Leadership in Context

Christ is returning for a victorious Church. Just as a bride prepares for her wedding—welcoming her guests with care, remaining loyal and resolved in her relationship with her groom, and knowing his heart—so should we, as the Bride of Christ. This is a great picture of the Church.

A pillar resists a downward pressure and anchors for the upward force of wind. God has called us, the Church, to be the pillars of Truth. To be there, we have to be firmly planted in the foundation of Christ.

As leaders, we can demonstrate our confidence in God not based on our personal perfection, but in our response to God and how He works in our lives. Being approved by God through the things we have gone through and our response, that is integrity. When you cut through something that is solid wood, all of the layers are wood. It’s the same thing through and through. Integrity is there. Integrity is consistency.

Scripture outlines some core values of a disciple—work of faith, labor of love, and steadfastness of hope. Faith is a work; it is something we do. Love is a labor at times, but is also our motivation. And staying steadfast in our hope, that gives God the opportunity to move.

Sanctification is the mark of Christian growth and maturity. It is God’s divine empowerment of our will. Not that we rely on our will to not sin, but a yielding of our will to the Holy Spirit.

Increase your capacity with your convictions, competency, curiosity, and connection. Today we are pulling an episode from the archives on increasing your capacity. Convictions override feelings. Increasing your competency will increase your capacity. Curiosity is part of a learning venue. And connection multiplies your capacity.

If you are going to increase your capacity, you have to take advantage of what you already have. Today we are pulling an episode from the archives on increasing your capacity. People tend to complain about what they don’t have, but they don’t fill up what they do have. The greatest mark of a leader is that a leader leads himself.

Capacity is what you can take hold of, what you can handle. Today we are pulling an episode from the archives. Increasing your capacity doesn’t mean you have to get a new talent. It means you have to use the talents you have more effectively. For leaders, the key way to drill down is learning the power of “yes” and “no.” If you say no to the right things, you’ll be able to say yes to the right things—that increases your capacity.

How can we say that love never fails? True love, godly love, is always representing Christ. It is being like Jesus. Love never fails because love always honors God.

There is a pattern in Scripture of a baptizing of the Holy Spirit after salvation through the laying on of hands. In the majority of those times, the evidence of that happening is that they spoke in tongues. We are edified and emboldened when we pray in the Spirit. When we are praying in the Holy Spirit, our spiritual antenna gets pointed in the right direction.

Angels are still active beings, creative for the purpose of worshiping God. They are not to be used to authenticate spiritual experiences. But they are part of the supernatural and we need to not forget about them. We can call on the Lord to send them to minister to us.

We should be thinking God’s way and not allowing the world to think for us. We should be making decisions based on the Lordship of Jesus in our life, not based on the culture. And we should be saying loud and clear with our lives that children are a blessing.

The less we think, the more we feel. The less we learn to think, the more we rely on our feelings. We need to learn to think through things so we aren’t dependent on our emotions.

Many of us had strong convictions about not getting the COVID-19 vaccination because we didn’t know what it would do to our bodies and how it might change us. Yet, when it comes to child prevention, there are pharmaceutical cocktails that Christians are putting into their bodies with no consideration about the affects on our bodies. When we take away the divinity of God and the humanity of man working together in procreation by literally changing the creation from the way it was made to func...

If we say that children are a blessing, why do we want to limit that blessing? The concern is that we put so little effort into coming to the decision to limit how many children we have. This episode stirs up a conversation on procreation. Send your questions and comments about this to Pastor Keith at podcast@nrpastors.com. We are going to spend the next few weeks on this. Listen to the episodes, and give this real consideration so that no matter what decision you make, the deci...