This past month, my father and I were privileged to speak at a national summit of Native American leaders in Springdale, Arkansas. It was a wonderful time to meet Native leaders from various tribes who had come from across North America including Canada and Alaska. Years earlier, my father had challenged a Native American gathering to consider that God “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27). God delights in using ordinary people so when His mighty work is accomplished all the glory goes to Him. God will not share His glory with anyone.
We believe God may choose to do a work of revival among the Native American people of North America so they can carry that revival down the natural worldwide highways to other indigenous people around the world. At this recent conference, many of the Native American leaders took up the challenge to allow God to make them catalysts for revival. Be praying for these dear people as they wait for God to show them what that will involve.
Far too many of God’s people dismiss themselves as “ordinary” and then assume God would not use them to bring about revival or to advance His kingdom. How much of God’s kingdom work has gone wanting because one of His children complained that they were too ordinary to get the job done?
As I have often said, when you complain about how ordinary you are, you are actually saying more about your belief in God than in how ordinary you are. You are in essence declaring that even almighty God is not powerful enough to use someone as ordinary as you. That of course, is not true. The fact God may not have been using your life for His purposes is not that He cannot, but that you have not fully surrendered your life to Him so He can.
We live in a day when we need to rid ourselves of every tired, overused excuse and open ourselves up to whatever amazing thing God wants to do in our lives. The needs of the world go waiting while God’s people debate whether God can use someone as ordinary as them! First Corinthians 1:27 indicates God delights in using the ordinary to confound the wise of the world.
Spiritual Leadership
My father and I are extremely pleased at the release of the greatly revised and expanded Spiritual Leadership: Moving People on to God’s Agenda. We took the original version published in 2001 and added roughly 150 pages to it. There are numerous new illustrations. We address many new leadership issues and leadership books. And we added two important chapters, one on dealing with change and one on leading teams. We feel like the new version is much improved over the previous edition and different enough that you would want to read it even if you read the original book.
We continue to believe that when God’s people face a crisis, God raises up leaders through whom He can bring deliverance. We live in a day when we need to be prepared for when God assigns us to a task. These days call for extraordinary leadership. Are you prepared for the role God may ask you to play?
