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Joshua Reich

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How do I Get my Husband to Lead at Home?

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husband

One of the questions Katie and I get a lot is, “How do I get my husband to lead at home?”

How do I get my husband to lead at home?

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One of the biggest reasons men don’t lead at home is twofold: 1) They don’t think they can do it, and 2) Their wife is leading (because he isn’t and stuff has to get done), and she is very good at it.

2 reasons men don’t lead in their home.

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One thing men don’t do often is duplicate efforts. If you as a wife are leading at home, taking up the mantle of the spiritual life of your family, keeping the family on track in scheduling to make sure you aren’t overwhelmed, he won’t do it.

While Scripture calls men to lead in their homes, most women do it, and honestly most women are better suited to do it. But as I have seen over and over, and Scripture is on point with this, when we get off track from God’s way, even with gifting in the mix, it is disastrous.

So if you are doing anything you want your husband to do, stop doing it.

I remember Katie pulling me aside one time and saying, “I really want you to do _____ in our family, and right now I’m doing it. I’m going to stop doing it in hopes that you will pick it up.” I didn’t start overnight, but I was able to see the importance in something.

I think for a man to lead, he needs to drive the bus of what comes into his home in terms of TV and entertainment, protecting his family on the internet and what is taught spiritually. This does not mean he does it all. In fact, Katie does more of this than I do because she spends more time with the kids, but she looks for me to lead the charge on this.

Protect your family’s schedule. This means you need to make sure date nights and daddy dates are happening, you aren’t involved in too many things and you make sure priorities happen. (Which means if you make baseball practice and scouts more of a priority than church and community for 10 years, don’t be surprised when your kids go to college and leave church. It is not the church’s fault; the onus is on you as a man.)

Women, if your husband isn’t doing this, don’t berate him, don’t send him a link to this (unless you’ve talked about it), don’t hand him a book or tell him there are husbands doing this, so he needs to step up.

Ask God, pray for him, ask God to make him into the man God wants him to be, not the man you want him to be. And stop doing the things God has called him to do, even if that means something might not get done for a time.

Let me end with this. Men often struggle to do something they think they might not be good at, even the real risk-taking adventurous guys. They will take risks at work, but they are often scared to death about failing in front of their wife or kids. This is often the biggest barrier to a man taking the lead at home. This gives the wife a great opportunity to cheer him on and help him succeed.

A barrier to men leading at home is their fear of failure.

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Too many people do not set their spouse up to succeed. If you want your husband to take the lead at home, instead of nagging him one more time, how could you help him succeed? How could you cheer him on? What is one thing you could do to partner with him in this?

3 ways to get your husband to lead at home.

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My Favorite Books of 2015

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books

Each year, I post a list of my favorite books, the ones I would call the best books of the year. To see my list of favorite books from past years, simply click on the numbers: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. To me, I love this list because it shows what has influenced me in the past year, where I’m growing and what God is teaching me. If you are a leader, you should be a reader, there is no way around that.

To make this list, it does not have to be published in 2015, I only needed to read it in 2015. As always, this list was hard to narrow down, but here are the top 15 books of 2015:

15. Teams That Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership by Ryan Hartwig & Warren Bird

Summary: Teams that Thrive looks at how a leadership team can move to the next level and really make an impact. This was an incredibly insightful book for the leadership team at the church I lead.

Best Quote: “The five Cs of thriving teams: Clear. Does the team’s purpose paint a clear picture of value? Compelling. Do team members view the purpose as consequential? Does it address something that truly matters, drawing people into it? Challenging. To accomplish the purpose, is each member of the team required to contribute in a meaningful and interdependent way? Calling-oriented. Does accomplishing the purpose help members accomplish God’s calling on their lives and pursue their goals? Consistently held. Do the members of a group truly know the group’s purpose and pursue it with fervor?”

14. Taking People with You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen by David Novak

Summary: Yum! Brands CEO David Novak shows that in order to lead a great organization of any size you need to get your people aligned, enthusiastic, and focused relentlessly on the mission.

Best Quote: “You have to begin by asking yourself three big questions that will drive your approach to leadership and allow you to take people with you. They are: 1.) What’s the single biggest thing you can imagine that will grow your business or change your life? 2.) Who do you need to affect, influence, or take with you to be successful? 3.) What perceptions, habits, or beliefs of this target audience do you need to build, change, or reinforce to reach your goal?”

13. Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Summary: Leadership BS takes a look at the leadership industry, showing why it’s failing and how it might be remade. Pfeffer looks at the usual prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest, tell the truth, build trust, and take care of others and asks if these prescriptions are truths or myths about leadership.

Best Quote: “Being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders do not need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them. And often what others want and need is the reassurance that things will work out and the confidence that they are on the right track.”

12. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg

Summary: An inside look at Google, how it works, what they’ve learned and how they continue to grow and get better.

Best Quote: “Start by asking what could be true in five years. Larry Page often says that the job of a CEO is not only to think about the core business, but also the future; most companies fail because they get too comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. And that is especially fatal today, when technology-driven change is rampant. So the question to ask isn’t what will be true, but what could be true.”

11. Gaining By Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send by J.D. Greear

Summary: Greear looks at how we are not only called to send people out to plant churches, but also to train them as leaders to be involved in our cities, governments, businesses and the arts. The best churches are those that send.

Best Quote: “I want to suggest four reasons why the future of Christianity belongs to churches that send, and why those of us who want to see the world reached will be more committed to raising up and sending out than we are to gathering and counting. Those four reasons are: 1. Increasingly, in a “post-Christian” society, unbelievers will simply not make their way into our churches, no matter how “attractive” we make them. 2. Multiplication beats out addition, every time. 3. The presence of God accompanies those who send. 4. Jesus’ promises of “greatness” in the church are always related to sending.”

10. Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller

Summary: All that Tim Keller thinks on preaching. Enough said.

Best Quote: “What, then, is good preaching? Let me pull all these ideas together into a single description. It is “proclaim[ing]. . . . the testimony of God” (1 Corinthians 2:1)—preaching biblically, engaging with the authoritative text. This means preaching the Word and not your opinion. When we preach the Scriptures we are speaking “the very words of God” (1 Peter 4:11). You need to make clear the meaning of the text in its context—both in its historical time and within the whole of Scripture. This task of serving the Word is exposition, which is to draw out the message of the passage with faithfulness and insight and with a view to the rest of biblical teaching, so as not to “expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” It is also proclaiming to “both Jews and Greeks” (1 Corinthians 1:24)—preaching compellingly, engaging the culture, and touching hearts. This means not merely informing the mind but also capturing the hearer’s interest and imagination and persuading her toward repentance and action. A good sermon is not like a club that beats upon the will but like a sword that cuts to the heart (Acts 2:37). At its best it pierces to our very foundations, analyzing and revealing us to ourselves (Hebrews 4:12). It must build on Bible exposition, for people have not understood a text unless they see how it bears on their lives. Helping people see this is the task of application, and it is much more complicated than is usually recognized.”

9. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Summary: How to be more organized, productive and get the right things done to lower your stress level.

Best Quote: “In training and coaching many thousands of people, I have found that lack of time is not the major issue for them (though they may think it is); the real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what associated next-action steps are required. Clarifying things on the front end, when they first appear on the radar, rather than on the back end, after trouble has developed, allows people to reap the benefits of managing action…Many people try to get organized but make the mistake of doing it with incomplete batches of stuff. You can’t organize what’s incoming—you can only capture it and process it. Instead, you organize the actions you’ll need to take based on the decisions you’ve made about what needs to be done.”

8. H3 Leadership: Be Humble. Stay Hungry. Always Hustle. by Brad Lomenick

Summary: Lomenick categorizes 20 essential leadership habits organized into three distinct filters he calls “the 3 Hs”: Humble (Who am I?), Hungry (Where do I want to go?) and Hustle (How will I get there?).

Best Quote: “Who you are is not what you do. What you do is not who you are. Identity is unchanging. Being comes before doing. Who you are determines what you do.”

7. The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #Join the Ride by Darren Hardy

Summary: This book looks at the roller coaster entrepreneurs go through. The applications of this book to church planters is obvious and incredibly helpful.

Best Quote: “The only constraint of a company’s growth and potential is the owner’s ambition. I am the constraint. The market, the opportunity, everything is there. It’s up to me to set the pace, clear the obstacles, get the resources, and create the conversations to grow the company faster. As CEO, the most important thing I manage is myself. Do that right, and everything else falls into place.”

6. Chess Not Checkers: Elevate Your Leadership Game by Mark Miller

Summary: Written in the style of a fable, this book looks at how a company/church grows the leadership and systems need to change as it grows, but often the last people to realize it are the leaders.

Best Quote: “Most small businesses can be successful with a checkers mindset. That’s actually the game you play when an organization is in start-up mode. The leader does virtually everything in the beginning. That’s checkers. Then, if you grow, you begin to add staff. Many leaders see these additional people as interchangeable pieces, nothing more than hired hands, no need for specialists. Each piece is capable of the same limited moves. That’s checkers. In the beginning the game is simple. That’s checkers. You react, you make decisions, the pace is frenetic—you’re playing checkers. And, it works … for a while. You can win in business by playing checkers until someone sneaks in one night after you’ve closed for the day and flips the board. The game changes, and you don’t even know it.”

5. Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy by Donald Miller

Summary: Miller looks at what keeps us from getting close to people, trusting them and moving past our fears of relationships and intimacy.

Best Quote: “Here’s something I heard recently: Men move toward whatever makes them feel competent.” As soon as I heard that I knew it was true. Every man I know migrates toward something that makes him feel powerful and in control. If it’s work, he puts in more hours, if it’s sports he’s constantly at the gym. I only bring this up because few men I know feel competent in intimate relationships, which might be one of the reasons they don’t sit around talking about how well they do or don’t get along with the people they love.”

4. Yawning at Tigers: You Can’t Tame God, So Stop Trying by Drew Dyck

Summary: Many people have lost a reverence and an awe for God and his power. This book helps you to recapture who God is, how powerful He is, how in control He is and how that brings freedom to your life.

Best Quote: “Many of us say we want to experience God, but we don’t look for his majesty. We travel life’s paths with our heads down, focused on the next step with our careers or families or retirement plans. But we don’t really expect God to show up with divine wonder…Unfortunately, in our efforts to make the Bible interesting and relevant, we try to normalize God. We become experts at taking something lofty, so unfathomable and incomprehensible, and dragging it down to the lowest shelf. We fail to account for the fact that God is neither completely knowable nor remotely manageable. Here’s the beautiful irony: making God strange actually enables us to know him more. Once we have marveled at his magnitude and mystery, we are able to achieve the deep intimacy that grows out of a true appreciation for who God is. Instead of treating him as an equal, we approach him with reverent awe. Only when we’ve been awestruck by his majesty can we be overwhelmed by his love.”

3. Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City by Tim Keller

Summary: Like Preaching, this is all that Keller knows, believes and how he leads his church. So much wisdom packed into this book. He helps leaders lead their churches through creating a theological vision.

Best Quote: “What is a theological vision? It is a faithful restatement of the gospel with rich implications for life, ministry, and mission in a type of culture at a moment in history. A theological vision is a vision for what you are going to do with your doctrine in a particular time and place.”

2. Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth by Samuel Chand

Summary: This book looks at the reality that the only way for you to reach your potential as a leader, for your church or company to reach its potential, you must raise your threshold for pain.

Best Quote: “My advice for a pastor who faces any kind of crisis is to give yourself one day to moan, whine, and feel sorry for yourself. Just one day . . . then get up, ask God for direction, and take your people where He leads you. Leaders can’t afford to collapse for more than a day. They then have to seek solutions. We don’t have the luxury to be paralyzed by anxiety and discouragement. We have an obligation to trust God for a workable solution and a plan of action. Begin with the positive assumption that God always has a plan. The price is the figurative blood of leadership: having your sanity or integrity questioned, the uncertainty of taking bold risks, the pain of hard conversations and replacing people (many of whom are friends) who no longer fit the larger scope of responsibilities, and the strain of being publicly positive while dealing with the myriad of private pains of change.”

1. The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus by Zach Eswine

Summary: A look at how God does his best work through broken and flawed humans, not perfect ones.

Best Quote: “To the important pastor doing large and famous things speedily, the brokenness of people actually feels like an intrusion keeping us from getting our important work for God done. Our desire for greatness in ministry isn’t the problem. Our problem rises from how the haste of doing large things, famously and as fast as we can, is reshaping our definition of what a great thing is. Desire greatness, dear pastor! But bend your definition of greatness to the one Jesus gives us. At minimum we must begin to take a stand on this one important fact: obscurity and greatness are not opposites. It is possible for ministry leaders to desire greatness in ways no different from anyone, anywhere in our culture. Attaching Jesus’s name to these desires doesn’t change the fact that they look just like the cravings of the world.”

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4 Ways to Learn from a Mistake

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No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from success to go beyond the state of the art. -Henry Petroski

Mistakes and missteps in life are painful but incredibly helpful if we don’t waste them.

When you make a decision in your church, business or life and it doesn’t pan out as you expected, what do you do with that? You can either let it go and move on pretending it never happened. You can mope about life being hard and waste the experience. Or you can dissect the decision and learn from it.

Only one of those choices will actually move you forward; the other two will keep you stuck or move you backwards.

Do you feel like you make mistakes and never learn from them?

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In The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems, the authors give four questions to ask as you reflect on an action or decision in your life:

  1. What did I/we expect to accomplish?
  2. What, in fact, did I/we accomplish?
  3. Why are the answers to questions 1 and 2 different? (Notice that the question is not, “Who’s to blame?”)
  4. What actions do we have to take to make sure this does not happen again? In other words, what did we learn?
4 questions to grow when you make a bad choice.

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How to Survive a Challenging Season

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leadership challenges

All of us have lived through a challenging season. You might be in one now, just coming out of one or waiting for yours to happen. (Only the truly pessimistic of us are really waiting, but you get the idea.)

They can happen when we least expect it: a disruption in our career or finances, a child that is hard to parent, a spouse who all of a sudden becomes distant, a sickness we didn’t expect or plan for, or simply life not going as we planned.

Challenges.

They are relational, financial, spiritual, emotional, and physical.

They know no limits. Challenges have no heart, so they aren’t worried about you and your survival.

Here are some questions I ask myself as I’m going through a challenging season:

3 questions to ask during a challenging season.

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  1. What is God trying to teach me in this season? It is easy to get angry in a challenging season and blame the person you think caused the it. You may be right, but doing that will not help you for very long. Eventually that will exhaust you, and you’ll still be in a challenging season. So take a day, be angry, and then wake up tomorrow and start looking forward. By asking this question you begin to get to what God is trying to do, which is helpful because it takes our eyes off ourselves. God does not waste experiences and moments. He uses them for his glory and our good.
  2. What is God preparing me for by having me in this season? Because God doesn’t waste moments, what we walk through today is helpful for tomorrow. Begin looking forward, looking and asking God for what He is doing.
  3. What is God’s invitation to me in this season? This question comes from Jim Cofield in The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection. This has been a powerful reminder to me in moments of pain and hurt.
How to survive a challenging season.

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In his book Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth, Samuel Chand lists five things we know about God or learn through difficult seasons:

  1. God never abandons us, even when we can’t sense his presence.
  2. Our faith and character are developed most powerfully in times of adversity.
  3. God sometimes delivers us from pain, but more often he delivers us through it.
  4. Life’s most defining moments are usually painful experiences.
  5. We do not grow in those moments by default.
5 promises of God to you in a challenging season.

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What a Pastor Wants from His Church

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pastor

Someone asked me what made a lead pastor love his church. Outside of the obvious: being called by God to lead and love the church they are in, the answer is pretty simple.

What a lead pastor wants from his church is also what a church wants from their pastor.

Here are some things that if you attend a church, your lead pastor wants from you but maybe has never said (in no particular order):

What a pastor wants from his church is what his church wants from him.

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1. Commitment.

A church wants their pastor to stick through thick and thin, and so does a pastor. He wants people who will stick with the vision and not quit. He wants people who are sold out to what God has called them to, not just consumers who show up for the latest sermon series.

Your pastor wants a church that has people willing to push through hard times and stay committed. This is not something our culture does very well, and most churched people are terrible at it. Hurt feelings, leave the church. Don’t like the music, leave the church. Moved to a new facility I don’t like, leave the church. Sadly, pastors and the people who attend their church don’t expect the other to stay. They have both watched too many people come and go. This should not be so.

Your pastor wants you to be committed to your church.

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2. Loyalty.

Your pastor wants you to be loyal. Being loyal does not mean following blindly. Loyalty means that when you have hurt feelings, you talk it out with the person who hurt your feelings, not share a prayer request in your small group about it. Loyalty means that when you hear people being divisive, you stop it instead of joining in or being silent.

3. Growth.

Yes, every pastor wants the church to grow, but that’s not what he wants from you. He wants you to grow into the person God has called you to be. He wants you to use your gifts inside the church and outside the church. He wants you to be in community and take the risk to make that happen and make community a beautiful thing. He wants you to be generous not only with your time but also with your stuff. He doesn’t want you to be stingy.

Your pastor wants you to grow spiritually.

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4. Prayer.

In the same way that you want your pastor and leaders to pray for you, your pastor wants you to pray for him and his family. He wants you to lift him up during the week while he’s working on a sermon, he wants your prayers on Saturday night before church, and then afterwards when he’s exhausted and spent. If you don’t know how you can pray for your pastor, you can ask or simply pray during those times.

Your pastor wants you to pray for him and his family.

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5. Appreciation.

Everyone wants to be appreciated for what they do, whether it is as a volunteer, in a job or in a relationship. We all want people to say thanks, give a gift or let us know how something made a difference in our lives.

Being a pastor is no different.

While many churches use October as pastor appreciation month and say thanks to their pastor then, some churches give their pastors gifts or people in the church are generous in some way, many churches show no appreciation to their pastor outside of saying, “Today’s sermon was nice.” To be fair, many pastors do not show appreciation to their volunteers and staff, and so the cycle continues. I’ve talked to many pastors who left their church, not because God told them but because they didn’t feel appreciated.

Your pastor wants to be appreciated.

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There are more things that could be added to this list, but if every person in a church did these five things, I believe the longevity and happiness of pastors would soar. I also believe the health of churches would greatly increase.

5 things your pastor wants from his church.

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4 Things Healthy Leaders Do

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healthy leaders

No leader or pastor starts their career or starts a church with thinking about quitting. All of them start with grand plans and dreams of the future and finishing, retiring, making it to the end with friends and family around them.

Yet statistically that is incredibly rare. Most quit, give up, fall out of the race or simply stop trying while still collecting a paycheck.

According to stats:

  • 78% of pastors say they have no close friends.
  • 1,500 pastors quit each month.
  • 70% of pastors battle depression.
  • Only 10% of pastors will retire as a pastor.

Recently I’ve had several pastors talk about not wanting to burn out, which seems like a good goal. But the moment you start talking about burnout, you have moved into a dangerous place.

Let me throw out a different question, one I think is better: How can you lead and live at a sustainable pace?

How can you lead and live at a sustainable pace?

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There is a great passage in Matthew that you have more than likely heard a sermon on, or if you are a pastor you’ve preached on this passage. It is so common and so easy to forget the power in it.

To remind you, this is what it says in The Message version:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

I think according to this passage, there are four things healthy leaders (or non-leaders) do:

4 things healthy leaders do.

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1. Healthy leaders don’t try to be God.

We say we aren’t trying to be God or we say we can’t save anyone, only the Holy Spirit can, but many leaders carry the burden that they can, or at the very least, they will try.

We think, “If I can just talk to them, or get them to read this book or hear this podcast, that will help.” It might, but it might not.

We can also drift so far from God personally that we simply lead out of our abilities and strengths. This is easy to do if you have a strong speaking gift. You can cover up your lack of relationship with God by being charismatic or interesting on stage.

Healthy leaders don’t try to be God.

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2. Healthy leaders walk and work with Jesus, not for Jesus.

Yes, Jesus is the chief shepherd and the senior pastor of your church, but you don’t work for him. We work with him and through the power of the Holy Spirit. We follow what the Spirit starts and is doing.

We talk about our priority list as Christians being God, family, job. Yet it is easy for a pastor’s list to be God/job, family because of how closely connected his job and God are. Often this is so subtle that no one sees it, or if they do they don’t say anything about it.

I firmly believe there is a calling that comes with being a pastor, but, and please hear this: being a pastor is also a job. A job that will end. A job you will retire from one day.

If we aren’t careful, we start to become unhealthy when our identity is too wrapped up in what we do. This is why we get hurt when someone rejects a sermon, our advice or the vision of the church. We feel like they are rejecting us, because our sermon, that vision, is who we are. It is our identity.

That’s a dangerous spot.

Healthy leaders walk and work with Jesus, not for Jesus.

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3. Healthy leaders don’t force stuff.

The reason I love this version of these verses are two phrases. The first is, Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I am like most leaders. We are incredibly driven, we make things happen, and we force it.

How many times have you played a conversation in your head before it happens: you’ll say this, they’ll say this, then you’ll respond, then they’ll respond, and this is how it ends. Then the meeting goes just like that and you think, “That could’ve been an email.”

We also can very easily force our kids and our wife to be something they aren’t.

One of the saddest things to watch is, as a man is pushing his calling and planting his church, his wife is sitting there dying emotionally, physically, spiritually.

Here’s a question for you as a leader: Is your family too much about your calling and goals? Does your wife have space for hers?

Healthy leaders don’t force stuff.

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4. Healthy leaders don’t carry burdens they aren’t meant to carry.

I’m a perfectionist. In every part of my life, I carry a burden of wanting everything to be perfect. Every experience with my kids and my wife, I build up in my mind, and when it fails to reach that I get stressed out and angry.

Another struggle for many leaders is they don’t know how to handle the emotional side of ministry. We struggle with our emotions of hurt, depression, loss, anger, and then as those emotions entangle with the emotions of those in our church and we walk with them through divorce, miscarriages, death, suicide, and addictions (just to name a few), we become at a loss of what to do with all the burdens.

Healthy leaders don’t carry burdens they aren’t meant to carry.

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In the end, Matthew 11 is an invitation from Jesus to live freely and lightly. That’s the second phrase in this passage that is so beautiful. Many pastors do not live in this place. Many followers of Jesus never experience this, yet this is supposed to be the normal Christian experience.

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How Conversion Works

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conversion

Conversion is a mysterious thing. In many ways you are a part of it when you take the step of following Jesus, but there is also the reality that much of it is happening with God, and you are along for the ride. I know many people feel like it is all them and they are choosing Team Jesus, but that isn’t found in Scripture. It is not all you.

Do you choose Team Jesus, or does Jesus choose you?

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If we get this wrong, it starts us off thinking about change incorrectly. Much of our culture thinks about change in what they can do and the willpower they have to accomplish change. Want to change something? Make a resolution. Want to stop something? Simply think hard enough. Need to be less negative? Simply think positively and it will happen.

Many Christians think this way and find themselves spinning their wheels. Change isn’t completely on us, and don’t miss this: We don’t have the power on our own to change.

How change and conversion work.

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Acts 9 is a well known passage that shows the change that happens in Saul as he becomes Paul and becomes the messenger that will take the gospel to the Gentiles. It also shows us how change and conversion work and the implications of them.

1. Salvation starts with God. Salvation is a gift from God. We do not deserve it, and it is given freely by God. There should never be any pride in you about being better than someone, because without God changing you, you are stuck and broken on your own.

We also see in Saul that no one is ever beyond the reach of God. Saul is a first century terrorist, killing people over religion, and yet God saves him.

This reality that salvation starts with God is what makes grace so amazing. What is incredible about a choice we make, an effort we put forth? Instead God, not needing to extend grace and forgiveness, does so.

2. There is a personal encounter with Jesus. We all meet Jesus differently, but when we begin following Jesus it is because we have an encounter with him. We begin to have knowledge of who He really is.

This is the step of receiving God’s free gift of grace, admitting you are broken, you are a sinner and you can’t fix yourself.

This is when we apply Romans 8:1, where Paul later wrote: There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The moment we take that step of responding to God’s grace, our sins are wiped clean. Many times, though, we hold ourselves accountable for things God does not.

We hold ourselves accountable for things God does not.

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3. Surrendering to the Lordship of Jesus. We often want to live our lives with a little bit of Jesus sprinkled on top. Saul calls him Lord, surrendering to follow Jesus no matter what. This is a crucial step. Jesus is not just your Redeemer and Savior; He is your King when you take the step of following Him.

4. Following Jesus always comes with a call to talk about Jesus. What we’re about to see is that immediately Saul started sharing about Jesus with others. The moment you become a follower of Jesus, you are called to tell people about Jesus.

It is easy to think God can’t use you or do anything with your life. After all, who are you really? You aren’t Billy Graham. Yet we are told that Stephen only had one convert (Saul), but he changed the world. You have no idea what God can do through you.

Right now there are people in your life that God wants to use you to reach.

While we know a lot about Paul’s teaching, writing, planting churches and developing leaders, God also made sure of something else in the Bible: that we knew Paul’s story. That we knew who Paul was. This is important as it relates to our story and how God changes us.

It’s also important because a lot of us can feel like our story is hopeless. We’re hopeless. We’re beyond redemption and forgiveness, beyond hope. Yet we aren’t. God is never finished with your story.

God is never finished with your story.

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Being a Pastor is Also a Job

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One of the things pastors and Christians talk a lot about is the calling of a pastor. While we often make that an incredibly mystical and mystifying conversation, being a pastor is more than that.

It is also a job.

Now before you get out pitchforks and torches, hear me out. I’ve said this in several circles, and the reactions are often the same. Some see this as completely heretical; others are convicted immediately as they think about it.

A pastor is a calling. Being a pastor is also a job.

Being a pastor is a calling, but it is also a job.

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A job ends. One day you will retire from your job. Your job is also something you do.

To many pastors their job never ends. They talk about dying in the pulpit, and for them their job is not something they do, but who they are.

Now to be clear, being a pastor is a calling. It is a role. It is a spiritual gift. But it is not the sum total of who I am. I am a man, a friend, a dad, a husband, a brother, a son and a neighbor.

Here’s why this is so important: Too many pastors over spiritualize their calling, which leads them to burnout, overworking and ultimately, sin. In fact, many pastors make their identities center around who they are as a pastor. I’m pastor so-and-so, which raises their level of importance.

This is also another reason why pastors take it so personally when a sermon doesn’t go well, people don’t respond to what they said, or someone is angry at a vision change. Why? Their role and personal identity are wrapped up in them. They haven’t separated the two, so when someone doesn’t respond the way they’d like, that person is rejecting them. But they aren’t. They are rejecting the message, the opportunity.

When you talk to pastors who burnout, you hear things about the needs of people, how they couldn’t say no, how they preached too much, didn’t take care of themselves, carried burdens into their sleep that they should’ve let go of.

In all this we sin, yet because we’re called we somehow give each other a pass, or at the very least talk about how hard ministry is and the suffering we endure.

Most of that, though, stems from our pride and need to be needed. We train our people in it, and they respond because it speaks to something in their hearts, a desire they have that resonates with wrapping up what we do with who we are.

While some have pushed back on this, this is a tension you have to wrestle with as a pastor. You are not as important as you think you are. You are not as needed as you think you are. And one day you will stop preaching, stop leading the meetings you lead, and someone will take your place.

It has been interesting to me watching pastors get closer to retirement and seeing the look of horror as they struggle with what is next. Many of them continue preaching and leading when they should hand those tasks off to someone else, but they don’t. They go past their effectiveness because this is their calling, without ever questioning how effective they are at their job.

Here’s another example. Many Christians trumpet the order of their priorities: God, family and job. For pastors their job is connected to God, so it is easy to see something like this: job/God, and family. It is dangerous because it is not always obvious.

Here are some ways I try to balance this tension:

  1. When someone rejects a vision, plan, strategy or sermon, do I take it personally? If so, why? Is that healthy or prideful?
  2. Do I have an overinflated view of my impact on my church?
  3. When was the last time I said no?
  4. Do I stop working at night and over the weekend? Do I stop thinking about work when I’m not working?
  5. Do I live out what I tell people they should do with their jobs: relationship with God, family, then work?
5 questions to help you be healthy as a pastor.

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When Easy becomes Difficult

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One of the ways you know you need Breathing Room is when what normally comes easy for you “all of a sudden” becomes an arduous, monumental task.

The reason I say “all of a sudden” is not because it happens suddenly, but because it feels like it happens suddenly.

This sneaks up on people, and one day, one night they realize how exhausted and tired they are. They lie in bed not wanting to move; they sit at their desk unmotivated to do anything. They look at their to-do list, and it feels like an insurmountable task.

One thing I’ve noticed in my life that is a clue that I’m living at an unsustainable pace is that I have a hard time making a decision. It could be as simple as what to make for lunch or where to go out to eat, where you find yourself paralyzed, standing in the kitchen unable to make a choice.

The other “all of a sudden” moment comes when the things you are good at – your job, building something, preaching, writing, running a meeting, creating a budget, balancing a checkbook, planning an event – feel like they take all day and suck all the energy out of you.

We wonder why.

This used to be so fun, so life giving.

I want to encourage you to pause here for a moment.

Do any of these things ring true for you right now?

Here’s my question: What is your plan to make sure that the place you are in right now doesn’t become a lifestyle?

How will you keep your busy month from becoming a lifestyle?

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Often when we are tired, rundown, frazzled, whatever word you want to give it, we say, “It’s just a busy week, month, or season.” How do you know that week won’t become a lifestyle?

Yet what seemed like a busy fall becomes a hectic winter that rolls right into a frenzied spring and on and on and on.

Why?

We never stop to ask the crucial questions.

Here are a few:

  1. What is difficult for me right now? What is stressful?
  2. Are those things normally stressful?
  3. If not, what is happening in my life right now to create that stress?
  4. Can you name the last time things slowed down for you?
  5. Do you find yourself hoping that something in your life gets cancelled?
5 questions to know you are too busy.

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That last one is one I’ve started to look out for in my life. Here’s what I mean: Have you ever had a dinner planned or a meeting scheduled, and you are hoping against hope that it will get cancelled? You think, “If they got sick and had to cancel I wouldn’t be mad about that.”

If so, that’s a sign that you are living past what is sustainable.