Lecture 3: Red Flags in Your Ministry

Course: Spiritual Life of the Leader

Lecture 3 Red Flags in Your Ministry

Which do you love more, the Lord or the projects you are doing for him? Is your goal to exalt the Lord or build a personal kingdom? Essence of anxiety is whether or not you can trust God. The question to ask when you begin having feelings of self-pity is, “Is you life going to be defined by how you think it ought to go?” The blame-shame mindset is that you are unhappy because there is something wrong with the people around you. When you experience these red flags in your ministry, you should recognize it as time that it’s possible that the Lord may be prompting you to make a change in your life. The Mary in you must rest at the feet of Jesus if the Martha in you is to do her work.

A. Example of Red Flags

I want to talk about red flags in minister. I need to understand that when I see this red flag, it is warning us of something and we experience this warning in minister. This may be a call from the Holy Spirit for me to step back and find out what the Lord is trying to say to us. Could there be a better way? Okay, so what did Martha fear? She perhaps feared that her project would fail. In this, we need to let the Holy Spirit press us into considering what the Holy Spirit is saying in regards to understanding love. Do I love the work I am doing or the ministry that I am doing? Do I do the project that I do for our Lord or do I love him more? It is kind of a pressing question for us today in terms of what is really driving my life. So she is afraid that something is going to collapse, even in the midst of her good work for the Lord. If you dig beneath the story, you will certainly get a sense that she is also afraid of not measuring up. She will not be seen as worthy; others will not see her as worthy or perhaps worth, others will not see her as being confident. You see this in Asian based cultures. You see drive, drive, and drive in order to excel and prove your worthiness. There is an interesting term that the Singaporeans use a lot. I think that it is a Chinese Mandarin term, keyasue; the idea is that there is not enough to go around; not enough resources to go around. So you have to drive harder than others around you. You have to work and work. So Martha had some sense that she wouldn’t make an impression upon Jesus. This raises a red flag in itself; who is this ministry really about? Has she entered into this ministry for our Lord in order to promote herself, to be in good standing before Christ? This is a huge issue for us today and there is this word, ‘object pole.’ What is the object pole for your work? What is the work centered on? Is our work centered on exalting our Lord? Or is our work focused on building a personal kingdom?

This business of building a personal kingdom can be cloaked under the garb of mercy. In other words, you can cloak all of this as being Christian all done in the name of Christ, yet at the very heart and center of this world view is pride and ego. We will come back to some of these points in the course so please keep them in mind. In some of the crises of ministry, is the Lord allowing things to collapse, allowing things to come undone in order to get us out of this self-centered egotistic way of life that is only interested in what I gain or what I am able to build for myself?

Another red flag that we need to look at is agitation. There is also anger and clearly any anxiety is connected to something specifically. For instance when I drove out in the rain yesterday from the Portland Airport on roads that I hadn’t driven on before, there was some concern over this. Anxiety is very broad; it is a looming sense that life may not be good after all; that I really need to be concerned about everything. The bottom line of anxiety is considering whether God is good, life is good and can I trust the movement of God in my life? Not only do you have this broad sense of nervousness about life but a specific fear and for Martha, this could be the fear that her meal would not work out.

There are other issues in this event that were important. When you start unfolding her own self-perception of what she was experiencing. This is especially so when you see her question, ‘Lord, do you not care?’ Now, in my audience here I want to ask what is she saying and experiencing in her own life? She is experiencing disappointment in others and this includes Jesus. What else is going on? Think about what else is happening in her own life? That is correct; it is self-pity. She is not only disappointed but she is experiencing self-pity. The minute you start feeling sorry for yourself is the minute that there is an open door that wraps life around with what you experience, whether it is going as you think it should go. This is a red flag; is my life going to be defined by how I think it ought to go. When I’m disappointed, what is that saying? Do we think that God isn’t arranging things the way he really ought to be arranging them? So, who is at the center of the world when this happens? We think that we are at the center of the world when this happens. So, self-pity is normally a fairly serious lapse for us that allow all sorts of darkness to come in.

She also entered into the blame-shame game. This makes an equation in life. This is an equation that will kill a relationship, it will kill a marriage. It will kill a ministry. It is very common to hear pastors talk about how great their situation would be if they just didn’t have to deal with people. Of course, it doesn’t work that way or if we didn’t have certain sets of people; sometimes, there is truth in this but I’m not sure we will have time to look into this. So what is the equation? I’m not happy equals what? There is something wrong with you. I’m not happy equals something being wrong with the people around me. Do you see why this is such a devastating equation. That is saying that I am the center of all that it is and I expect everyone else to come in place around me. We were driving to Nashville, Tennessee one time with my two grandchildren and one of my daughters; the grandchildren were out of control and I told them to behave. Afterwards, I heard one of the grandkids say, this is granddad’s world and we just have to live in it! The people in our world, including the people we serve are not orbiting spheres of self-servitude, spinning around us who are there to make our lives happen. That is not a Christian world view. I realize that I am guilty of all of these.

So, there is this whole business for Martha of controlling others. Control becomes a huge factor; it is a huge red factor in terms of a disintegrating setting where self is being exalted, that is self-understanding and self-will is taking priority over everything else. Was she trying to make up for a self-perceived deficit? Did she have a sense that she just didn’t measure up? Measuring up is a bit of an American idiom; better wording would include not being self-complete or not having everything she needed to be confident in herself. She felt that she had to resort to these types of behavior in order to make up some type of deficit in my life. This is what’s going on when Jesus speaks with love to her and speaks a gracious word to her.