only the Great Teacher, the Holy Spirit, can empower us to do that which we intend to put into practice!

So, I really can’t answer anyone’s question to their complete satisfaction. And to me it’s so incredible that I can’t because by not being able to answer the question, and knowing I can’t, forces me to point others to the One who can. At best we can inspire others to “experience” the answer. Only then have we actually done them a service.

A witness is someone who has seen or experienced something first hand. A witness gives a testimony, a verbal rendering of what they have seen or experienced. The breakdown of the church has been a couple of thousand years of people who don’t have experience trying to describe and explain what was told to them by someone else who really didn’t have a personal experience. In the end, it’s all reduced to intellectualism, words without power!

Grace, which is God’s ability and power to live, be, and do what we don’t have the power to do is only experienced by those who believe with the intention to do! There’s nothing impossible to the person who believes in their heart! Faith knows. Belief is feeling and thinking. Perfect faith is believing and doing! When you want to know if something is true… believe it and put it into practice.

The Earth is Not Flat – part 3

Because the church is right about Jesus, we have assumed we are right about everything. Like the early church fathers, we have not become students of the Word nor true disciples of Jesus. Like them, we have trusted for salvation and then sought to find security by subtly incorporating our cultural beliefs and personal fears into the repertoire of our personal theology.

Those who come from a background of satanism, occult, or new age, attack anything in the Bible that looks like their background. In the lack of security in Jesus they cloak their fear in self-righteous legalism, giving undue trust to those places from which they have come. Those who come from cults think that everything that sounds like what their cults embraced is, in fact, a cult belief. These are not people who, like Paul, believe that all things are pure when used for pure reasons. They pass judgments rooted in unbelief based on their intellectual concepts that mask their insecurity. They are weak in the faith!(Rom. 14)

Sadly, we must remember it was the church that killed people who proclaimed the world was round and the sun was the center of the solar system. Because the information didn’t come from the churches pseudo-scientific perspective it was considered to be “of the devil.” The most trivial disagreements were relegated to a demonic opposition of truth and punished with excommunication, exile, or death.

Our predecessors have fought against everything they didn’t understand with a blinded fervor (zeal) of convenient scriptural misinterpretation, factual ignorance, and cultural insensitivity that resulted in God and the church being rejected by the world. And as the Scripture says to believers in both the Old and New testaments, Because of you the name of God is blasphemed everyday. (Is. 52:5, Rom. 2:24)We, not the devil, are the main cause for the world turning its back on God and the Gospel.

Jesus said that because of our tradition, i.e. culture, we make the Word of God of no effect. (Mark 7:13) There are very few things that happen in a typical Sunday service that are actually scriptural, but we feel safe with those things and consider them godly, not because they are in the Bible, but because they are our culture. That doesn’t make them evil, it just means we tend to eventually adapt to the cultural norms and call them holy. Yet, anything outside of our culture that is incorporated into worship, we call cult or demonic.

When something comes that challenges our “current cultural concepts” we immediately make it of the devil (and he’s not that smart.) Then we shift directly into attack mode. Traditionally, the church has opposed nearly every advancement of civilization… until it becomes culturally accepted. Then, in time, when it is accepted by a large enough part of the Christian culture, we declare it to “no longer be of the devil.” It is now of God, just because we are comfortable with it.

Approximately 90% of the world’s population believes in a higher power. 50% of those believe in God, but they don’t know who He is. Between 70% and 90% of Americans believe in God and claim some form of Christianity, yet, they don’t attend church; they have corrupted values, destructive morals, and as a whole, their life isn’t working. Our world is sinking into destitution and depravity while the church clings desperately to tactics of outreach that haven’t worked in hundreds of years, and are rooted more in religious tradition (culture) than Bible truth. We attack what we don’t understand seeking to find security in our intellectual segregation.

Our impotent methods fail to reach the world Jesus came to save. Our dogmatic resistance to anything beyond our current scope of logic causes the world to reject the truth we do hold. And all the while the world is falling into eternal oblivion without God! And that seems to be alright as long as we don’t have to “think outside of our religious box.”

While we can’t get the promises of God to work in our own life, we fight against those things that we do not understand. All the while, demanding that the world be like us. They see that our faith isn’t really working that well. We are not dealing with sin much better than they. Our divorce rate is higher than theirs. And we’re always begging for money! We do not live a life of righteousness, peace, and joy that attracts the world to Jesus, the church, or the Gospel. The truth is that waitresses, businessmen, and scientists hate to see Christians coming. They don’t tip; they want everything for nothing, and they don’t know how to reconcile science and the Bible!

Because of the church’s intolerance and disrespect for others, we are hundreds of years behind where could have been had we not arrogantly rejected the discoveries of other cultures. We could have had aircraft, steam engines, and who knows what else hundreds or even thousands of years before we did. But we, the people of God, destroyed libraries, books, and inventions that did not come from “Christian sources.” We think that which is discovered by anyone other than our approved sources is of the devil. From our erroneous theology of dualism, we have created a false secular and sacred dichotomy that denies the very teaching of the New Testament. To the pure all things are pure. (Titus 1:15)

When the apostle Paul wrote to Titus he quoted a Creatian prophet to make a point. When he preached at Mars Hill he went to an idol and said, this is the God I’m going to tell you about. When John wrote to the Gentile world he called Jesus the “logos” which is a philosophical term describing the natural power in the world that causes things to flow as they should. The Chinese New Testament calls Jesus the “tao” as a suitable concept for logos. There are dozens of places where the writers of the New Testament were inspired by the Holy Spirit to use terminology and communication styles that were understandable to the people they addressed to create effectiveness. They were not threatened by a false sense of the sacred and secular.

Even Abraham, the father of faith of both Jews and Christians, made a sacrifice to God that was identical to the sacrifices made by the heathen to the false gods they served. Yet, he acknowledged God in his sacrifice. It was not only accepted by God but followed by a visitation. (Gen 15) Satanists quote Scriptures to conjure demons, but we don’t stop using those Scriptures and label them “of the devil.” Every religion in the world knows things we know and says things we say. We are not responsible for how they misinterpret those truths; we know the Source of all truth is God! The misuse of truth does not invalidate the truth.

Many people ignorantly discover a biblical reality, use it, and in the end worship the creation instead of the Creator, the process of God instead of the person of God. They dishonor God (the Creator) by worshipping the process (the creation.) We dishonor God (the Creator) by rejecting the process (the creation.) He is the God of

Creation. We should know the laws of creation better than any people who inhabit the Earth, yet we don’t.

If we valued God’s creation and the cultures of other people, if we just valued people as God values them, we could close the gap between the church and the rest of humanity. We could find common ground that would open the door to the Gospel of Jesus. Additionally, we could all live a greater quality of life if we were open to all God’s blessings and provision, even those on the natural plane. As the Apostle Paul said to Timothy, Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy. (1 Tim. 6:17-18) Enjoying the benefits of God’s creation will not make us trust Him less; on the contrary much, much more! When we value and enjoy God’s creation we honor the God of creation.

Read all the articles in the August issue of Impact Magazine.

What to Do When You’ve Done it All and Nothing Seems to Work!

The one thing that is a constant in life is change! In fact, there is one thing we know for sure; we are predestined to experience change and it should be a positive, healthy, enjoyable process. As Romans 8:29 says, For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son. It is our destiny to be like Jesus; therefore, we never stop changing, growing, and developing!
One would think with change being a life-long process we would be better at it than we are, but we’re not. We can master change and make it a truly enjoyable, effortless process. Understanding how we got here will help us understand how we get from here to some other place. Most of the permanent changes that have come into our life are unintentional. They were beliefs that only served us as children in a specific environment. Then we become adults with dysfunctional beliefs and we spend the rest of our lives struggling to reverse those changes! We don’t understand how we became the way we are and we don’t believe how we can change!
When we came to Jesus we received the power to change any and everything in our life. We have deposited in us the capacity to be the person we choose to be; yet, few people ever realize this incredible opportunity. In fact, believers are frustrated. Charismatic and Word of Faith believers are probably the most frustrated! Why? Because we know the promises! We know what should and could be happening; we just don’t really get much of it to work! Information that doesn’t work doesn’t bring freedom, it brings torment!
There is one prerequisite law that we must believe in order to begin the process of positive change. We must start by realizing that all things are possible through believing! (Mark 9:23) Not only are all things possible by believing, all things exist or come to be the way they are by believing! This is the first law of faith! It is the first law of creation!
We all have the power to create life the way we choose. We might not choose the outcome, but you can be sure, we choose the life. We chose the life we now have and most of what happens in our lives. We didn’t know the choices we made would have the consequences. We didn’t know we could have made other choices. But we did make the choices.
The main thing we did not choose was the environment that influenced our choices. We did not choose our parents, their values, and their generationally inherited dysfunction. Unfortunately, no one told us that we could make new Heart Choices that would forever change the pattern of our life. But your choices can be the end of generations of dysfunction. The Bible says it starts with repentance, i.e. changing our minds! We can change our minds about the life we live; we can choose another life, we can then change our hearts, and our life will change!
There are some reasons why we have such difficulty bringing about the changes we so desperately desire. The first is homeostasis, that state of equilibrium that keeps everything the normal. Our conscious mind justifies and rationalizes the beliefs of the heart. In other words, my intellectual mind keeps giving me reasons and excuses for why my life is the way it is. Since we trust our intellect more than the Word of God we accept these reasons as valid. After all, they make sense; they are logical and “factual.”
We think we have reached these views through an intellectual process. We think we have gathered information and made an informed decision. But the truth is the only information that leads us to any limited decision is doubt! Doubt is not, after all, the disbelief of the Word of God, it is simply when we believe something other than the Word of God. And we believe what we have the evidence to believe.
When facing change the thoughts of our heart invade the thoughts of our mind and give us plenty of evidence. It looks at everything we have ever done, everything we have tried and failed, our assessment of life, and all of our fears that make all the limitations in the natural world seem realistic! We think this conclusion was the work of our intellect. No! It was the work of our heart. It shaped our perception based on our current beliefs, primarily our sense of self!
To go where we have never gone, to live life on better terms, to do what we have never done is a venture into the unknown. The heart is motivated by fear and love. Everything emerges from these two sources. Anything unknown is treated as a threat, i.e. fear! And it is a threat! It is a threat to our sense of normal, our homeostasis! When the mind starts thinking thoughts that exceed the accepted norms of the heart, they upset our sense of balance!
It is also a threat because it seems that it would be hard and painful to bring about such massive change. Because we don’t know the law of entering rest, we think that our efforts bring about our change, and effort is always hard! But effort really doesn’t bring about change. Effort brings only temporary changes in behavior that disappear when effort is no longer exerted. Believing brings about effortless, permanent, painless change!
One of the essential laws of change is this: I am not really changing, I am transforming. I am not trying to become what I am not. I am choosing to live and manifest an aspect of who I am in Jesus. Change, becoming something else, is a rejection of who we are in order to become something else. Transformation is a yielding to who we really are on the inside. It is an accepting of who I really am in Jesus!
There is another predominant limiting factor to change: attempting to control the process. We want to go where we’ve never been but we want to draw our own map. If we’ve never been there we don’t know the map. We don’t know how to get there. We find a false sense of security in doing something our way. But as Proverbs 16:25 elucidates, There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. Just because it seems to be right doesn’t mean it’s even close!
Religion and faith are basically a struggle about the process, the way something is done. Religion has tried, since Cain and Abel, to choose the way that seems right to man. Faith, on the other hand, trusts the way, the process, that God says. All religious people want righteousness, some want to earn it, others receive it by faith. Everyone wants to know God but not everyone wants Him by faith! We try to choose the process that validates our current beliefs. This deceptive process insures we will never change. In fact, after we fail it ensures we will stop trying to change!
The struggle between true spirituality and religion is always about believing. Religion always comes up with some logical process that makes sense to the carnal thinker and always circumvents or, in some way, distorts believing. It is here that our struggle to be god of our own world emerges. The writer of Proverbs said, Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding. (Proverbs 3:5) We want the process to fit our understanding!
We want to trust God but control the process. But if you don’t trust God’s way, you really don’t trust God. You can’t choose the end God promises and the process you desire. We must trust that our Shepherd will lead us down the appropriate path. Verses 6-7 of the passage from Proverbs goes on to say, In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes. In essence we are saying, “God, I will only trust You if You do it my way!” But today you can choose to trust God’s ways even though you might not yet know those ways.
When we want a better income we want to get it through the job we have; we don’t want the pain of changing jobs. But what if you are as far as you can go on your current job? When we want a loving future we want it with the person we think will make us happy. But what if we are really bad at picking out potential mates? What if our omniscient Father can see that there is someone who could make you happy for life? We are like the woman with the issue of blood, “My miracle will only happen if it happens the way I think it should.” While God is calling us down a path to His promise we resist because it’s not the way we want it to happen. It’s not the process we trust!
Our sense of security must be in the goodness of God, not the process that makes us feel safe. I understand the need for safety, but safety while on a cruise ship is in the way we feel about the ship and the crew, even though we really know nothing about sailing. It’s the same every time we get on an airplane. If we had to understand everything that occurred in flight and make every decision we would probably crash the plane. We’ve got to settle down in God and know that He will get us there. And since we are going where we have never gone toward a better career, a loving mate, or a life of purpose and destiny, we don’t know how to get there. But He does!
Then, there is the issue of the heart. Our current course is the result of the beliefs of the heart. As previously mentioned, our life script was written when we were so young that it was totally irrational. It has very few roots in reality. It was a view of the world forged by our environment and we did not choose that environment. When these life-controlling beliefs were forged they were written on our heart. They were not intellectual decisions. We were, after all, in a meditative state from conception to around 10-12 years old. We can’t change the heart unless we are willing to work within the heart.
All transformation is a work of the heart. It is something that occurs by bringing about influence in your heart. Your current beliefs were created in your heart, so in order to change those beliefs it must be done in the heart. Positive thinking, behavior modification, and any other technique rooted in behavior has to do with willpower. And to borrow something I heard someone say, “Willpower only works when you don’t need it!” When there is a struggle between beliefs and willpower, willpower will always lose, no matter how close to winning you seem to come, and believing will always effortlessly win.
God has a way that ALWAYS WORKS; it’s called believing. It has worked for you all your life. You may have wished for some things that didn’t happen, but be assured, you became everything you believed about yourself. As surely as believing has brought you to where you are, it will take you where you want to go.
(This article is based on the new eight message series entitled: What to Do When You’ve Done It All and Nothing Seems to Work! )

The Healing Power of Forgiveness

August 2009 Magazine

One With God

Impact Magazine for July 2009

Why We Do What We Do

For years I tried to understand why people did the things they did and why I did the things I did. It seems that I and everyone else in the world often find ourselves going against the very things that we say, believe, and know that we want.

Ultimately it’s not nearly as complicated as we have made it! Prov. 16:26 says, The person who labors, labors for himself. For his hungry mouth drives him on. Although this passage is talking about physical labor, the principles carry over to all areas of life. Just as our hunger for sustenance drives to physical labor our hunger for the basic emotional needs drives our other endeavors.

Man is wired for happiness, fulfillment, safety, peace, and mostly, love. Nothing drives our behavior more than the need to feel loved, i.e. valuable, precious, and a sense of high esteem. In fact, the two root motivators of all behavior and emotion are love or fear. In any given situation the degree to which we experience love we will not be afraid and the degree to which we feel fear we cannot experience love. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear. (1 John 4:18, NKJV)

So we do everything we do to feel the types of feelings we experience when we are loved and to avoid the types of feelings we experience when we are afraid. Someone has reduced this to pain and pleasure. We do everything we do to move toward pleasure and avoid pain. Well, sort of…

We actually move toward our anticipation of pleasure and away from our anticipation of pain! The problem is, what I perceive as pain may not really be my source of pain and what I perceive as pleasure could be where all my pain comes from. For example, most people put off the tasks they do not like doing until last, preferring to do the easy things first. Why? Because the difficult tasks are perceived as a source of pain.

Here’s what usually happens to the person working this strategy: When we put the hard tasks last several negative things can begin to occur. Because we have subconsciously labeled the task as painful we keep finding reasons to put it off. The delay, especially if it is an important task, starts creating feelings of stress or anxiety.  We tend to identify the negative feelings with the task rather than the postponing of the task. In our attempt to avoid pain we actually create it.

Then there’s the 80/20 rule: 80% of your results (income) come from 20% of your labor. The thing we are putting off is often one of the more important things that we do. It could be causing negative financial ramifications. This task and all these negative feelings could be resolved by simply giving this task a monetary value. When it becomes valuable our emotions will change. Plus, by doing the job we dread first, we have all the other work we enjoy motivating us to get finished so we can get on to what we enjoy.

People who are uncomfortable discussing their feelings will withhold meaningful communication from their spouse. Since they are usually drawn to those who need to talk about feelings (yes, opposites do attract) they feel pressured from their spouse to talk, so they shut down. Because all people need to talk, they simply find someone else to talk to, someone who is not as threatening. Very quickly they come to perceive their spouse as their source of pain and the other person as their source of pleasure. An affair is usually not very far away. Oh, by the way, an affair that could cost them their home, their children, their income, the loss of most of their close friends, and untold amounts of emotional stress and guilt… MASSIVE PAIN!

Then there all those life scripts you wrote on your heart when you were a child, all the things you did to survive in your family’s emotion system. Your life script is the main source of all illogical behavior. It is behavior based on beliefs that, as a child, kept you safe, made you feel loved, or provided survival for you. It is those very beliefs that we developed from the illogical immature rationale of a child that have morphed into an adult version of why we do what we do, even though it may not be working for us!

At the time we developed these beliefs they worked, but that was based on the dynamics of our childhood environment. However, we are no longer that child and we are no longer in that environment. Yet, we are still doing the same things, running the same mental programs, expecting to get what we want and need from our efforts, and it just rarely happens. We perceive and anticipate pleasure but keep getting pain.

The conscious mind serves to justify, rationalize, and convince us that our beliefs are sane, rational, and helpful. It’s called homeostasis: the attempt to keep everything orderly and in balance. We even convince ourselves that we chose these beliefs as adults. But nothing could be farther from the truth. We chose them as children and they probably worked to some degree, but we can now choose new beliefs and get a much more desirable and predictable outcome.

You are going to spend your life trying to get the things you need: love, safety, acceptance, and self worth. Learn to do what works. Join me on Friday evenings for my latest series: What to Do When You’ve Done It All and Nothing Seems to Work! If you can’t get there at 7:40pm, CST, it is posted to my site www.impactministries.com for viewing from Saturday noon until Wednesday morning!