Pastors, God has commissioned you to make disciples. God has gifted you to equip your church members for ministry. And God has committed you to train up not one generation of leaders but to oversee the training of two additional generations of leaders. But are you? Are you doing these things? I know I have struggled to develop leaders. Why? One reason is that I got busy doing church. Each week was filled with sermon prep and then preaching; administration, phone calls, visits. Nothing wrong with that. But weeks would go by, then months. And before you know it a year has passed and I still have not developed a leader. But that’s changing. And I want to share with you how it is changing and what you can do to develop the next generation of leaders at your church. This is Mark Jones and you are listening to Coaching Christian Leaders. Today we are going to answer an all-important question. And we must know the answer to move forward in our leadership development. Here’s the question – How do you know if God is in favor of your plans? Does God support what you are planning? Let me share with you something that I do. And always when I do it I regret it. I get a great idea. I develop a plan. I identify the resources. I contact the people. And I forge ahead. But I forget to do one thing. And because I forget this, often my plans fall flat. What do I forget to do? I forget to include the Lord. I forget to seek His help and I forget to commit this plan or this idea to God. And you know what happens? Eventually, nothing, because God has not established these plans. If you have listened to the first 3 episodes on Leadership Development maybe you have noticed that I have yet to identify a person to train. I have not covered how to select a candidate. That’s on purpose. We are going to lay this whole thing out before we go and identify and recruit trainees. You see I am taking the Field of Dreams approach. Maybe you saw the Kevin Costner film where Kevin Costner’s character, a farmer, hears a voice in the cornfields “Build it and they will come.” And so he does just that. He builds a baseball field. That’s what I am proposing. We are going to build a leadership development program before we even pick out a candidate to go through the program. We are going to create each step and then we are going to ask God to give us the leaders to train. But what if we do all this planning and fail to include God in the effort? It’s possible that when the system is finished there will not be a candidate because we did not include God in the planning. So let’s bring God in now before we get too far down the road. Open your Bibles to Proverbs 16 and let’s consider the first three verses. I’ll read from the King James Version initially. The preparations of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord. 2 All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits. 3 Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established. Of the three verses, verse one is the most difficult one for me to understand. The preparations of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, is from the Lord. So I read through some commentaries, especially those that are language heavy, but they confused me even more. I also considered other translations. Here’s the ESV. The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. Or how about the NIV? To humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the proper answer of the tongue. On and on I studied and finally I selected Pastor John MacArthur Jr.’s understanding of the verse. Here is his note from his Study Bible, “Human responsibility is always subject to God’s absolute sovereignty.” Dr. MacArthur’s note seems to square with the majority of others and the other two verses, 2-3, support the idea. “Human responsibility is always subject to God’s absolute sovereignty.” The Good News Bible translates the verse with the idea that Dr. MacArthur is teaching. We may make our plans, but God has the last word We can make all the plans we want. And we should do so. But always remember, God is ultimately in control, especially when it concerns His church. Now let’s consider verses 2 2 All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits. When we plan, according to verse 2, when we develop systems and programs, there is nothing wrong with that, but...we can be deceived. We can even deceive our own selves. We can with good intention come up with plans and programs that are in conflict with God’s Word. Maybe we find or develop something that is completely out of step with God and His Word. Verse 2 teaches that God weighs our ideas. He examines our motives. He determines the truth in our plans. So if we can even trick our own selves into a less than perfect idea, what can we do? The answer is in verse three. 3 Commit ...
