Vision in Leadership
Tom Shrader explores vision as the third characteristic of biblical leadership, defining it as unusual discernment and foresight. Using Abraham from Hebrews 11 as the primary example, he shows how vision translates to faith in Christian leadership - thinking long-term, being open to adventure, willing to sacrifice, ready for challenges, able to motivate others, and bold in commitment.
“When you're a person of vision, and by that we mean faith, whether you're an originator, organizer, or an operator, doesn't matter - when you're a person of faith, people around you are excited by it.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Studies in Leadership
Recorded: February 13, 2003
Duration: 42 min
Themes: vision, leadership, faith, sacrifice, humility, faithfulness, discernment, commitment, new to leadership, pastor, elder, mentor, struggling with direction, business leader, young adult, developing leaders
Scripture: Hebrews 11:8-17, Proverbs 29:18, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Theological Themes: biblical leadership, servant leadership, spiritual discernment, christian character, faith leadership, biblical vision, pastoral calling, spiritual maturity
Full Transcript
Looking at this thing of leadership and looking at eight characteristics that we identify with leadership, the first week was one that typically you wouldn't expect: humility. Yet I believe not only for just the Christian life, but for leadership, to truly be a humble leader, to be a servant leader, that's what God calls you to be. To lead in an understanding way.
Last week we looked at loyalty. Probably a better word for us biblically would be faithfulness. Today we look at the third of the sessions, and this does fit with this whole idea of leadership. We look at vision.
Defining Vision
Here's how Webster defines it: an unusual discernment or foresight. Unusual discernment means unique. It's not a vision, not necessarily something that everyone has. It's a characteristic that is not necessarily commonplace.
Remember the senior Bush when he was president said, "What is it about this vision thing?" That coupled with the whole idea that "read my lips, no new taxes" is how you elect a governor from Arkansas president. So this vision thing.
Three Types of People in Organizations
This is helpful when we talk about vision because you need it at every area of business. In a business, typical, let's take a business setting or any organization, you have basically three types of people.
Number one is the originator. That's the entrepreneur, self-starter type guy or gal. That's the person who's generating all sorts of heat and typically what is associated with them is chaos. But they're the originator.
Then there's the organizer. That's what you need. Person, gal, guy, sees the whole world as an org chart. Everything's flowing, job descriptions, they love job descriptions, love to write policy manuals, design systems. They take that chaos and make order from it.
Then the third type of person is the operator. You give them the policy manual, you go away for 20 years, you come back and it's still running exactly the same way. They love just that sort of thing and you fit in there somewhere.
The Importance of Understanding Your Type
If you are one of those working in another type of job, you'll be very frustrated. We had a guy who was in this study who was just horrific working in the plant. He was a great operator but then they all of a sudden made him an organizer and he was struggling and then they said we want some creativity from you and he was absolutely awful and that's what business does. They take this guy who's working well and think if he can do this he must do this better.
Rarely does the best salesman make the best sales manager and that just doesn't happen because what a manager needs is all that structure. A salesman's going "I don't know where the form is, what does it matter? They sign it, ship it. That's how we work."
I tend to be in that first, that originator. I was at Motorola when I came down here. I was at Motorola I think two weeks before I sent my first memo saying I think we can restructure this and they were not receptive and to the end you see their stock prices continue to plummet. I was there to help them if they would have listened, and that's true I could have helped them a lot.
A Profile of Vision
A profile of vision goes like this. It must be as vague as a dream or as precise as a mission statement but it articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future condition that's better in some important way than exists right now. Here's the phrase I use: it's a verbal photograph of a future reality. It's to be able to articulate this view. It's to be able to somehow bring people together around this view and they may not see it clearly but you do to some degree.
The Place of Vision
The place of vision: If there is a spark of genius in the leadership function at all it must lie in this transcending ability, a kind of magic to assemble out of all the variety of images and signals and forecasts and alternatives, a clearly articulated vision of the future that is at once simple, easily understood, clearly desirable, and energizing.
That's where you may get into it like a vision statement. The church that I go to, here's how we say it. Here's what you're about. Here's what we are here. Helping one another learn God's truth and live biblically changed lives. Helping one another learn God's truth and live biblically changed lives.
So if you're around there for any length of time you should understand, you know, because all churches kind of have the same manual here, the black book, well how's this work itself out? Well we help one another where this is a partnership here of learning God's truth to the end that our life changes.
Vision as Sound Bites
And then we even simplify it more into a motto: come, learn, serve. So what are you doing here at East Valley Bible Church? Well you're in that process. Once you're there, that invitation's over, now you're learning and serving, you're moving continually.
It's a sound bite. We can't say that in a negative way. Sound bites are good and oftentimes they cast a vision. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." "I did not have sex with..." Oh no, I'm sorry, I get them all confused when I think of those great visionaries.
The Misuse of Proverbs 29:18
There is a verse that we use frequently in Christian circles that has in it this vision deal and it's most often misused. It's Proverbs 29:18. It says this: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." And oftentimes that's used in conjunction with launching a new program or a building fund or something like that and that's...
The Person of Vision
When there is no clear preaching, teaching, direction from the Word of God, people perish. They don't know. This is a very confusing world we live in. There's lots of things going on. There's lots of views.
I was talking to a guy just this morning who went to visit a doctor this week about something on his body and started talking to this doctor and spent an hour and a half with this doctor. He said to the doctor, "What do you believe?" And he said it was an hour and a half of the goofiest stuff he'd ever heard. It's like nailing jello to the wall to try to pin the guy down because there's no basis for his belief. His belief is as fickle as the barometric pressure.
How do you find direction in the world? I was at a men's conference and before I got up there, trying to set the tone, this guy said, "Alright, everybody stand up." He had everybody stand up. He said, "At the count of three, I want you to point to true north. One, two, three." And there were arms going everywhere—exactly what you'd expect.
He said, "Now in your packet there's a little brown envelope. Open it up. Take out what's in there. Put it in your hand. Lay it down face up." It's a compass. And he says, "Now I want you to point to true north when I count three. One, two, three." And every hand went to the same place.
What's the true north in our life? What's the true north in our life individually? What's the true north in our life collectively? I could even say as a society, as a nation. Where do we find true north? Because there are all these competing voices. Well, we find it in the scripture. We find it in God's Word. Where there's not a clear proclamation of the Word of God, the people will perish.
Vision and Faith
When we talk about vision, let me tell you what I think translates pretty well into our Christian language. That would be faith. If we talk about vision, we're talking about faith. When we talk about faith, probably the classic example would be Abraham.
I don't know how much you know about Abraham. You're going to learn a little bit about him today. He was doing pretty well, frankly, and happy where he was. And God called him to a different area. He had all sorts of conflicts within his family. He experiences all sorts of hardship. Things begin to come together for him.
He then is visited and told by God that these extraordinary promises will be fulfilled through him, including the birth of a son. And he is now a hundred years old, and that son has not arrived. And just ten years prior to that, he decides to try to solve this dilemma himself. We'll look at it today.
And then he has this promised son, lives for a few more years with his wife. His wife dies. We don't talk about this very often. His wife dies, and he has five or six more kids. Found little Muffy and brought her home. She must be a little 21 year old, I'm guessing. And five or six more kids, and then he finally dies.
Abraham's Characteristics
Abraham. Here are some characteristics—seven of them. Here's the first one: A person of vision is long in perspective. Long in perspective. It is not typically a visionary who thinks in terms of immediacy. A vision person is thinking about things way in the future. It's committed to things in the future.
Hebrews chapter 11. If you have your Bibles, that's where we're going to be this afternoon. "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place that he would later receive as an inheritance, obeyed and went. For he was looking forward to the city with the foundation whose architect and builder is God."
He's looking forward. Looking beyond the immediacy. It's not trying to make decisions based on this quarter's income or earnings, but what's it going to mean three, four, five years from now? It's thinking with an eternal perspective.
Long-Term Perspective
For me, I talk about contentment, and I think I talk about this all the time. They go hand in glove. You have to be a person who's thinking long-term.
Last night, we moved Sunday, and Susan spent most of this week cleaning the house that we moved out of. Last night was it. We've been in that house almost 21 years. Susan had made a couple of trips during the day, and we were in there. It had been actually a pretty easy process for me, but I found myself getting very emotional last night.
We're trying to get out, and I'm vacuuming one room, and she's vacuuming another room, and I said, "I just don't want to go." So I went over and got a couple of cigars for her and some ice cream for me. We sat out in the back, by the pool, on a garbage bag. In fact, we didn't talk for a long time.
I just walked around, and I thought about—that's where the girls learned to walk and to swim. I could literally stand at the end of that pool, and I could see them. Little girls jumping in the pool. We talked about so many things. In one of the closets, we found on the wall a hole. We had a hamster that had gotten loose and was up in there, and we couldn't get it out. I put a hole in the wall and couldn't get the hamster out. Sarah slept every night for a week in the bathtub and finally caught the hamster coming out at night. We talked about all that stuff. Twenty years.
And what I said to Susan is, "You know, 20 years, I'll be 73. I wonder if I've got 20 productive years left." She said, "I don't think you've had 20 productive years yet."
I found myself thinking about something that was really emotional for me. As I've gotten older, exactly the opposite of what I thought would occur has happened. I thought as I got older I'd be thinking in terms of days or weeks, but I find myself now thinking more in terms of decades or larger blocks of time. I don't want to lose sight of that.
The Christian's Eternal Perspective
The whole motive in the Christian life, I think, is to think long term. In church we're studying 2 Corinthians, and 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verses 16, 17, and 18 says this: "Though the outer man is decaying, the inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. For we look not at the things that are seen, but the things that are not seen. Because the things that are seen are temporal, the things that are not seen are eternal."
There you go. You want a long term perspective? It's an eternal perspective. Right after that, you know what Paul talks about? He talks about this body being temporary, and then he tells us that as Christians we're going to be judged. He tells us all of that so that our motive for life will extend beyond just the bottom line. For the Christian businessman, for the Christian businesswoman, the bottom line is not the bottom line.
Thinking Long Term in Marriage and Family
So I think in terms of long term perspective, everything in life is not disposable. Maybe you're here and maybe you're thinking about blowing up a marriage that you're in. Can I tell you something? Not only is it okay, it's the right thing to do to stay together for the sake of the kids. I can't say how often I talk to people who are, especially at the beginning of a divorce, and I'll say, "How are the kids doing?" And every time I hear the same thing: "They're doing great. They're doing great."
They're not doing great. They're not. I'm telling you they're not. There are all sorts of studies that are coming out now. I deal with people that are 35 and 40 years old that still aren't doing great. It's not at all unusual to have somebody around who's 25 or 30 years old, and their parents are getting divorced after 30 or 35 or 40 years of marriage, and it's killing these kids. Don't do it. Think long term.
The Value of Every Life
I can't tell you how many ladies that we've dealt with - we dealt with one Christmas Eve - where the doctor would come in and say, "Listen, the fetus is in trouble here. You're going to have a baby with problems." And the doctor's saying, "I just, for quality..." Here's what the doctor said. The doctor said to her, "Listen, the quality of life is not going to be good for this baby." She said, "What do you think I should do?"
I said, "The quality of my life hasn't been good. It's not a quality of life issue. Do you hear what you're saying? What should I do with a baby? Feed it, burp it, and die for it. Not kill it." That makes no sense at all. It feels good or it feels right or it gets me over the hump of a problem that I have, but I'll tell you, and some of you ladies in here can say amen to it, you will deal with the psychological trauma of that for the rest of your life. Think long term.
Openness to Adventure
Here's the second thing: there's an openness to adventure. I like this. Verse 8: "Abraham obeyed and went even though he didn't know where he was going." So you and Abraham had a lot in common. He didn't know. God just simply told him to go.
Now we can take this, I think, and put it in the wrong light, and all of a sudden we want to have an Abrahamic experience. We want to hear from God. There is a new view in the Christian circles that's starting to catch a lot of steam. It's getting very mystical. We're starting to talk about these things, we're taking life stuff and making it way too complicated.
A Real-Life Example of Simplicity
We had a guy who was at one of the Poverty Living Studies, and he saw the one Thursday morning and he said, "Oh, this is incredible," and he said, "Where else do you do it?" And I invited him down here, and he came down here, and then he went back to Denver. He was from Denver. He told his friend about it, and his friend called and said, "I want to do that in Denver. I want to do what you do in Denver."
I said, "Okay, that's fine. Argue yourself out." He said, "I want to come down and talk to you." I said, "Why? I mean, what for?" He said, "Well, I want to understand how this came about. I want to understand the programming. I want to understand the fundraising." I said, "Listen, you're going to be very disappointed when you get down here, buddy." He said, "No, no, I want to come." I said, "I wouldn't come." He said, "I'm going to come."
So he came, and he observed this, and he's all excited about it. He said, "Boy, I want to do that." Plus, watching me makes it look easy, so he thinks he can do it. So he sat down and he said, "Now, I want you to tell me, what's your 10-year plan?" I said, "Oh, well, I don't know. I don't really have a 10-year plan."
"That's all right. We'll get back to that. Tell me how you spread the word here. How do you market? TV? Radio?" "Well, word of mouth, sort of." "All right. How do you finance this stuff?" "Well, people just send money."
I'm telling you, you could just see it's like somebody licked all the red off his sucker. I said to him, "I told you to stay in Denver. I don't have any formula. This is not like McDonald's where you crank something out. This is what it is."
So finally he said, "Well, at least this," and he said, "Tell me about the call of God on your life to do this." I said, "Well, I don't..." He said, "Well, how did you figure out to do this?" I said, "Oh, now that I can answer. I wanted to do it." He said, "That's it?" I said, "Yeah, because I think that's what the Christian life..."
If there's no sin in your life and you're not dealing with a moral issue, then you do whatever you want to do. Can we embrace how freeing that is? Why do we want to make this so hard? Why do we want to get into all of this yearning and moving and groaning and having to hear all this call?
If what you want to do is go off to seminary and that's just what you want to do—you want to do that as much as you want to eat or sleep—there's your call. Go do it. If God put on your heart somehow, or you've got this desire to start this business, it's not a moral issue. It's just wisdom. And maybe you screw it up and you do the wrong thing. Who cares?
Don't Overcomplicate Your Decisions
I met a guy in one of the studies, 35 years old. He said, "I'm thinking about making a job change. I don't want to do what God doesn't want me to do. I want to make it. I want to know that this is God's will that I go to this job. I have to know that. I'm 35 years old. This will be the last job change in my life." He was so bad that he had gone to Dillard's to buy a pair of gray slacks, and he couldn't decide which shade of gray to get, whether to go with a charcoal or a lighter gray.
I said, "Pal, let me help you out here. Do you want to do this?" "I think so." I said, "Well, do it." He said, "What if it doesn't work out?" I said, "It probably won't. You're going to have two or three more jobs. You're 35. You're going to work another 35 years." You've got to be open. You don't know where you're going. You don't know what's going to happen.
We had a guy in one of the studies who went to the doctor, had some problems. The doctor said, "You're terminally ill. You've got cancer. You're going to die." Of course, that shook his world up, shook up the friends around him. He started journaling. He lived six years. In those six years, two of his closest friends in independent auto accidents, separate from one another, were killed—broccoli-eating runners, those kinds of guys. You don't know. You see what I'm saying? You don't know.
Be Willing to Invest
Here's the third thing: You've got to be willing to sacrifice. The word I prefer is invest. "By faith Abraham made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign land" (verse nine). He's going. He has no idea where he's going. He's just convinced that He wants to go there because He's convinced God called Him to go there. He's open to this adventure.
He's not, by the way, an adventurous person. If you read the Genesis account of Abraham's life, He's a pretty staid, close to the vest, guarded, not a risk taker. He's in cash. And now, boom, off He's going. He's gone. He's out running around because He's convinced God's doing that.
What is interesting—I am without television till the 20th of February, so I'm reading—I was reading through a survey of Israel's history. I was reading this the other night and they're talking about the living conditions at the time of Abraham, the time that He was moving. Here's what they say: "Times generally were prosperous. Some 100,000 business documents were discovered in this general area, most of which concern this period, giving insight. Economic conditions appear in general to have been stable. It was a progressive world where the cultural advantages are notable. Artists were skilled, builders competent, business active, times good. We may believe that Abraham, clearly a capable person, would have availed himself of the educational opportunities. Certainly He gained an appreciation for the cultural niceties when He found it necessary to leave and go where standards could be only lower. Such advantages undoubtedly would have made Abraham's leaving more difficult."
I want you to understand that. He's in a good area. You're living in Paradise Valley and God's calling you and you don't know where and it's time to go. You obey and you are willing in that to experience all the sacrifice or investment that accompanies that.
The Reality of Investment
You're going to start to think long term and you're going to be willing to be open to adventure. There may be sacrifice. Again, I like the word investment.
When I started doing this, I think Sarah was 7 and Hayley was 5, and I came home one day and I said to Susan, "I think I want to quit and do this." She said, "All right. Can I ask a question?" I said, "Sure, what is the question?" She said, "How will we eat?" And I said, "Well, I thought about that."
That first year—and I'm not saying woe is me here at all, I love it, I don't have any problem here—that first year, our income was less than we paid in income tax the previous year. Now, that's a hard deal. I must have communicated this to the kids because we're walking through the mall one night and I can take you right to the spot at Fiesta Mall. It's right outside of Cinnabon and there's a bench. We're walking through and Sarah said, "Oh, man, I want to get one of those." And Hayley said, "You know we can't afford that anymore."
I thought, uh-oh, I've miscommunicated. I took them right to that bench. I sat down, got down like this. I said, "Now listen, girls, we've got money and we've got money for that. We're just choosing not to spend it on this stuff. We're
Stewardship Beyond Money
Investing it in other places. You see that? There's sacrifice. And there's investment. Let's get it away from money. Where are you investing your time? This is the only February 13th, 2003, you're ever going to experience.
We've got people that they'll take money and move it over here for a half of an eighth of a quarter of a point. And then they'll move it over here for a fraction. They'll move it down there for a fraction. I got that figured out. I understand good stewardship. While you're doing that, how much time are you wasting?
You go blow a hundred grand a day, which probably some of you have done, go blow a hundred grand a day, you go get another hundred grand back. You blow a minute today, you can never get it back. And we are such great stewards of our money. We'll look for every tax loophole and everything. Fine, I got no problem with it. Good stewardship. But good stewardship isn't limited to money. It's time, it's energy, it's effort. Where are you investing your life?
Abraham's Promise at One Hundred
Abraham's ready for a challenge. I like this. He's going to become a papa. Verse 11: "By faith, Abraham, even though he was past age and Sarah was barren, was enabled to become a father because he considered Him faithful who had made the promise."
Here's the promise. God had come to Abraham and He'd made a promise to Abraham. He said that indeed he would be the father of many nations. They would trace their lineage back to him, which they did. That He'd give them a land and that this blessing to the whole earth would come from his lineage. That's Jesus.
The problem is he's now 90 years old and there's no kid. You've got to have an offspring for this. There's no offspring. So Sarah says, well, it mustn't be me. So Sarah takes her handmaid and gets together with Abraham and they have this child and yet God makes it clear that's not the blessing and now he's 100 years old.
Don't sterilize this story. He's 100 years old. She's 90. In fact, when Sarah heard this, that she was going to have this baby at 90, the scripture says she laughed. Sure enough, out comes Isaac.
Think about that. They give old Abraham a call and they say, you know what, Abraham, we missed your birthday and we don't want to scare you with a surprise party. You're an old man. You're 100. Can you come to, we're going to have a party for you for your 100th birthday. Can you come? And he said, hang on. I've got to talk to Sarah. Sarah, can we go? And he comes back and he says, we can go if we can find a babysitter. That's a very funny thing. 100 years old.
Never Too Old for God's Purposes
You're ready for this. I want you to understand. I don't know where you are in this life thing, but this never ends. You're always to be ready for the challenge that God places before you.
My experience has been that as men and women age, as you get older and older and older, there's a tendency to think that you're less and less relevant and that somehow God will use you less. That's exactly the wrong thinking. Many of you have chosen to make yourself obsolete by not even getting in the game.
It's very easy. I'm going to give you a little way here to tell yourself when God's done with you. Here's how you know when God's done with you. You will assume room temperature. That's how you'll know. When you die, He's done. And maybe it's the very act of dying where you'll impact people and family most. I don't know. But I'll tell you this, when you start to put it together, all of a sudden you think long-term and you've got an adventure before you and you're ready to invest. You better be ready for this challenge.
The Ability to Motivate Others
Here's the next point. There's three. You're able to motivate. In verse 9, it says, Abraham lived in a tent, temporary dwelling, moving on. And so did his kid and his grandkid, Isaac and Jacob. Sarah was barren, but there she is, ready for the task.
Verse 17: "Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice." Do you know that story? We have now the promised one, Abraham at age 100 and Sarah have Isaac. Isaac's the promised one. This is the one that's coming.
Now, years later, we don't know exactly how long. Some think as early as when Isaac was 10 or 12. Others say 25 or so. So we'll split it, say 17. When he's 17 years old, all of a sudden the greatest test that Abraham would ever have is put before him.
The Ultimate Test of Faith
God calls him and says, "I want you to take your son and I want you to take him and I want you to sacrifice him." Now, that's not exactly what Abraham said, is it? Or God said, is it? Because if God would have said, take your son and sacrifice him, Abraham would have said, Ishmael, come here. What He said was, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac." He didn't want to, I don't want you to misunderstand this. I got a little loophole here.
So he takes Isaac along with some servants. They make a three-day journey. Now they come to the mountain. Now it's time for sacrifice. Now they're going up and as they're going up, apparently, not a lot of conversations going on, but all of a sudden, Isaac says, hey dad, here's what I noticed. We got a fire. We got some wood. We got a knife. We don't have a sacrifice. And Abraham said, "Jehovah Jireh, God will provide."
And they get there and there's no record of any sort of a struggle. Again, think of it. Seventeen-year-old and a hundred and seventeen-year-old, I'm guessing this kid could out-wrestle him, out-run him. He must have cooperated and climbed right up on that altar knowing full well what was going to happen, what took place there.
Contagious Faith
I believe Abraham's faith is contagious. When you're a person of vision, and by that we mean faith, whether you're an originator, organizer, or an operator, doesn't matter. When you're a person of faith, people around you are excited by it. They're ignited.
You want to get a sense of this, good, bad, or indifferent, get around a political campaign. Watch the people who are involved in a campaign that are really committed.
to what's going on. They're motivated. Get around a church, and all of a sudden, you've got a person of vision. You got a board that's supporting that vision, and people catch that vision. This is contagious stuff.
Abraham's a man of faith, and I believe Isaac caught it like that. And he said, you know what? All I know is he's my dad, and my dad isn't going to do something stupid. If dad says God told him to do it, that's good enough for me. There you go. You better be bold in that commitment.
Abraham's Bold Commitment
Verse 17, "By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promise was about to sacrifice the one and only son, even though God had said to him, it's through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from the dead."
Remember when I said they went as far as a certain place, and they left the servants there? Now Isaac and Abraham are going together. They're the only two. You know what Abraham said to the servants? We will return.
Now think about this. We know from what happens that Abraham is willing to sacrifice. He knows, because God's communicated to him, that He wants him to do this. He also knows that God's promised, through this boy, to be literally the lineage to Christ. So he said, you know what, reasonably speaking, there's only one thing that can happen. God must be able to raise the dead. Nothing else makes any sense.
Isn't that amazing? And so he goes, and they prepare the altar, and they prepare the sacrifice, and Abraham stands over Isaac. He raises that knife, and God stops him. It's a great picture of what happened thousands of years later on Calvary, when God's only son Jesus came, and they raised that hammer to pound those nails into His hands and His feet. This time, God didn't stop.
Living by God's Principles
There's a bold commitment. It's an unusual discernment. It's an understanding of the simplicity of the Christian life. Here's God's Word. Here's what it says. Now we do it, and we do what's right because it's right, even if it doesn't feel right.
A Christian person lives based on the principles of that Word. If the Bible says do it, do it. If the Bible says avoid it, avoid it. And everything else, you've got freedom.
I was talking to a guy the other day. He's been out of college a couple of years, and he's doing ministry work, and he went with another guy, and they met a business guy, and this guy was talking about a lot of stuff. They got in the car, and the guy I'm talking about says, is that the way business is? And he said, yeah, that's the way business is. Don't tell the truth very often. When they do, they shade it. All about themselves. Do you live that way?
Really, it's been interesting over the years, and sex is such an easy way to evaluate this, but over the years it's been amazing to me how many guys and gals who are single come to this study and end up sexually involved with one another. What are you thinking about? Can you not hear? What are you doing here? Is this a giant joke?
It's really interesting, isn't it? And so we all go, yeah, all the married guys go, yeah, okay, how about you? Who are told to give an honest day's wage to those people they're working for, and you're stiffing them? You're lorded over them? You're a lousy dad or a lousy mom? What are you thinking about?
There's a boldness and commitment. You do what's right, even if it doesn't matter how it feels. If you know it's right, you do what's right. Why? Because it's right. Abraham's ready to go. He doesn't know anything. Here's what he knows. God told him to go there. He's got the promise in Isaac. Boom! He can only conclude one thing. I guess God's going to raise him from the dead.
The Impact of Your Life
Here's the last part, and you will have impact. You'll be destined for impact. Verse 12, "And so from this one man he, as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and as countless as sand in the seashore."
Do you understand that everyone is watching you? When we think of impact, I fear we think of some grandiose task that we're involved in. I was in a small group, eight guys in there, and I was talking to them, and I said, how many of you have a mentor? And of course, everybody's got to say yes to that. So they all do.
I said, well, tell me who your mentor is. And they started talking about it. I said, well, how often do you see them? Maybe twice a year. One guy said, so-and-so is my mentor. I happened to be meeting that guy afterwards for lunch, and I said, did you know you're this guy's mentor? He said, I wouldn't have guessed that in a hundred years.
You know what's going on there? There's impact. You do not have to sit down in a booth at a restaurant and have this ongoing dialogue where you're filling in the blanks to be mentoring somebody. You are touching people's lives all the time, and they're watching you all the time. And I think there's a tendency to underestimate the casual impact you have.
The Teaching Power of Example
Clearly, those of you that are parents are having a profound impact on those kids, and teach them real early. And when they're little kids, and they say, hello, yeah, I don't know, Sedona, Timeshare, I don't know, hang on, I'll get him. Dad, you want to tell him Sedona? Tell him I'm not home. He said, tell him I'm not home.
When you do that, do you understand that you've just taught that kid it's okay to lie? I'll tell you something, and I mean this, and I'm not beating this guy up, but I'm telling you, these high school kids who don't know a thing about history, I'll tell you they learned one thing from the Clinton administration. She had sex, but I didn't. These kids use that all the time.
When I was a kid, when we said making out, making out meant sneaking into a drive-in and a little kissing. You know, now, when a kid says making out to you, I hope you understand that you're talking about oral sex and beyond. That's all part of making out now. And the girls
They are delighted because they say they're virgins, and the guys are pleased because they say, "I didn't have sex, she did." They caught that value. That was taught to them by the moral leader of the free world. What a joke.
You're destined for impact. You're going to have impact. When you sin, there's impact. So don't do it. This isn't that hard, is it? Don't do it. And when you sin, you're broken. And you repent. Because you're going to sin. I'm going to sin. We're going to screw up.
People Are Watching Everything
I hope you understand how fragile the people are around you and how closely they're watching everything you do. You would be shocked at the notes I get. "I noticed Sunday that you had on a black sock and a blue sock." And I want to say, "Did you get anything I said?" Not really. A black sock and a blue sock.
I had a time - I'll tell you the story, we've got to close. I'm teaching down in Tucson. I'm visiting, and I get up, and I'm teaching, and I'm done. And I say amen, and I look, and I'm not kidding, there's probably 25 people lined up. I said, "Well, I sensed it was powerful."
The first guy up says, "Hey, you got on a black shoe and a brown shoe." And sure enough, I got two loafers, same model, same make. One's black, one's brown. I said, "Well, thank you." He said, "Hey, you got on a black shoe and a brown shoe." Twenty-five people lined up to tell me I got on a black shoe and a brown shoe.
People are watching everything. And you know what? That's okay. When you say you're a Christian, it's okay. That's what Jesus said: be salt and light, let them see your good works, and glorify your Father in heaven. And that's the way life is.
Next week we just continue our study. Father, help us as we try to be men and women who live humbly, faithfully, with faith before a lost and dying world. Help us be good moms and good dads and good husbands and good wives and good employees and good friends and good employers. And let all we do bring honor and glory to You. Father, we pray that to You in Jesus' name. Amen.