Spiritual Leadership (part 3)

Our Father in heaven, we are thankful for all the blessings that are ours in Christ Jesus.

Father, we think of all the needs we have in the church body, in our own lives.

Lord, we would pray that you would just put those things out of our minds, even for these next few hours as we worship and have fellowship.

Father, we pray that you would bless our time this morning as we look to your word, principles of leadership, and just the basic Christian life, and pray that you'd bless each one here in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, I started, I wanted to do this series for a number of reasons, but one of the things that really struck me, let me just give you a little story.

I'm kind of famous for one thing, and that's getting people fired. Okay, it's not really true, but let me give you a little story.

Janet and I get saved, and we did what we, I mean, this was like, we didn't take a lot of,

I don't know what kind of family we were. Maybe we were a horrible family. We didn't do a lot of vacations, per se.

We went to see people and not things. So I think it was, well, it had to be 1997.

We did the vacation across America thing, which was,

I mean, it was kind of, it was our second huge vacation, but what we did was we flew to the

Midwest, and we saw Janet's family. We did the St. Louis Arch. We did all this kind of stuff, and then we flew to the

East Coast, and we visited my brother who lives in the

Baltimore area, Baltimore, D .C. We did some touring around there, and then we drove up to New England to see our good friends,

Mike and Kim Abendroth, and stay here for a while when they were living on a little three -bedroom shack there on the lake, and on our way back down,

I knew somebody in Maryland who had ministered to me when I first got saved, and he said, hey, if you're in the area, give us a call.

So I called him, and he said, we're having the church. It was a small church, but it was a wealthy church, and he said, we're having people from the church over tonight.

Why don't you stop by and give everybody your testimony? You know, it would be a great encouragement.

Okay, fine. Do it, that the house is, you know, for a house, it was pretty full.

There were like 40 people there or something like that, and as I gave my testimony, and I'm talking about how

I got saved, and then how Janet got saved, and I referred to her as a

TBN Christian, because that's what she was.

When she first, you know, we left the Mormon church, and she kind of got involved in watching

TBN because of a neighbor we had, and she was watching that all the time, and I said,

TBN Christian, and there was a woman like, in the back, I could still see her. I don't remember her face exactly, but I could see her back by the fireplace, and I don't know why.

I just sort of fixed on her, and as soon as I said TBN Christian, she went like this. I thought, okay, that's not really a good response, but I finished my testimony, and just, you know, rejoicing and everything, and we had fun, and next day,

I get a call from the pastor. He says, Steve, you really opened up a can of worms, you know, and I go,

I can kind of see that, you know. Well, I guess this lady really got busy, and, you know, started all this kind of campaign against the pastor, and within three weeks, he was out.

Thank you, thank you very much. He and I remain friends, by the way. But the point is, you know, as I think about it,

I'm like, well, why was it that she was so appalled by that? And even today, if I say

TBN Christian, there are gonna be some people who are upset about that, and I don't know if anybody in here, what do

I mean when I say a TBN Christian? Okay, Prosperity Gospel.

They're watching the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which amazingly, well, it does broadcast, and it is a network, but you don't have to believe in the

Trinity to be on it, right? They allow Catholics to be on there. In fact,

I remember once, the founder of TBN, Paul Crouch, was on the air, and he says, don't call me a

Protestant, I'm not protesting anything. And I'm like, that's just bad leadership.

But I thought, this is a, we live in a, I mean, it's always been, has there ever been a time when discernment has not been needed?

And the answer is no, why is that? There's a lot of deception out there.

I mean, if we think, in fact, let's just look at 2 Corinthians 10 for a moment. If we think that Satan is somehow on vacation, or that he has basically given up, or that there's a time where the truth reigns and Satan just kind of resigns in defeat, that never happens.

2 Corinthians 10, verses three to five, and these are verses that you really, in addition to all the other verses

I tell you, you ought to know, you really ought to know these verses. Paul writes, for though we walk in the flesh, we live our lives normally in the world.

He's not talking about in sinful flesh. We are not waging war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

Now, what sort of divine power would destroy strongholds? Okay, the

Holy Spirit, okay. The knowledge of the scriptures, the truth, right?

Because what he's talking about here is spiritual warfare in the true sense, which is, well, let me read verse five.

We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey

Christ. Spiritual warfare isn't about possession, and it's not about territorial demons and all that kind of nonsense you read about if you read 1st and 2nd

Pareti. And those of you laughing probably read the books, like the first books

I read when I was saved. That's not spiritual warfare.

Spiritual warfare is these ideas that are raised up against the truth. In other words, they're false ideas.

It's TBN. It's this idea that we can all come together as long as we sing the same songs and hold hands and whatever.

It doesn't matter if you're a Roman Catholic, doesn't matter if you're a Oneness Pentecostal. Oneness meaning what?

No trinity. It's only, you know, God is only the

Father or the Son or the Spirit, and he just changes into different modes. That's why it's also called modalism, right?

You guys are pretty good. You should be teaching. But all these things, and my point is, you know,

I just think about this woman and other people, you know, that same sort of mindset.

And by the way, it crops up here at Bethlehem Bible Church too, where we have people who don't, they don't know what they don't know.

You ever had that happen to you? You're sitting there and you go, I didn't know that. I hope that happens sometimes.

Why? Because nobody knows everything about the Bible, right?

I mean, we should constantly be learning. But when we hear something that is new, what should we do?

Verify it against scripture, exactly. Other thoughts? Something different? I mean, that's what we wanna do, right?

We wanna be Bereans, compared to what the scripture says. If it's true, then we should believe it.

But what's the wrong response when you hear something and you think, hmm,

I don't know if I believe that. I don't know if I agree with that or not. What's the wrong response? Speak, right?

Immediately make your voice, make your opinion known and say, I disagree. You wanna say somebody is a

TBN Christian, I object. Why do you object? Because it's, what?

What does it sound like? Division, judgment, right?

You're putting somebody down for being a TBN Christian. Don't do that. Was I putting my wife down?

No. I mean, if somebody comes to, when somebody comes to Christ, do we expect them to be a fully formed mature

Christian? Well, the answer is yes, we do. But are they, right?

I mean, I know I have baptized people and I thought, okay, this person is not ready for seminary.

This person is not ready to marry an elder, if they're a woman. Of course, today, ready for seminary, it could be a guy, it could be a girl, could be, but we baptize people anyway, why?

Even if they don't have perfect theology, why? Because it's their profession of faith.

And as long as it's a credible profession of faith, I mean, if they say, I'm a oneness Pentecostal, will you baptize me?

The answer is going to be, let's continue to talk about the Trinity, right?

But most people don't even know enough to say I'm a oneness Pentecostal or whatever. So talk to them, and if they have a credible profession of faith, we baptize them.

There's a higher standard for joining the church. There's a higher standard for later on wanting to be a teacher, wanting to be a deacon, whatever.

The more responsibility there is, the higher the threshold is.

But my point here is to urge people, first of all, all of us, to be discerning, but secondly, to think, okay, if somebody says something at BBC, and I don't think that's quite right, well, there are a couple of ways

I could go around it. One is, you blockhead, let me tell you how you're wrong. That would be the wrong way to go.

The other way is to say, to do what? If somebody says something, you go, even whether it's

Pastor Mike or whether it's somebody who just got baptized, they say something, you need to go, I don't think that's right theologically.

What are your choices? Grab a Bible, okay. And then beat them about the head and shoulders with it.

That's so good, Charlie. Ask questions. Did you, do

I understand this right? Did you say, or do you, you know, did you mean to say this or however you wanna frame it.

Don't come across, I mean, it's, you know, the other option is you can say, Pastor Steve, I need to borrow your office in the

Klieg lights, you know. Where were you on? But yeah, just gently ask some questions, make sure that you've understood them right, and then do what?

Correct them, right? This is what we would see in scripture would be the right sort of model.

And the idea is, I mean, really, what would we call that? I mean, we call it correction, but I think another word for it would be what?

Discipleship, right? I found somebody who doesn't know as much as I do. So what do

I do with them? I want to shepherd them, I wanna teach them, I wanna lead them, I want to disciple them, correct them, right?

So we were talking, or we did talk about false teachers, and I wanted to just kind of bring that to you.

I just think there are so many situations, and you know what, I imagine, you know, what's our, okay, let me back up just a second.

That's the right thing to do, what Charlie said. What do we typically do when we hear something wrong? I can put it this way.

La, la, la, la, la, la, la. I didn't hear anything, right? Which is the harder thing to do?

Well, I mean, it's harder to come alongside somebody and correct them, it's easier to just ignore it and let them go off in their ignorance.

It's easier to receive gossip than it is to rebuke the person gossiping.

It's always easier to not do anything, right?

It's harder to kind of step up. Okay, let's talk about wisdom for a moment.

What is wisdom? Somebody's about to say old age,

Charlie. The skillful application of knowledge.

I really like that. You know, it's one thing to know things, right? It's another thing to be wise about how you apply them.

And it's like Charlie said, if I hear something wrong, there are several ways to go about addressing that.

And one is to say, are you kidding me?

You know, the other way is, or the best way is to ask questions, kind of draw them out, make sure you understood them rightly and then walk them through what the scripture says.

But wisdom is the skillful application of knowledge. So first of all, you know, knowledge is requisite, right?

You have to know something before you can apply it. But being wise means,

I mean, and in so many situations I'm dealing with this in counseling situations all the time, not doing what?

If wisdom is applying, skillfully applying knowledge, what is unwisdom?

What's that? Okay, but I just mean, generally speaking, berating them in that situation.

Yeah, Egbert. Okay, knowing what to do and not doing it, right?

That would be slacking even, but what is the typical unwise thing that people do?

Emotional reaction, right? Situation not in this church, but I listened to this man describe this situation to me and I don't even wanna go into the details, but I just thought, how could you do this?

But it's easy for me, my dotage here to look at what people do and to just go, man,

I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that at all. But then I'm nearly dead. I mean, as you get older sometimes, just that your need to immediately respond and Pastor Bob is restraining himself this morning.

Your need to immediately respond is somewhat slack, it's like the bit in your mouth gets just a little bit sharper.

You learn to just kind of go, you wanna open it up, but there's something that just goes, oh, I shouldn't do that right now.

Our worst decisions are made on emotion and impulse.

True or false? Why would that be? Okay, it's easy, right?

I think something, therefore I do it. Why else? To skillfully apply knowledge to be wise, you have to actually spend some time thinking about it.

Now, sometimes it doesn't take as long, right? Some situations are easier than others.

I think it must have been during, I watched one football game yesterday, I confess. And a commercial came on for an

Aston Martin, vehicle, have you seen this? And I thought, oh, it's a really nice looking car.

Now get this, zero down. So nothing down,

I could go get one today. And the payments on a lease were just a mere $1 ,700 a month.

I was like, is that three bedrooms, two baths? What's the deal on that? That's kind of, you know, full basement on that.

Whew, a lease, something.

Now, that's pretty easy to just go, that's absurd.

But there are plenty of decisions in life that are not so easy, right? That are not, because we typically,

I mean, there are other reasons that we do things wrongly and they are, you know, greed, you know, just desire, pleasure.

There are a lot of reasons that we make unwise decisions. But our worst decisions are made based on emotion or reaction.

And I think, you know, some, okay, let's put it this way. When you're disciplining a child, is it good or bad to discipline a child?

Is it wise or unwise to discipline a child when you're mad? Unwise, why?

Because you're probably not thinking, really, ultimately, this is for the child's own good.

You're thinking revenge, revenge.

Not a good motive when you're, I mean, first of all, why, you know, it's like we lose sight of this.

You know, we say in Matthew 18, the goal of church discipline is what? Restoration.

The goal of parental discipline is punishment, right?

It's sheer punishment, right or wrong?

Isn't that how the world says, you know, you hear this, you hear corporal punishment.

Is that the goal? No, the goal is restoration.

You want the child to understand that what they've done is wrong, that it's inhibited or broken the relationship between you and them or them and somebody else.

You want that relationship made right and they need to understand that. And being a child, there are different ways that you need to get that message through to them.

But back to the point. The point is this, that our worst decisions are made on emotion.

So if I'm upset with a child and then I decide to discipline that child, in anger,

I could expect a bad outcome. Instead, what I ought to do is take some time and think it through and then apply wisdom.

Make sure that the punishment, as it were, fits the crime and has the goal of restoration.

And there are many, many places in life. I don't care if it's romantic relationships, if it's buying a car, if it's disciplining a child.

I mean, if I asked for examples, I think we could probably come up with 20 or 30 or more examples where emotion -driven decisions are typically the worst.

So as a leader, if you are somebody, I mean, I guess there's a chance that if you, let's say your profession is football coach, you have to have some emotion.

But if you make your decisions, if you style your offense or whatever based on emotion, your offensive line, see,

I'm gonna get too technical here. Your offensive line weighs 110 pounds across the front. And you just said, we're gonna run the ball every time we're gonna knock those

Patriots around. That's probably not gonna happen, right? There has to be some wisdom you have to think through.

In fact, if your offensive line is 110 pounds, you should just quit. Just saying.

Okay, talking about leadership. Another facet of leadership that I wanna talk about is activity.

And this applies a lot to the home as well as other things, spiritual leadership.

Your activities, what are you known for? What is it that you spend your time on?

What's a stereotypical adult male American?

What does he spend his time doing? Watching football, which I did yesterday.

I already confessed, get off my back. Watching football, and then when it's not football season, what does he do?

And eventually it gets down to curling and it's just like ESPN, ESPN 1, 2.

Why aren't there more ESPN 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10? What's that?

Yeah, I mean, I'll turn off the sound and I'll watch some kind of space rugby.

It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's sports, I'll watch it. The best kind of rugby because there's no gravity.

Stereotypical American male, comes home from work, doesn't wanna talk to anybody, turns on the

TV, eats dinner, goes to bed, gets up the next morning and does the same thing, right?

That's kind of the stereotype. What does that say to your wife?

What does that say to your family? I can't be bothered, not interested.

I have better things to do, right? You're self -absorbed, you're all about pleasing yourself.

And what are you teaching your kids? You're teaching them to be self -absorbed, to be selfish.

What you do with your time speaks volumes to your family. Did I see a hand?

Okay, all right. So what sorts of things ought we be doing in our homes?

Should we be doing? We want our families to get the right message, okay?

Becky says, wrestle with your kids, break furniture. No, that's not what she said.

She said, be engaged with them. You know, they wanna play Xbox joint. No, that's not what she said either.

It's good to have conversations, right? Here, let me ask you this. Is this good family time?

Hey kids, let's gather around. Okay, you grab that controller, you grab that controller, you grab that controller, let's play.

And six hours later, we'll have lunch. People do that. And I think it's okay, you know, it's okay to do anything in moderation.

But if you, you know, oh, we're having family time. We did, yeah, Call of Duty, you know, whatever.

I don't know what the latest and greatest thing is. I probably would if I'd spent a couple minutes thinking about it, but I wasn't wise enough to do that.

The point is you want to engage with them on a spiritual basis, right?

It doesn't always have to be that. It can be fun too. Is there anything wrong with having fun? No, no, it's good to, you know, get out and help the kids with snowballs once in a while, that kind of thing.

Just remind them who's bigger. Charlie, that's an excellent point.

If you don't actually have fellowship with them, if you don't actually spend time with your kids, then when they disobey, when they do something they ought not to have done, they haven't broken fellowship because there is no fellowship.

You know, there really isn't a family unit per se that they've kind of wandered away from because the only thing that you guys ever spend time doing is watching you watch

TV or whatever it is that you do. I've known men, you know, on the other end of the spectrum,

I've known men who were so busy in ministry that they had no time for their families. And they weren't even in ministry per se, but they were ministering to the body and neglecting their family.

You know, if you've got a regular job 40 hours a week and you're ministering for 40 hours a week, and then you, you know, whatever's left, my family gets, what's wrong with that?

You know, it's kind of like, well, here

I give to the church. Really, what do you give? Well, after we pay our rents and our cars, notice

I said cars, because everybody's like, well, we have to have two car payments. How can we not have? We pay all our bills and da, da, da, da, da, then the

Lord gets what's left. Well, that's about the same as, you know, after I do all the things that I want to do, that I feel gifted to do, or that I feel led to do, then my family gets what's left.

No. What are your priorities? It's been well said, you know, show me your day runner.

I don't really keep a day runner. I've been thinking I probably should, but show me how you spend your time and I'll tell you what your priorities are, right?

Other thoughts about activities, wisdom. Okay. A leader must be financially prudent.

Can you imagine you have a pastor, an elder, even a deacon and they're bankrupt?

How could that happen? What's that?

It can happen, but okay, assuming you don't lose your job, how did you get to bankruptcy?

Okay, spent more than you make. I mean, that's a pretty basic principle. That's why, you know, out of the whole Dave Ramsey thing,

I was like, I mean, he does a lot of goofy stuff, but if you could just understand a few things in that whole course, here are the two principles everybody should understand.

One is spend less than you make. And save money. It's, I know it's shocking.

It's really shocking. But if you're not financially prudent, if you're not wise, if you're not planning, if you're not budgeting, then you can run into problems.

But I've never met anybody yet who's gone bankrupt, who spent less than they made and save money.

It's almost impossible. I think it is impossible to do because that's not how people get in trouble.

How do they get in trouble? They buy things that are not wise.

They spend their money on the wrong things. They violate Matthew 6, 19 to 21. Do not lay for yourselves treasures on earth, right?

They treasure things on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.

In other words, on these temporary things, and we all like them. There's nothing wrong with goods, but it's when you treasure them, when you really put your priority on them, but lay out for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys, excuse me, but where, and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. You know, when you hear the term, here's one that we hear and we think, we just kind of let it go by.

Impulse buy, impulse shop. What does that mean? Buy without thinking.

Now let's back up for a second. If wisdom is the skillful application of knowledge, and then you buy without thinking, was your purchase wise?

It can have been. It's absolutely impossible for an impulse buy to be wise.

Was it necessarily sinful? I don't know, but I can say it wasn't wise. Why? Because if wisdom is a skillful application of knowledge and you impulse bought something, it means you bought something without thinking.

It can have been wise. Yeah. Not that he would know anything about $2 ,000 guitar.

Nothing, nothing at all. Pack of gum or a $2 ,000. Yeah, or, you know, well, we went to the dealership just to just look and we came home with a $1 ,700 a month car payment.

Well done. I'm still trying to figure that one out.

And why would they even advertise it on TV? Like, you know, hey, if you've given up having a house, how about this

Aston Martin instead? I don't know. It was really weird. Okay.

I mean, the economy must really be cooking when they can come up with ads like that. Financially prudent.

And again, these are things that apply. They apply to the church. You know, 1

Timothy says, if you don't know how to run your own household, right?

And that root word comes from economy, kind of running the totality of your household, not just your wife and your kids, but it's the whole gamut.

It's the way you run your budget, everything else. If you don't know how to run your own household, how are you going to run the church of God?

Meaning, if you haven't been faithful in little things, how are you going to be faithful in big things?

Not to give too many, you know, inside secrets, but when it came to the church,

I mean, you know, when you come and it's a new, a whole new deal for me. I mean, I was a police officer and I come into the church, you know, and I'm sitting in my first elders meeting and I go,

I have a question. Does anybody have a problem with the idea that we have non -members doing the counting?

And the elders are all like, we do that? I said, yeah, we do. They go, well, we shouldn't do that.

It's like, okay. Does anybody think it's wise to have the same two guys count together week after week, after week, after week, after week?

And I said, well, what's your point? And I said, well, I'm kind of suspicious. And I just think if there's going to be a problem, right, it's going to be because these two guys, you know, let's just call them

Steve and Stan. Steve and Stan are sitting there counting, you know, week after week and Stan's going, yeah, you know, things have been really rough lately.

Short, well, you know, Steve says, hey, this offering this week is pretty good. There's lots of money in the

Deacon Fund. Why don't you just go ahead and take 50? It doesn't take long before that just gets out of control.

So it's just, the heart is deceitful. We shouldn't trust anybody. We need to have checks and balances.

And so we changed, we changed a lot of things, but those are just a couple. We need to think, you know, it's like, look,

I love my wife, I trust my wife, but if I don't check everyone, no, I'm kidding. She's not here.

She can't defend herself. She's at home sick. So going right to my house, tell her,

I'll tell her. I don't even, I never even look at our checkbook.

Every once in a while, I'll just go, are we okay? You know, she goes, yeah, we're fine. Okay. A good leader has to be a listener, a listener.

Let's look at Proverbs 18, 13. I mean, there are a lot of principles, godly principles, and I would say leadership principles in the book of Proverbs, Proverbs 18, 13.

If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame. If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.

Well, why would that be? Did you even listen to my question, Mickey? Okay. No, so yeah, sometimes you don't even like comprehend fully what the person's saying.

And I think that's the point of the verse, right? Can you think of situations where either you have or you might, or it's happened to you, where somebody didn't even listen to you finish your sentence before they gave an answer.

So it's like, would you please stop with your question so I can give you the answer, right? I've got the answer.

Just finish with your dopey question. And that's exactly what they're saying here. And again, if we think, and I'll get back to you in a minute.

If we just think about what wisdom is, using Charlie's definition, the skillful application of knowledge.

Can I skillfully apply my knowledge when I don't listen adequately to what the person is asking?

And the answer is no, right? Christine. And you said a couple of things that are really powerful there.

One is the emotional response, right? I can't wait for that person to finish what they want to say, because I really, you know,

I have something I need to say. But I think the other thing you said is super important. And that is pride, right?

And ultimately, we don't listen to other people. Why? Because, sorry, we don't really care.

I'm gonna say that again, because we don't really care. It takes care to listen to the other person.

I'm reading this book and I won't even, oh, I forgot. I was gonna give a couple copies of it away to various people today.

I'll get to that later in the week. But the point of this book, and it's a secular book, but he goes through this stop between this police officer and this woman and it happened in Texas.

And this is because I'm listening to the audio book and it steps along the way. He plays the actual audio, because the police officer had a body cam on.

He plays the actual audio interchange between the two. And I find myself cringing, both of what the officer says and then her response to it.

And I'm cringing and cringing and cringing, because I'm like, oh, don't say that. Oh, don't say that.

Because it's just escalating and escalating and they're both going off emotion and pride.

And eventually this whole situation gets out of control. And then the police officer winds up arresting this woman and she committed suicide a few days later.

And I just thought, God is sovereign, but he uses sinful people to bring about his sovereign purposes.

And in this case, it was just heartbreaking to listen to this whole thing unfold and just go, oh, they just shouldn't talk like that.

But pride is a big reason why we don't listen to other people. And if you want to be, and almost everybody in here should be either a discipler, meaning teaching or shepherding somebody else in the church, or maybe even a counselor, which means kind of, it is sort of a discipling relationship, but maybe it's just for one or two issues and then they move on.

But in order to fully understand somebody's issues, we have to be willing to listen.

Now, can that be frustrating? Can it be frustrating to listen to somebody?

And I can tell you from experience, it absolutely can. I remember one time, went to a house in, lock me out of Flint Ridge.

I mean, if you think of it as like A minus Beverly Hills, you're pretty close. And I mean, this house had an elevator in it.

How many houses have you been in with an elevator? And they said, we went there for a burglary call.

And so we're there and we're listening and we're listening and we're listening and I'm writing down, I'm the rookie. I'm writing everything down and everything that was stolen and the hours and everything else.

And something is said during the course of this whole thing and I was too new to interrupt and my experienced training officer didn't say anything.

And so we go through, I don't know, 20 minutes or so of this whole story. Then I ask a question and we get another 15 minutes and it just kind of goes on and on and on and on.

Well, I don't even know how long we were there. Seemed like a lifetime. And it turned out, were they burglarized?

No. The teenage daughter's boyfriend had taken some things and sort of broken up with her.

But that's not how the whole thing started. They called the police station, said they were burglarized. We got there, they said they were burglarized.

They went on and on and on. They were burglarized, burglarized, burglarized, burglarized. And it's only after asking a couple of questions that we finally got to the truth.

We were probably, I would argue we were too patient, maybe not skillful enough.

But you have to listen. I mean, we didn't wind up turning in a burglary report, thankfully, because it wasn't a burglary, right?

It was a dispute between a boyfriend and a girlfriend. That's a good point.

I mean, sometimes the question to you seems obvious, and so you give the answer.

And sometimes they wanna hear more than just the answer. They wanna understand that you're kind of on their side.

So that's good. I was gonna say too, along with that, sometimes the answer is obvious to the person with more wisdom, hopefully the parent or the leader.

What's helpful, you know, because I used to do this like when I was in middle management, I'll call it.

There are times where it's helpful. I'll get the question from my subordinate or from my child or from whomever.

Sometimes it's helpful to like walk them through. Okay, well, let's talk about that.

You know, what is the right answer? You know, why is that the right answer? Let's just kind of go through the steps a little bit so that, not so that you don't come to me with your stupid questions or anything, right?

That's not the point. The point is to just kind of help you see for yourself because especially as your children get older, right?

I think we need to view it not as, I mean, if you're treating your three -year -old and your 23 -year -old the same way, by the way, your 23 -year -old should be, okay.

If you're treating your three -year -old and your let's say 17 -year -old the same, right? You're doing your 17 -year -old a disservice because your 17 -year -old needs to be reasoned with and kind of coached and led and taught how to think for himself because someday he or she will have to think for themselves, right?

They'll have to make their own decisions. They'll be on their own. They'll be independent. I mean, here's what you don't want.

You know, they've been married for 15, 20 years or whatever and they have to call you and ask you what you think about something relatively basic but not so basic that you're offended by the question.

If they call and ask what sort of flower grows best in the winter, well, that's fine. I don't know what that is, some kind of Arctic mum.

But if they're calling you to ask you, well, hey, they're 40 years old.

They've been a professing Christian for 20 years and they call you up and they say, hey, dad, what should I be looking for in a church?

What were you doing? Were you not listening to me? I mean, I'd be like, I mean, there are some things that you just think, okay,

I should be teaching my kids as they go along so that, I mean, you know, basically here,

I mean, I don't wanna go off in a whole parenting paradigm here. But what is the goal of parenting, you know, or one of the goals?

I mean, we want them to become Christians. We want them to love the Lord. But I always think, you know, what is my basic goal for my kids when they were growing up?

My basic goal was for them, first of all, I wanted them to avoid, you know, some of the bigger mistakes

I made in my life. But my overall goal was I want their lives to be what?

Better than my life, right? I want them to, you know, especially once we got saved,

I was like, I want them to have Christian spouses. You know, I want things to be, and financially I want them to be better off and to be more well -advised than I was, you know, and all these kinds of things.

In other words, I want to put my wisdom into them to the point that they can look at life and make decisions and make better decisions than I did.

Right? Isn't that kind of the goal of parenting? I think it is.

I mean, I'm like, by the grace of God, I think, you know, our kids are doing much better than we were at their age.

But it's a matter of instilling these things and teaching them these things.

And really, ultimately, I don't know how I got off on this from listening, but here's the thing, and we'll close here.

If we're good listeners, we're going to be better leaders. And I don't care what the scenario is.

If it's with your kids, if it's with your spouse, if it's at work, if you listen to what the people around you are saying and you take the time to think about it and to then apply wisdom and knowledge and all those kinds of things, people are at least going to respect you.

They may not always agree with you, right? Your kids may not always agree with you, but they're going to think, you know what? I don't fully understand what my dad did.

I don't fully understand what my mom did, but here's what I know. I know she listened to me.

I know he listened to me. I know they heard me. I know they asked questions. They reasoned with me, and ultimately they went against me.

I may not like that, but I respect it. I respect it.

And in time, maybe I'll even agree with them, right? But if you are emotional, if you're rash, if you are a poor listener, then the response of people to you is going to be, okay, not sure if I agree with him, and I don't really respect him.

Why? Because he really didn't respect me.

He didn't take the time to listen to me. He didn't seem to care about my problems. It was like the last thing on his list was wanting to pay any attention to me.

It's important that we listen to people, that we treat them that way. Well, we have to close in prayer.

Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the guidance that it gives us on our interpersonal relationships and the most important relationships that we have.

Just thinking about families, how we lead, how we shepherd. And then in our church, how we ought to respond to one another, listen to one another, bear one another's burdens, pray for each other.

And we can only do these things if we actually take the time to listen, to listen to the point where the other person trusts us enough to really unburden themselves and to share and be open and honest.

Father, make us better leaders, disciplers, and just brothers and sisters in Christ, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.