Leadership Archive, 2025
2/22 Performative Legalism vs Intimacy with the Lord
Kingdom leaders are responsible for helping their listenership evolve out of a performative transaction with God, and into a love relationship with Him based on heartfelt worship, gut-level prayer, emotional vulnerability, His personal voice in the verse, and all the nuances of an intimate love relationship. Unfortunately, many churches in the West program their members and attendees to be performative with God, because those churches and their pastors are themselves performative. This creates a generational spiritual dysfunction whereby the Old Covenant performance-based system stays alive and keeps passing on from leader to follower, leader to follower, leader to follower, ad infinitum.
Jesus tried to stop the performative, transactional, religious hamster-wheel with His first coming. Through the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10, Jesus intentionally held up two covenantal systems: one based on legalistic transactions mediated by human effort, the other based on personal relationship mediated by voice-to-voice, heart-to-heart intimacy. Martha was performative towards Jesus, captive to the legalistic tyranny of religious must-dos. Mary was relational towards Jesus; she wanted heart-level intimacy, calm conversation with Him, resting in His presence, hearing His voice, learning to be vulnerable with Him. The issue was never service versus prayer, or practical activity versus intimate activity, or horizontal engagement versus vertical engagement. The issue was chronology and motive.
Jesus said only one thing is supremely, utterly, incomparably first, and that is intimacy with Himself. The practical duties Martha was obsessing over were important, of course, but they were not supremely, utterly, incomparably first. They were supposed to be the joyful fruit of a right root system.
But Martha was not serving as an act of joyful fruit, she was serving to escape her emotional world. Jesus said Martha was merimnao and thorybazo, literally "having anxiety" and "disturbed", not about one thing but "many things" (Lk 10:41). Spiritual leaders, selah this. It is often a person's unprocessed, unhealed emotional world that underpins legalistic, performative approaches to God. Genuine intimacy with Him would require opening those distressed hotspots to Him, feeling them afresh, grieving them to Him, processing them with Him, and welcoming His precious inner healing in all its forms. The alternative is to keep suppressing them, escaping them, staying on the surface, and relating to God through an Old Covenant-style performance, whereby endless rules and rituals are obsessively kept for an aloof God atop a quaking mountain.
Spiritual leaders, selah what Jesus said to Martha. He did not tell her to simply do one more Tanakh study. He did not quote a scripture. He did not speak to her intellect. He did not prophesy to her. As the One who came to heal the brokenhearted, to comfort those who mourn, to provide for those grieve, to give an anointing of joy to those in mourning, to give a disposition of worship to those in despair (Isa 61:1-3, Lk 4:17-21), Jesus spoke to Martha's emotional world. He said only the voice-to-voice, heart-to-heart intimacy with Himself could heal every place inside, and for this reason it was supremely, utterly, incomparably needful. Spiritual leaders, are you vision-casting Mary or Martha? What are you saying to Martha? Are you enabling and worsening her bondage by exploiting her religious hyperactivity to keep your machine running, or are you slowing down, pausing, and ministering to her merimnao and thorybazo inner world?
5/31/24 Samuel: From a Person to a Prophet
The following is an excerpt from my book, New Testament Prophecy: Healthy, Mature Prophetic Ministry in the Church.
Regarding personal development, four major domains are constantly emphasized in the Word: spirituality (our direct relationship with God and His kingdom), personality (our emotions, intellect, and will that produce our behavior), relationality (our relationships, social dynamics), and vocationality (our job, finances, vocational calling). There are around four verses in 1Samuel 2 and 3 that constellate these four areas in Samuel's development, first as a person, then as a prophet. Do not miss the sequence of these very specific, very intentional verses.
(1) Spirituality: Samuel Ministered Before & To The Lord
1Samuel 2:18, 3:1 (NKJV): ...Samuel ministered before the LORD, even as a child, wearing a linen ephod…Now the boy Samuel ministered to the LORD…
Samuel got the foundation and greatest commandment right, his spirituality, his direct relationship with God. He lived and moved and had his being in the presence of the Lord at the tabernacle complex.
(2) Personality: Samuel Grew as a Person
1Samuel 2:26 (NKJV): And the child Samuel grew in stature, and in favor both with the LORD and men.
Samuel's spirituality inspired and informed his personality, and he grew and matured emotionally, intellectually, and volitionally in a way that pleased the Lord.
(3) Relationality: Samuel Grew in Relationships, Social Dynamics
1Samuel 2:26 (NKJV): And the child Samuel grew in stature, and in favor both with the LORD and men.
Samuel's growth as a person inspired and informed his relationships with others. This happened to such a godly, healthy, winsome degree that people began to appreciate and favor him.
(4) Vocationality: Samuel Rewarded with Vocational Purpose & Power
1Samuel 3:7 (NKJV): Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, nor was the word of the LORD yet revealed to him.
Samuel "not yet knowing the Lord" here is not salvific. It does not mean he was not in a saved relationship with God in the Old Covenant expression. The second phrase clarifies the first phrase. The writer is telling us Samuel did not yet know the Lord in the revelatory and prophetic dimension, i.e., "nor was the word of the LORD yet revealed to him".
To help us understand this spiritual nuance, we could look at an analogous situation in Acts 19:1-7. Upon arriving in Ephesus, Paul discovered twelve disciples. They had believed John the Baptist's message, repented, and were baptized. They were saved and in a saved relationship with God according to the spiritual information they had up to that point. When Paul gave them the rest of the story, they believed, were baptized, were indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and spoke in tongues and prophesied.
Like young Samuel, there was a specialized sense in which the twelve Ephesian disciples did not know the Lord, because the fuller word of God had not yet been revealed to them. But their not knowing Him more fully did not mean they were not saved at all. In fact, Luke calls them "disciples" in 19:1, acknowledging their entry-level salvation.
This is the idea in 1Samuel 3:7. The writer is telling us Samuel did not yet know the Lord in a specialized sense, not a salvific sense. That specialized sense was the revelatory and prophetic dimensions of God, which he was about to experience. The spiritual graduation rewarded Samuel's spirituality, personality, and relationality with vocational purpose and power.
1Samuel 3:19,20 (NKJV): So Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel had been established as a prophet of the LORD.
So many immature and amateur prophesiers dream of 1Samuel 3:19,20 being true of them. They try to make it happen through a mixture of genuine giftedness and aggressive or passive-aggressive self-promotion. For the sake of all that is good and godly, stop! Possess ye your soul! Humble yourself! Simply do what Samuel did, in the order he did it.