Now looking back after having a number of places of leadership
when I look abck into my childhood, I can see that God
had marked me in a special way for leadership even though I did not know it at that time.
When I think back to my time playing sports as a young man,
I'll give you one example.
I played hockey from age 4 to 18.
Every year I played ice hockey and I was on the ice 3 to 4 and sometimes 5 times every week
and as we would do practices, we would have to skate laps around the ice rink
and work hard and do all kinds of drills.
I always at the front of the pack.
When our team was going through all these exercises
for some reason I always hated to be at the back.
I have this group of people in front of me and I'd be trying to skate my way through them
and I loved to be at the front.
I didn't even realize it until many years went by
and my parents came to me one day after practice
and said "Cody, why do you always have to be at the front?"
What are you talking about? I didn't even realize it
There's just something for me about being up in the front where I had all this open space
in front of me. I wasn't stuck in all this tight space with all the other guys doing the drill
I had to be out front.
So I've just been paying more attention in this last year and a half
as God is highlighting leadership, that going all the way back to my childhood
there was something about being a leader,
being a forerunner. Going out in front of other people.
I even think about my time in school.
It was always really easy for me to make frineds.
I always had influence. I alwyays had friends who were looking to me and willing to hear my opinions
I even used it to my advantage many times in a bad way.
Where we would have some of the smartest kids in the class
and just because I was popular and able to be friends with them as well,
I would go into group studies with them and do projects with them
and I'd get higher grades just because I was with the smart kids.
It wasn't very godly, what I was doing
but I could see that I could use some of my influence
to help advance myself in school.
Then I was serving with kids camps, youth camps, through the summer
and I was given jobs or positions of leadership every single summer that I did that.
I wasn't seeking leadership at all. It always just kept coming to me.
Then moving into working with Youth With a Mission,
I was given leadership. I was helping lead schools of 12-15 students
working with other leaders. We would lead other students through this Bible school
for many months at a time, and go into outreaches in other parts of the world.
I just kept seeing this pattern where God is putting me in leadership
I want to tell you a quick story of what happened here in Israel.
There were some leaders from the International House of Prayer.
They were doing some worship and teaching at Christ Church.
We were singing this song called, "All is for your glory".
Laura, Hacket, who is one of the worship leaders, was singing all is for your glory
I'll read you a few words from the song,
For your name that you would have the preeminence,
put me anywhere, just put your glory in me. I will serve anywhere, just let me see your beauty.
I'd sung this song many times before. I'm very familiar with it.
I was just loving God's presence worshiping God.
I will serve anywhere, just put your glory in me!
What I'm thinking all the way up until this time is I will clean any dirty toilet,
I will go to any far away county. God I'll serve you anywhere.
As i'm thinking this, this voice comes into my head so clearly:
"Ok, Cody, will you serve me as a leader?"
That was the first time I had ever thought of it in that way.
What? I can serve you as a leader?
Service doesn't just mean the low things of cleaning the toilet or floor or some dishes or the most humble servant type things?
The Holy Spirit began to challenge me.
No, you can serve me by me putting you in a place of leadership and influence
and beginning to lead people in the direction that I want to take them.
Wow, that was a new thought for me.
It really challenged me. I had to repent of some wrong thoughts about what it means to serve God.
As I began to repent and say yes to allowing him to move me into more authority and leadership
and responsibility, it has been like this domino effect over the past few years
where not long after, my wife and I became deacons in our congregation in Jerusalem
This last summer I got moved to become the international director here at Revive Israel.
So leadership continues to happen. It continues to grow.
It's exciting but it is also kind of overwhelming.
If you haven't had a lot of good leadership models in your life
you feel kind of like you don't have the tools in the beginning.
As I've been studying the word, again, because the Holy Spirit is highlighting this subject of leadership in my personal life,
I'm seeing leadership principles and things connected to leadership in every page of the Bible right now.
You can open up the Bible to Genesis chapter one, the very first thing that God says to man
is to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth and take dominion.
In other words, "Go and take leadership."
Go and govern and rule over the earth. This is not something passive.
This is God's calling upon mankind to step in the place of leadership.
To advance his kingdom in the earth. His will in the earth.
Right from Genesis chapter one and the rest of the pages of the Bible,
we see story after story example after example of both good leadership and and bad leadership.
One of the things that has encouraged me is when I look at Jesus
he is the perfect leader.
He has never made one mistake in his leadership.
Going into the future; going into the events of the end times,
he will not make one mistake in his leadership.
He is a perfect leader. He knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows exactly where he is going.
The good news is that he lives on the inside of us as believers.
I have full access to the greatest leader who has ever existed and will exist.
The spirit of the king is inside of us.
He is longing to lead us, to develop us to train us in his leadership style and functions.
That has brought a lot of encouragement to me when I feel overwhelmed,
I have big decisions, I am dealing with finances and managing.
God, I don't know what to do, what's the right thing?
But having the confidence to know that I can connect with Holy Spirit right now, he has a solution.
He has an answer to this problem.
It is by us growing in that connection with the Holy Spirit that we can grow in our ability to lead and to manage.
I want to share a negative example from my own life.
about how I see we can be stunted or hindered in growing in leadership.
This has happened in two different seasons of my life.
One of them was when I first came to Israel, and became a part of our congregation, Ahavat Yeshua.
When you don't have any position in an organization or a congregation,
you come primarily, I'll call it a spectator.
You're just coming to receive.
It's very easy to have a critical spirit toward your leaders.
I think this is going to be familiar.
We have a lot of leaders and pastors with us in this room today.
I'm sitting on the edge of the outside, looking at the leaders.
Seeing what they're doing. Seeing the decisions that they are making.
And because I am not in the mix of making decisions about what's going on
it's really easy to become critical and point out all of the things that I think they are doing wrong.
This happened for me for many months.
I wasn't looking for leadership. I was still trying to learn Hebrew.
I was sitting back and feeling like, why did they do that?
Why did they make that kind of decision? Why are they going in this direction?
This critical spirit started to come upon me.
I was being so critical of what was happening. The decisions that were being made.
I even had a hard time connecting emotionally and relationally with my leaders
because I was so critical of them.
This goes on for a number of months
The Holy Spirit is convicting me, "Cody, you cannot come in agreement with this critical spirit."
As the Holy Spirit is dealing with me and encouraging me to begin praying for my leaders
I repent, I start praying for my leaders, my heart begins to change.
As my heart begins to change, I sense the Holy Spirit saying:
"If you want to see things change, you can't sit on the outside and look in and point out what's wrrong
You need to get in the game yourself.
You need to come in and be a solution to those problems.
Are you willing to do that?
If you want to see change, a certain direction, then you have to be a part of that.
You can't sit and just yell from the side, "No you should do this and no you should do that."
No, you have to get in the mix and do it yourself.
Be a part of a team of leaders. Have influence. Grow in responsibility and favor
among that team of people. So people can trust you
and hear what you have to say. Come up with good ideas and come up with solutions
and as that begins to happen, people begin to listen to you.
I began to see that shift as I began praying for my leaders and repented of a critical spirit.
I began to see that people started interacting with me differently.
They wanted to hear what I had to say.
Eventually, I was asked to become a deacon and given more leadership.
My wife and I are co-leading the youth group in our congregation.
There are many places of leadership now that I am moving into, but if we have a critical spirit
towards our leaders, it's going to hinder us from growing in our leadership.
So we have to be very sensitive and be careful not to allow that to happen.
I wanted to find something as well.
As I talk a lot about leader, there is also manager.
There is a difference between a manager and a leader.
I read this from John W. Gardner. He was a former Secretary of State in the USA government.
He did a big research project on what is leadership, and what is management.
He has this definition of management:
Management is the process of assuring that the program and objectives of the organization are implemented.
Leadership, on the other hand has to do with casting vision and motivating people.
I'm going to say this again.
Management is the process of assuring that the program and objectives of the organization are implemented.
You know what the goals and the things are in your organization. You have structure and you as a manager are making sure those things are happening.
The leader, on the other hand, his focus is t o motivate and inspire people to do that they are doing better.
The research shows that there are very few people who are excellent leaders and excellent managers.
All in one package. Most people are either one or the other.
You're more of a leader where you are able to inspire, cast vision but lack on the managerial side.
Where other people are very good managers but are not that great on motivating you and casting vision,
this is where we're going. But they're going to be more focused on the structure and implementing
what has been set up to do.
I want to see us grow in both of these things.
We need this in the body here in Israel. There is a great need for leaders and managers
to get raised up in the body in Israel to take us into the next season where God wants to take us.
I also want to talk about a myth that I see is common
I believed this for a period of time in my life.
That to be a leader, it has to be something you're born with.;
This is not true. You can be a leader even if you haven't been so called born with those skills.
Leadership skills can be received and grown into.
All of us can aquire through training the skills to be better and more effective leaders and managers.
This levels the playing field. All of us have access to grow in our leadership skills and abilities.
There are a few things that are very key (because of time I'm going to finish with this).
I'm going to break down three styles of leaders for us.
Each of them has a different background.
The first leader is the leader of leaders.
This person has been born with leadership skills. It is something God-given.
Something unique. A special grace that God puts on someone. So he has that and
he has seen leadership modeled through out his life.
You have to see both good and bad leadership modeled for you year after year.
You have to be around leaders.
The next thing this person needs as a leader of leaders
is that he has to add leadership skills to himself on a regular basis.
The last thing is that he has to have self discipline to be a great leader.
If you are called to be a leader of leaders, you have to have some grace from God for that
you need to see good leadership modeled for you through out your life
and you need to be pushing yourself to grow in your personal leadership skills
and you have to have self discipline and desire and focus about personal growth on a regular basis
If you can put that package together, you will be able to grow to be a leader of leaders.
That has great influence and is very effective in leadership.
Another leader can be called the learned leader.
I'm taking some of this teaching from John Maxwell. I've been reading some of his books on leadership.
This is from him. I'm stealing it from him, but it's good stuff.
He is talking about the 'learned leader'. This leader has seen leadership modeled for most of his life;
he has added leadership skills to himself through training and he has self discipline to become a great leader.
He wasn't specifically born with this unusual grace of God to become a leader but he has seen good
leadership modeled for him through out his life. He has been receiving training and getting more skills
and equipped and he has this desire. This self motivation and discipline to train himself to become a better leader.
That's a higher lever leader. We need more of those.
I'll give you a last example of one other leader.
John calls him the 'limited leader'. This is a type of leader who has little or no exposure to leaders.
Or to leadership. He has little or no exposure to training to become a leader,
but yet he still has the desire to become a leader.
He probably does not have the potential to become the greatest leader of leaders but he has
the potential to become a leader and give leadership to different things.
Though he doesn't have a lot of exposure to good leadership
He doesn't have a lot of training. But just having a lot of desire and motivation to become a leader
that person is qualified to grow into a place of leadership.
I think I'm going to stop here because of time.
We could continue to talk about this subject. It's an important subject.
The guests are with us from different nations.
The goal of what we do here in the mornings is to train and equip young leaders to be sent
to serve in the local body in Israel.
That's why we gather throughout the week for times of worship, prayer, teaching
so that we can experience God's presence, hear the voice of Holy Spirit
be trained and equipped ourselves and also receive training and equipping from our leaders
so that we are better equipped an empowered to go and serve and strengthen the local body
here in Israel and also the international ekklesia, the body around the world as God leads us.
Amen. Thank you.
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