Leadership Fridays: Be careful of living for cruel masters

If you are a leadership type, I already know something about you. Your greatest temptation is to find your identity in successfully leading... anything. There are a thousand opportunities calling you to use your vision, your personality, and your gifts to make things better. Your daughter's soccer team is disorganized and has no stated objective. Your group at work is floundering in laziness, comparison and small vision. Your small group at church is stagnating, attendance is waning and people keep coming out of sheer duty. All of these things beckon your attention and energy. Be careful of living to successfully lead of any one of them. And be careful to look at "making disciples" like just another nagging voice in the crowd of opportunities.

Listen to Tim Keller from "The Reason For God":

If you live for career and you don't do well it may punish you for the rest of your life, and you will feel like a failure. If you live for your children and they don't turn out all right you could be absolutely in torment because you feel worthless as a person.

If Jesus is your center and Lord and you fail him, he will forgive you. Your career can't die for your sins. You might say, "If I were a Christian I'd be going around pursued by guilt all the time!" But we all are being pursued by guilt because we must have an identity and there must be some standard to live up to by which we get that identity. Whatever you base your life on - you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who died for you - who breathed his last breath for you. Does that sound oppressive?"

Additional Resources
Don't Waste Your Life - Audio, J.P.
Cheating the Thief Part 6 - Purpose (from last year's "Spring Training for Men")