God's Grace — George Verwer

Father, we thank you for what you've already said in a very strong way to our hearts this morning. Pray that we may continue on from there, carrying these truths back to our own situation, our own hearts, our own particular struggles.

Lord, we thank you that we can face, by your grace, life head-on with all that it involves. Some of the scary experiences, some of the hard experiences. And may we, as a result of these days together, somehow go away a little more mature about what it's all about here on planet Earth.

Guide us in our thinking, in our note-taking, in our studies, in our conversations throughout the day. And Lord, wherever there may be people that listen to this tape, may somehow you minister their hearts as well.

In Jesus' name, amen. Well, we always get lots of sound effects. And we're picking up a little bit from what Brother Alfie has shared. I would just look at that passage in 2 Corinthians that all of you are familiar with.

Practical Grace in Difficult Situations

In praying and preparing for this morning, I felt burdened to really speak a little about the grace of God, the practical grace. And this is just what Alfie has been sharing with us. How God gives practical grace, or should we say grace for practical, difficult situations.

We know those beautiful words in 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul speaks about the messenger of Satan in verse 7, used to humbly. Now he prayed three times that it would go away, and it didn't go. Instead, God spoke to him and said, verse 9, My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.

Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. And then those strange words, really. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities. Weaknesses is a better translation.

In reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong. Words that I trust you do turn to frequently. Life for most of us as we move on is going to have some hard experiences.

And as we're warned and exhorted in scripture, as much as possible it's good to know the enemy's tactics. I made just a list of some of the hard experiences that some of the people I have counseled have gone through.

Some of them I've gone through myself. I thought you might want to just write some of these things down and just rejoice that she giveth grace. We know that here we often sing, as the burden grows greater, the grace grows greater.

Whereas the burden increasing, the grace groweth greater. It's been really amazing to watch so many people in the history of O .M. just receive grace in the time of need, really. It's amazing. People like Brother Ray Lynch who so wanted to get back with his wife and so wanted to get back to his children.

The greatest human desire this man has ever had. He's never had. To see God giving the grace these past twenty years since we've been laboring together. God giveth grace. What are some of those hard experiences?

Some of you may be in even now. A great mistake if we presume that leaders are all just ready to go and disciple others. Who's going to disciple the leaders? Who's going to minister to the leaders? Who's going to show the leaders the way of grace, the way of forgiveness?

How to wrestle with their emotions? How to deal with their hang-ups? Because in fact, in O .M. every week a large percentage of the problems are not the followers, they're the leaders. Can't blame new recruits, young babes in place for some of the things that happen on O .M. teams.

It's often, far more often the failure of the leader to appropriate the grace that God wants to give at that moment or to appropriate the wisdom or to learn from God's hand, God's school of experience.

It is true that things that have happened to us in the past often affect present conduct. Things that happened to you back in your family, your own relationship with your father, some of the trials you may have gone through in the past do affect often present behavior.

That doesn't mean that we believe in fatalism or that we believe in some form of deterministic philosophy, but it means we just realize that's a factor. Modern psychology is actually telling us now it's less a factor than previous thought.

The modern trend in some schools of psychology is that these young people from New York City, from broken homes into limpid homes, it's all not as simple as we once analyzed. And that some people from broken, terrible homes are just doing fantastic things, even in the secular world.

You used to think, from what psychology was trying to tell us, if you were from a broken home or your mother had this problem and your father had that problem, you just didn't have a chance. You were just destined to be a juvenile delinquent.

We know if that happens in the secular world, how much more it happens when the Holy Spirit invades a situation. What are some of the specific areas in day-by-day living where we must appropriate the grace of the Lord?

Grace When Parents Seem Not to Love Us

Number one, when we feel that our own parents don't really love us. When we feel our own parents don't really love us. Some of you may never have had that particular situation, but some of the people you counsel have.

In fact, some people run into O .M. as an escape from difficulties in the home. Now, of course, if it's a converted Hindu or converted Muslim who's been thrown out of his home, that's understandable. But if it's a brother who's just running away from a Christian home because he doesn't like it, or he's never disciplined himself, or for some other reason, then we're facing a totally different experience.

We need to be able to counsel and train some of these young people to be able to go back home and relate to their own parents and to appropriate the grace of God for that situation. Very seldom is it a black and white case that your parents don't love you.

It's more likely that they're not gifted in expressing it. Or it may be that in a family of ten children, your father and mother ran out of steam. I often thought with three children I was running out of steam, much less a baker's dozen.

We fail oftentimes as young, zealous, idealistic O .M .ers to face the fact that our parents are human. Our parents are human. Of course they're going to fail. Of course they have failed. You get this idea that when you arrive at the age of 25, you've got everything together.

I think I had less together now at 43 than I did at 25, at least in some ways. That's why many men come into a mid-year or mid-life crisis as they realize at 40 that they don't have it, they don't have what they were dreaming about at 25 or 19.

It's far more embarrassing. When you make mistakes at 19, people overlook it. Mistakes that I made at that age, many people just, they were impressed by the mistakes, they were encouraged, this is normal, press on.

Make the same mistakes now, and you can be in real trouble when you're older. The second thing is when you try hard to do something, you try very hard, you pray hard, you work hard, and it fails. Fails.

Grace When Ministry Efforts Fail

That's where you need grace. You have a great evangelistic campaign, you work very hard on it, and no one comes to Christ. Or maybe some come to Christ, you're all excited, and you tell others wonderful things God has done, you have your follow-up meeting, and no one shows up.

Remember the follow-up? I know about the tea already. Remember the follow-up meetings we had in Bombay after the ship visited? We didn't get overwhelmed by all the new converts from the open-air meetings.

Somebody did some research into this. If you want to get a case of the depressions, read some of that research. We have to know how to appropriate grace when we try hard to do something and it fails. Beware of the failure syndrome.

You think you're failing so much, most people sense they're failing a lot, most people. There are a few who are caught up in some kind of temporary success ego trip, but it generally doesn't last so long.

Grace When Friends Gossip

Then three, when someone, especially a friend, gossips about you. That's always a great experience, isn't it? You ever get that one on your team? Leaders, you find out someone's gossiping against you, find out they've developed a little nickname for you.

You're the kind of leader that tends to bark in the mornings and wake people up in a way that scares them. You're a bit demanding on them, bossing them around, and so they give you, privately, a little nickname.

Hitler. One of my first teams, one of the members, thought I was a Hitler. You know, there is a slight resemblance, you know. The same alien strain, and it is a strain at times to be an alien, whatever that means.

You know, if we're going to grow up, we've got to know how to handle gossip. If no one's gossiping about you, you're not doing anything. You're probably going to sleep for the last five years. Gossip is as basic to spiritual life in India as microbes in the water.

When you boil the water, I don't know what we're supposed to do with the gossip. We have to learn to appropriate the grace of God for those situations. Then, fourthly, we won't let your tea get too cold, but we need to get a little bit of this before the break.

Grace When Leaders Break Confidence

Fourthly, when a leader you have confided in breaks confidence. This happens, unfortunately, more often than we'd like. I guess we fail to realize that leaders are human. Some of the confidences that get broken, you know, are because the person who received the information forgot that it was confidential.

I know in my own case, I received so much information, you have no idea of how much information I have to pump into my head. An average of four hours, a little more, reading every single day, taking in information, sorting it out in my little mind, of course, filing some of it.

When you're on the road, your files and the material is not always handy, and sometimes without knowing it, I've said something that was supposed to be confidential. Quite honest, I find sometimes it's better for me not to say anything about some things that I don't know, especially, you know, about the women, which ones are pregnant, and then which ones are pregnant, and you're allowed to tell people about it, and which ones it's a secret.

In either case, it's probably not worth talking about it, because everybody already knows. So childish and so ridiculous when we go around sharing all these little confidences, especially in a very sort of rushed, quick way.

We don't emphasize it enough. Just sort of at the end of the conversation, we say, Oh, by the way, keep that to yourself. You know, it's very difficult several weeks later to know, and sometimes we've had people guarding these confidences, you know, very strictly, very carefully, weeks after a public announcement has been made about it all.

He's still guarding his confidence, Lord, help me, guard my tongue, crucify self. It's already been out in the International Weekly. Sometimes it's better to have less confidences, and at least be a little more relaxed about when some of these things leak out, a little more mature, because people are people, very weak, very human.

Sometimes somebody under tremendous pressure uses something that it really had been better not to use in order to try to convince this guy who's coming down on him that a particular thing is not so, and when he uses that, he's using information that he got from someone else, and immediately he's got himself in what we call a pickle in baseball.

I'm sure you don't understand what that is. A difficult situation. Let me tell you what that is. You need to know what a pickle is. In baseball, I used to play baseball, my favorite sport, until my arm didn't grow, and I was the pitcher on the small fry team and then the primary school team.

I went to high school, I had just made the team, and mainly I sat on the bench watching the other people play because the coach said that my arm was too skinny and I couldn't throw the ball fast enough.

But in a pickle, you know, you run to the bases, and if you're on your way running to the base and the man gets the ball in front of you, not running to the first base, but running to the second base, they can pass it back and forth, and you can run back and forth until they tag you with the ball.

Isn't that right, Gary? Sounds about right. Twenty-two years out of baseball land. Anyway, it's a difficult situation. And when we're under pressure as leaders, when we're under pressure as leaders, we need to be careful of what we quote from what other people have said, especially if they've said it to us in confidence.

It's better to use some ground in that discussion rather than quote things that were given to us in confidence or things that are going to just eventually bring more division. Now, I know that from experience because I found with my kind of temperament, when I'm really trying to convince somebody of something, boy, I will start to grab for everything I can.

I've had to repent and get correction. But at that point, you see, we need to learn something that often we don't mean certain things that we say. We're not trying to be malicious. You've just got us in a difficult situation, maybe under pressure, and so we say something.

And here's the mistake. Here's where two wrongs take place instead of one. Then that person, he goes and does the same thing, and the gossip goes, and the talk goes, and the word of God gets hindered.

Learning how to claim grace in that kind of situation. Number five, appropriating grace when someone you have won to Christ loved and helped turns back or even against you. I had many of those experiences in the early years of the work when I was so involved in personal evangelism.

Grace When New Believers Turn Away

I don't say this as a boast. I only say this so that you know where leadership training begins because it's so easy to get a wrong idea of a leader. And you think a leader is an administrator sitting behind a desk writing letters.

I dare to say that I doubt there's as many of you in this room that have ever done as much personal work as I have done with individual souls. I personally feel there's probably just a few of you. That was my whole life.

Personal work. Before I was born, long after I was born. Winning people to Christ. I was extreme, it's true. People accepted Christ when I witnessed whether they wanted to or not. I took course after course in personal evangelism.

I believe this was the way before I ever got into literature. I believe that personal soul winning and discipling that brother, loving him, was the way to reach the world for Christ. And one of the things that has so, so upset me at times about certain ministries in O .M., even the ship ministry, was the fact that so easy we get into mechanical things, spreading the gospel and selling books, and we miss that personal eyeball to eyeball personal witnessing for Jesus Christ, leading them to Christ.

And then following them up by letter. When I led people to Christ in the local jail, I went three, four times a week and started discipling them and training them. We shouldn't even have to talk about follow-up.

Follow-up must automatically be there. There can be no evangelism without follow-up. It's not even evangelism if there's no follow-up. Doesn't mean we have to plant a church. I didn't plant a church in that jail.

It doesn't mean we can always follow-up every single person that we give the gospel to. During that same period, I was giving out tracts, I was doing other things. I couldn't follow-up on all that. But I can always follow-up on some of it.

Well, that would take us into a separate message. But when you get into that kind of work, you're going to have your heart broken. You go into follow-up work, when you go into church planting or establishing anything permanent, you're going to have your heart broken, just like on our teams.

Probably out of one out of every twelve that have ever come on an OM team was a Judas. Of some kind. It doesn't mean, you know, he had to steal. There are many kinds of Judases. It's normal. And we need a lot of wisdom and a lot of discernment, especially when we gather up recruits back door.

I can't believe that some people get so preoccupied with the numbers. The number of people in your state does not determine your impact for God. Certainly you're not that childish yet. Certainly you're not that naive.

Those of you in this room, it's whether they are a spirit-filled group. Better to have smaller numbers. That's always been the teaching of OM. That's not new. We could have been 15 ,000 strong by now, just mainly emphasized America and mainly emphasized OM and built that sectarian mentality, which someone of my type of speaking gift can do if he's not careful.

But we've always believed that a minority of spirit-filled, praying, disciplined people can make a greater impact for the Lord. And the strategy we are moving forward in is no real change. We've been working that way in India all along.

It's just that as God works, there have to be times when we stop and we prune a little. There's no great cutback taking place here. Let's not get carried away with our imagination. Which state have we withdrawn from?

Would you tell me? We're going into Tamil Nadu and Andhra without me hardly even knowing about it. We're not cutting back in any big way. We're doing a little pruning. We're encouraging some people onto new horizons and new dimensions of faith.

We're consolidating a little and until the AIC, we won't even know what has been done because we haven't done too much here except in a few exceptional cases. Because so much of this depends on you state leaders and your team leaders whether you're willing to go back of one heart and of one mind and carry out what we believe the Lord has given to us.

Grace When Borrowed Possessions Are Damaged

Number six, when a friend, this is a very practical thing, you've loaned him something, your bicycle, your cassette recorder, in the West it would be more, your car, and he goes out and he crashes it.

That's a great blessing, isn't it? You've saved for five or six years to buy your bicycle, your car, your cassette recorder. It would be my little music recorder that I carry around. Boy, I loaned that to someone and they went and broke it.

That would be a test. That's a beautiful opportunity, isn't it? To let love cover and to realize what the scriptures teach about accepting the spoiling of your goods. Our hearts do get attached to things, don't they?

They do get attached to things. Nothing wrong with having things. We can use some of these things, that truck, this tape recorder, a typewriter, we can use these things for the glory of God. If you don't believe that then don't use any electricity.

It's all basically the same. Many Christians attack strong electricity. Still some do, even in the United States. It's up to the devil. If you use electricity, if you use an airplane, if you use a bus, then, you know, how are you going to say we shouldn't use a computer or we shouldn't use a tape recorder?

Where do you draw the line? I tell you, it's not easy. It's one of the most difficult areas to find balance. But I want to tell you, if we're not willing to use a little bit of modern equipment, whether it's electricity, tape recorder, a film projector, you know, I think we can forget about evangelizing the world because there are four and a half billion people, four and a half thousand million people out there and the multiplication method and the local church, you know, they all get revived and everybody rushes out, everybody's speaking to one who wins, one who wins, one who wins, one.

Well, for two thousand years we've been watching, we've been watching. Maybe that was God's original program, but the world has been reached because of men like Billy Graham. The world has been reached because of groups like World Vision.

Modern Tools for World Evangelism

The world has been reached because of Christian radio and Christian literature. Without those basic tools, not even a fraction of the people in the world today would have been reached. And we should never put personal evangelism in that discipleship, the simple type of going about things like Sadhu Sindhu Singh did with making use of the tools that God has given to the church in the twentieth century, whether it be a vehicle, a computer, a typewriter, or a cassette recorder.

Grace When Valuable Things Are Lost

Number seven, when you've lost something valuable and after fervent prayer it never shows up. You ever lose something really valuable? Your whole wallet with money, passport, whatever else? You pray and pray and pray and you've heard these tremendous testimonies, I have some, of praying back lost things.

So you pray and you pray, it never comes back. We've had many, many things lost in OM. I might put a practical exhortation in here, you know, learn to take care of your things. Learn to take care of your things, especially if you have something like a camera or a cassette recorder.

I tell you, they're just natural targets. They're just natural temptations. And you know, last year again, we lost a lot of things being stolen. Be careful when you're carrying money. All the way around, we need a lot of care.

But you know, when it happens, God wants you to know how to rejoice and appropriate grace for that practical nitty-gritty situation. And to understand that prayer doesn't manipulate God. We often learn through an experience when we don't see the answer.

As Tozer said, we learn more through that than we do when we see great answers to prayer. Number eight, when you felt you had a victory over a particular sin and then you fall again. You've even testified about that deliverance, how the Lord gave you deliverance and how you learn through meditating on the Word, through walking in the light with others, through claiming the power of the blood, you've learned victory over that.

Grace in Repeated Spiritual Failure

And then it happens again. And again! That's where I've seen young, immature Christians really blown away. They can handle their first failure and their second failure. It's the fifteenth failure. It's the twenty-fifth failure that they just finally said, Christianity doesn't work.

For I have no good. We are in a great warfare. We're in perpetual struggle. The Word says, the flesh rustles against the spirit. The spirit against the flesh. The two are contrary. And I believe in this great war with thousands of battles, we're going to lose quite a few.

I've lost quite a few. Maybe little ones, unnoticed by others. For me they were pretty big at that time because I was sure I had finally licked that thing. Finally licked that bad temper. Maybe went, I mean I must have went once for a year without a single Bavarian temper flip out.

Oh, the irritability I had instilled. You know, I lost a few of those. And then, boom, at a particular moment it happened. And I thought, you know, God, where's all this grace and victory and power? You know, I've had people pray over me.

I'm the kind that tries anything, man. If you want to pray over me standing on my head, I'll do it. When I was thirteen, I used to have an act in the Boy Scouts and one of them was standing on my head flipping over double flips, all kinds of things.

People came out and watched this guy with a flat head. You know, I'm willing to take chances. But, you know, that doesn't bring spiritual life. It doesn't bring spiritual life. May it help. Chuck Gacy.

Grace When Loved Ones Die

And then number nine, when one of you truly, one you truly love gets ill, you pray hard, so do others, and the friend dies. Happens. Happens all the time. Dennis Clark was the greatest healing ministry in England.

On a tour of Australia, suddenly finds out he has leukemia. Comes back to the hospital. People are praying. His wife is praying. We need this man, the founder of Intercessors for England. Many people are praying.

I get word, it looks like he's really healed, really coming back, praise the Lord. I arrive back in England after my Middle East trip, the last one, he's dead. First thing I do is go to his funeral. There with his children.

There with his wife. Relatively middle-aged man. You know, all of us have to die. And when it's God's time for a man to die, all the prayer of all of God's people will not make the difference. It's perfectly normal to pray.

God doesn't mind. He knows you're a human being. God's not going to condemn him. You don't pray for him and then have to take him. He'll let you pray, but you must be willing to learn through that experience, not my will, but thy will, O God.

Such a fear of death. Most often, God's people say I'm going to be realized and privileged. Glory to splendor. I'm going to heaven. Something I've only slightly comprehended myself. When it is a loved one, it is someone close.

There's nothing wrong with tears and nothing wrong with sorrow. We, again, are human beings. You have to preach that the husband, the widow, standing there in the front row. What do you do? Look up and say, Praise the Lord, sister.

Hallelujah. Jesus loves. Let's sing a little gospel jingle. I arrived back in England from another trip. Most times I go back from Asia. I have a crisis when I get back there. Most times. I went back from another trip out here in Asia and my friend, the man who helped start he suddenly had a heart attack and he was gone.

There I was in the funeral with his young wife. She never recovered from that. I think back sweating. Never recovered. It was his second wife, his first wife, was a very godly woman. Was on her way in the early years.

She also suddenly died partly through probably malpractice in the surgery. Oh, I heard this anointed man of God. I will tell you, you may not think the Anglican Church is the most ruling thing in planet Earth, but there are some of the most anointed men I've ever heard are in the Anglican Church.

And this godly bishop gave this message at that funeral. He said more in 15 minutes than I can say in 45. Well, now you're in the place of sorrow in the life of the belief. It's good to know that, isn't it?

Grace in Difficult Relationships and Rejection

And then number 10, just two points, so we'll go for tea. When you have wrong feelings towards someone, you work to get victory and fail finding it even harder to love that person. That's a perpetual battle.

And I think in this area, again, we fail to really accept our humanity and to realize we're going to have different vibrations about different people. We're going to have different emotions about different people.

And many of our relationships we will have to continue to work on. We will have to continue to bring our whole spiritual being under the crucifying surgical hand of our Savior. So don't be surprised and claim the grace that God can give in some of these sticky, difficult relationships which seem to be an ongoing battle.

And then lastly, when someone openly belittles you, someone openly rejects you, someone openly shows that you are wrong publicly, you ever have a public exposure experience? You know, leaders, don't, don't, don't publicly expose your team members in front of other team members.

That is not the way to do it. Don't publicly rebuke somebody because you think he spent an extra rupee on something. You deal with that privately as much as possible. All that kind of thing is done privately.

Now there are cases where maybe in the midst of the team meeting someone does and says something really off and you have to at least say something publicly maybe to bring the situation into balance as much as possible.

You need to confront people very compassionately. And I want to tell you, one of the greatest mistakes leaders make is their inability to confront people in a way that the person does not feel belittled or reduced to something less than human.

And I will tell you, don't let any kind of pride get into your leadership. Before God, you are still a sinner. And if you go to correct someone, you go with a spirit of humility lest you fall, lest you do the same thing and someone has to come along like Ray and Alfie and correct you on the same point.

I have found that sometimes leaders demand from their followers what they are not willing to give to those over them. And that sometimes a state leader or a national leader is willing and wants a very strong control over his little troops but he doesn't want very much control over him.

And if you're trying to correct him on something, suddenly you find you've got an argument. We need to understand how important it is to not only teach people how to submit but to learn a little about submission ourselves and then at the same time understand when things do go wrong, when you are belittled, when you are misunderstood, when you are rejected, there is still grace.

There is still grace, supernatural grace that can take you down the road weeping and praising the living God even if it's after a few tears. Oh, I've shed a few tears. And I hope, I hope you know how to weep.

Prayer for Grace in Every Circumstance

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your mercy to us ministering to us this morning. We thank you, Lord, that you give grace to many different experiences of life, little things, big things, misunderstandings, criticisms, gossip, things being lost, things being broken.

Lord, I know that I'm going to have to put this all in practice. Grace to get on airplanes, grace to go back to all kinds of unpredictable situations. Lord, we know, we know at times it might be easy.

We're all vulnerable. We're all vulnerable. And we believe, Lord, you can give grace. For your strength is made perfect in weakness. Your grace is sufficient. We stand on your promises. We believe your word.

That is the anchor. That is the foundation of this work and our lives. And there we stand by your grace. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. We're here now to the second message on this particular morning.

Facing Crisis Rather Than Escaping Pain

An interesting quotation. I think the Lord gave me this quotation when I was in Bombay many years ago. It's from that book The Psychology of Jesus and Mental Health by Raymond Creamer. It shows how God uses circumstances to bring us to the end of our self and to really teach us what life is about.

The archangel is trying to maneuver us by pain and sleeplessness into a crisis experience. So we will have to face reality. But we thwart the purpose of pain by taking an aspirin or a sleeping pill. Thus we avoid the pain and refuse to get at the real cause of our trouble.

The archangel scratches his head wondering what next he can do to push us into a corner. He tries a financial crisis. But Aunt Mary pays the bill and again we refuse to accept the crisis. The crisis experience has an opportunity to face ourselves.

Now I don't read that because I'm against taking aspirins. But there is something about us that so loves to get away from the pain. So loves to get away from the crisis. And I think you know in India we at times have been trying to run away rather than face the issues.

God has allowed this tremendous suffering to take place in Bombay. And I believe it's helping us. God's got us in a corner to make some changes that need to be made that this work be pure and that we be more united and that we be willing for some pruning.

And we just praise the Lord for it. Let me give you another quotation. I hope all of you men in training, women in training, have a quotation book. I don't know if I have one with me right now because I often take things out of it and just print.

Yes I do. This is my quotation book. It's getting old. I have to keep it in this plastic bag. But whenever I get a really good quotation, something that's a nugget of truth, it may have taken years for that man of God to get that nugget of truth.

I get it in this little book. Or at least I get it on paper. I have several files because he built it up a lot over the years. I cannot tell you how much that has ministered to me and how valuable that is.

You know, some of the old preaching is a little bit weak because they don't know how to use other people's spiritual truths and because not too many OMers are coming up with too many jewels themselves.

And your preaching will be a lot stronger as you use the word of God and also you use powerful antidotes, stories, in presenting the gospel. Let me give you this little quotation. General Montgomery was one of the great generals in Britain.

Seven Qualities of Christian Leadership

Supposedly he was a Christian. We don't know. He gave seven ingredients to military leadership. Now we're in God's army. Some of the things in the military are of no value to us. Every comparison in scripture we need to know where it ends.

The comparison of us being soldiers, we need to know where it ends because otherwise we get into a lot of gospel teen soldiering which is of little value. But here's seven ingredients to military leadership.

Number one, he should be able to sit back and avoid getting immersed in detail. Now in Christian leadership where we're also humble servants, we've got to have discernment as to when to get immersed in detail, even the simplest thing for the sake of Jesus in our simple walk with Christ.

And when in our leadership of the work we have to pull back so that we're able to really make objective, sane, well thought through, well played through decisions. Okay, number two, he must not be petty.

Petty. Petty. P-E-T-T-Y. We're getting English lessons here. It's quite funny to walk past a school here and hear this lady teaching English. Go listen to her. Quite interesting. Petty means you're bothered over small things.

Someone borrowed your pen and they forgot to return it and you're in a big flack. You're in a big huff about that pen. You're working on a message against pen-taking. Getting upset over little things, especially when it has to do with your own something touching your own ego.

God doesn't want us to be petty. A lot I can say about that. Number three, he does not want us to be pompous. New words, huh? Pompous. You know, we're better than the others. We're the leader. We're the team leader.