Lead like Christ

Reflecting the Qualities and Character of Christ in Your Ministry

• Publisher: Bethany House Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493431687
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Iglesia cristiana

What Does Christ-Centered Leadership Look Like? As a Christian, does your leadership approach look any different from that of those who don't follow Christ? Throughout the Bible, God shows us what leadership looks in His kingdom, and sometimes it can seem upside-down. The first shall be last. The master shall be the servant. But how can we apply these counterintuitive truths in our world today? Rather than focusing on the nuts and bolts of management, Lead like Christ uses the book of Titus to take a close look at what biblical leadership entails. Using Paul's instructions to his young ministry partner as a guide, Tozer takes us through themes of grace, servanthood, spiritual boldness, and humility toward the Word of God. This foundation will lead to powerful, long-lasting change in both your own leadership role today as well as in God's eternal kingdom.

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Lead like Christ

THE FOUNDATION

That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Philippians 3:10–11

Many are interested in what we call ministry. Yet, my heart saddens to realize that many do not understand what spiritual ministry is all about from the biblical point of view. For some reason, we have brought into the church the world’s business methods to fulfill Christ’s call.

A journey through the Gospels will show the passion Christ had when it came to ministry. He completely rejected the world and even religion to minister to the people around Him.

I am not against education. But I do feel many people are too educated, and by that I mean they are educated beyond their ability to function in the spiritual world. They are trapped in techniques and methods.

If secular education were absolutely necessary for ministry, that would rule me out. After my first day of eighth grade, I came home from school and told my mother that I could do a better job than my teacher. I never returned to school, and instead spent most of my time in the library reading books. It was perhaps a little arrogant of me, but I eventually got over it.

Education is important; but where it’s coming from and how we handle it matters.

A friend of mine used to say, “Get as much education as you can and earn as many degrees as possible, and then when you’re all finished, lay it on the altar and give it over to God. If God uses it, great. If God does not use that education, that is His choice.”

Christ, the Key to Ministry

This book is not a book of techniques and methods—a book that could be titled something like 10 Keys to a Successful Ministry. That would be how a worldly minded person would approach it. There is only one key to ministry: Christ.

When Abraham laid Isaac on the altar, it must have seemed like the most horrendous thing he had ever done in his relationship with God. Isaac represented everything Abraham had worked for, and now God wanted him to lay his son on the altar. Yet when Abraham did it without reservation, God gave Isaac back in a way that Abraham never could have imagined.

When we lay our education, experience, and expectations on the altar and give our ministry over to God without reservation, and are even willing to walk away from it, then God in His power can give what He wants us to have.

God does not call the equipped. Rather, in His wisdom, God equips the called. And that’s where the power and authority of God flow in the life of the servant. The equipping of God’s servant is a wonder that flows from heaven, and nothing on earth can hinder it.

In no way is biblical ministry associated with business. Business techniques of the world cannot accomplish the goals of spiritual leadership. When we use the world’s methods, we push aside the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit, and nothing else, who runs and energizes our spiritual leadership. To grieve the Holy Spirit is to jeopardize the true ministry of Christ.

Whenever God moves, He pushes aside the world, and the focus is on Christ. The world cannot honor Christ—only the true church can.

I’m not sure a church’s size has anything to do with this, but I’ve noticed that the bigger the church, the more it relies on worldly and business methods.

If we are going to lead like Christ, we need to model our leadership after His and observe how He dealt with the issues of His day. At the time, His main opposition was religion. The religious people and leaders did not want anything to do with Jesus. They considered Him a danger to their religiosity and lifestyle.

The government also opposed Jesus, and when the Pharisees tried to get Jesus to choose sides between religion and Rome, He responded, “‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they marveled at Him” (Mark 12:17).

When Jesus walked on water, it was a great illustration that He never allowed worldly circumstances to determine what He was going to do or not do. (Remember what happened to Peter when he tried to walk on water? He became obsessed with the circumstances and fell in.)

In this book, my purpose is to focus on how you and I, as servants of Christ, can lead like Christ in the circumstances we are in today. My focus will be on the book of Titus, which records how Paul mentored Titus to be a model servant and lead like Christ.

The Foundation of Spiritual Leadership

But before we go further, what is the foundation for all of this? On what do we build our spiritual leadership?

Again, is it education? Is it experience? Is it adopting the world’s methods?

No, it is none of that. Thus, we need to clearly understand what we build our ministry upon. I want to say right here that every born-again Christian is involved in ministry. We are not called to do the same kind of ministry as our brother or sister. But all of us, together, are engaged in the ministry of Jesus Christ.

To lead like Christ, the first thing we need to do is to know Christ. This is a crucial element of spiritual leadership.

Now, if I were to go up to people in church on a Sunday morning and ask them if they know Jesus, I would get a positive response from most everybody. Everybody knows who Jesus is.

That’s not the issue. Because it’s one thing to know about someone, and it’s another thing to experience a person intimately.

The apostle Paul writes, “Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8).

To know Christ on a personal basis does not come naturally or without cost. Knowing about Christ is one thing, but knowing Him personally is quite a different thing. That was certainly Paul’s experience before he became a Christ follower.

As a Pharisee, he knew all there was to know about the Messiah from the Old Testament. But it was on a journey to Damascus—a trip to further persecute the church—that Saul (Paul’s name at the time) encountered the real Christ.

Saul . . . went to the high priest and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. As he journeyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”

Acts 9:1–4

It was at this moment that Saul transformed into the Paul we know of today.

Following this Damascus transformational moment, Paul went into the desert for approximately three years. I believe he was unlearning religion during those years in order to understand who Jesus Christ really is.

Moses spent forty years in the wilderness to unlearn Egypt so God could use him to lead His people into the promised land.

Jacob was another Old Testament character who had such a transformation: “Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it’” (Genesis 28:16).

The Lord was with Jacob all the time, and he did not know it. His life changed when he encountered the Lord.

With the apostle Paul, it was the same. During his desert journey, Paul experienced Christ in a way that transformed him so completely that God was able to use him to lead like Christ and establish the church of Christ as we have it today.

The foundation of my spiritual ministry is to personally know Christ in such a way that my life has been transformed. To do this, I have needed to unlearn the world and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

To lead like Christ, we need to work in resurrection power that has nothing whatsoever to do with the world’s elements. I can’t emphasize it enough: This begins with a transformational encounter with Jesus Christ. Out of this experience will flow a passion and desire to serve Christ that colleges and seminaries cannot provide.

I like Charles Spurgeon and the requirement they had at Pastor’s College. They would not accept an applicant for the college until he could prove he had been called of God for ministry. Spurgeon’s idea was that you don’t go to college to discover your call. You go to college because you have been called of God to serve.

This perspective is lacking today. Consequently, our churches are suffering drastically because of the lack of Christ-led leadership.

My purpose is to inspire you to discover your calling in Christ that will enable you to receive the power and the anointing of the Holy Spirit in your life. As you build on the spiritual foundation of Christ, you will begin to see ministry from a completely different perspective. You will see ministry as Christ sees it and see people as Christ sees them.

I praise You, O Father, for the love You show to all of us in allowing us to be part of Your work here on earth. Help me today to surrender to Your way of doing ministry that I would honor You. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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Lead like Christ

THE MODEL

To Titus, a true son in our common faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Savior.

Titus 1:4

As stated earlier, this book is based on Paul’s letter to Titus. Because of that, I need to share a short biography of Titus—Paul’s example of what a Christ-led servant should be.

The poet Alexander Pope once said, “The proper study of mankind is man.”1 This is true because people take more interest in people than in ideas. I find it hard to get people interested in abstract ideas, but not in people. When you find a person who is the incarnation of a great idea, then you have a jewel indeed, a treasure. In both Paul and Titus, we have this jewel. In the man Paul, we have the incarnation of the doctrine he preached. And Titus, Paul’s spiritual son in a way, is an incarnation of the great doctrines of the New Testament.

To Be a Christ-Led Servant

There are several things about this man, Titus, that I need to lay out if we are to understand what it means to be a Christ-led servant. We will first look at Titus the man.

Titus was not a Jew, but an uncircumcised Greek with a Roman name. In many ways, he was a big man, not so much in size but rather in influence. He was a native of Antioch in Asia Minor, where there was a healthy Christian church. In Acts 11, we see that Paul was not the founder of the Antioch church. Still, Paul visited the church and often preached there.

At the time, Christians were scattered abroad because of the persecution that followed when Stephen was martyred, and Antioch was one of those places. From Antioch, missionaries went to various locations. This was a healthy missionary church, and Titus was fortunate enough and blessed by God to be born in that city.

I suppose Titus, in his early life, had been a believer in some kind of god. The Romans came in some years before and spread around their ideas of the gods. There was Zeus, the main Greek god, and Jupiter, his counterpart, the main Roman god. There were many others, and no doubt, this man Titus was a religious man. Enough so, when he listened to the mes...