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Meditation Monday: Thoughts to ponder from this year’s ‘Global Leaders Summit’.

* Bill Hybels opened the conference with his usual setting the tone, inspiring message.
Within this message was much for leaders of all levels.
Bill recognises that the church can’t simply stay where it is, there has to be a desire to move to the next point of the journey that God is calling His church too.
Some, within the church may feel that things are going well, God is being glorified, and not what to move on.

• A thought for the church to ponder, “What is the cost of staying where we are”?

* Adam Hamilton spoke about “leaders falling”! A very difficult subject to cover and one that Adam did very well in his message.

I want to share the • 5 Steps to “Resisting Temptation” that Adam spoke of:

1. Remember who you are: A father, a husband, a child of God.

2. Recognize the consequences of your actions:
“Will I feel better or worse after this?”
“Will it make you feel more of a sense of freedom or more one of shame?”
“Who will be hurt by my actions?”
Think about the worst possible outcome….

3. Rededicate yourself to God:
Stop, Drop to your knees, and pray whenever you feel temptation – doing so is like taking a cold shower.

4. Review struggle to a trusted friend: By telling the secret to another, it lessens its hold/power over you.

5. Remove yourself from the situation.

The above steps need to be applied by all; I’m sure you would agree!

* Bishop T D Jakes closed the conference and was a surprise gem for me. I’ve never heard him speak before.

I’ll close with this last thought From the Bishop, specifically for leaders:

“As leaders we need to gain out direction from God and then feed that through to the church; in doing so we MUST guard against diluting or polluting Gods direction”!

A Thought for Thursday - No Condemnation!

Do you ever get to a time in your life when you feel like you need to turn over a new forest, let alone a new leaf?

Then you decide that tomorrow is the day. You're fired up, motivated and ready to rumble. But when tomorrow gently wakes you, you turn over and hit the snooze button. Know that feeling?

Paul felt the same. He talks about it in the book that he wrote when God's Holy Spirit inspired him.

Read what he says:

^21-23It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.

²⁴I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?

²⁵The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different. ^1-2With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

^3-4God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.

^5-8Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored. (Romans 7:21-8:8, The Message)

Another translation puts it like this:

So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus.

Do you feel condemned? Does something keep telling you that you'll never be good enough? That you'll always hit the snooze button and never get those leaves turned over? I have news for you. If you belong to Jesus Christ:

Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. !

Nuff said.