Moving Forward, pt5
Leadership in Context with Keith Tucci
Episode 081
Five Forward Gears
1. You must determine that the place you are in is not the place where you will stay.
2. You must clearly identify where you are.
3. You must be committed to a sequence, not just an action.
4. You become the responsible party.
In other words, take full responsibility for your situation—whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.
Responsibility. Response-ability. My greatest ability is responding to God.
What is God saying? (Not what do I have, or what are my natural abilities or resources?) What is my responsibility? What does God want, and how will I respond to that?
In Habakkuk 2, the prophet asks: How will I respond to Him when He speaks to me when I stand on the wall? How will I respond when I am reproved by Him?
How we respond to God’s leading, direction, and correction is critical. Being the responsible party is governing how you respond to God. If you don’t respond to God first, inevitably you will respond to situations in not the best way.
A person that is going to go forward and leading other people forward, is a person who understands the concept of self-government under the Lordship of Jesus.
In Exodus 14, the whole thing started when God told Moses to throw his staff down. Moses didn’t invent the staff. Moses couldn’t make the staff do anything. Moses responded to God’s ability. When God told Moses to stretch his staff out over the Red Sea and it would part, he did it. Moses didn’t have the ability to make that happen, but he had the ability to respond to God.
God usually puts something in our hands when He’s asking us to respond.
I think the entitlement mentality has crept into the Church. We want other people to take responsibility for our spirituality and our walk with the Lord. As a leader, we want to help people get to a place to take responsibility for their own growth, but we can’t make them. There is never a picture of Jesus, the Great Shepherd, with a lamb in a headlock, force-feeding it grass. The Shepherd, Jesus, can lead us into places where we can eat and drink, but we have to do the eating and drinking.
In my pastoral experience, many times people did not take advantage of all the programs, ministries, and opportunities that we offered. Yet, they wanted us to intervene in their lives and help fix things that they, themselves, were not willing to take responsibility for.
If you take responsibility for getting on the road, I can help push you up the hill. We should be a people who take responsibility for our own spirituality so we can turn around and help others do the same thing.
When you lose responsibility, you lose the ability to respond. When you lose responsibility, you lose the vision for your life. You lose the ability to steer that vehicle, and someone else is going to do it. No one else is going to steer the vehicle in your life like you can if you listen to the Lord and be sensitive to His Spirit.
Take full responsibility. Don’t blame it on other people. Don’t look in the past. What can you do now? What can you respond to now?
To go forward, you need to be a person who takes full responsibility for your life.
Next week, we will talk about the last forward gear.
[This series is based on a message that Keith Tucci shared at NRP’s 2020 National Conference. You can hear that message on NRP’s website here: https://www.nrpastors.com/nationalconference2020]
Join us next week as Keith Tucci continues to put leadership truth in the context of the local church. And as always, please like, share, rate/review, and invite others to listen. See you next week!
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