Spiritual Leadership – Battle of the Call

Yesterday, we looked at three battles that were lost in a young couple’s life that rendered them ineffective and inactive as leaders in Christianity. Once tremendous leaders, they now had many excuses but really not valid reasons. The kingdom of God has been gypped. There were two battles lost before this young couple was faced with a “battlefield of change” and lost the final disabling battle – the “Battle of Me.”

The first battle was the Battle of Prayer. The second battle is what I call the “Battle of the Call.” The prize for this battle is the passionate, focus, intentional and surety that causes people to know that they are doing something that is beyond them and commissioned by God. That is what a spiritual “call” of God is.

The guy in our couple reports, “One morning I was praying and I asked God, ‘God, are we supposed to be at X Church?’ I didn’t get an answer and I began to think, ‘I don’t really know if we are supposed to be there. We have never been at another church since we have been married. I am just not sure so we began to look around.” From that moment, they began to fail to perform their “call” at the church. The young people watched them waffle, not show up and lie about where and why they were going other places. Do you see the error? This couple simply forgot that what they were doing was the CALL OF GOD.

Their commitment, involvement and leadership was not a decision they made but a gift that God gave them. Their productivity for God and time spent in his service were not things they chose to do but things that God called them to do. They did not realize (and do not realize to this day) that they let God down. They chose their question above God’s direction. A call from God is a call from God and is the call of God until another call comes from God. What we do in spiritual leadership is not about us, it is about God. It is not for us or for others but for God. A call to spiritual leadership is supposed to be obligatory upon us because we believe in a Holy God who issued the call. We cannot walk away because we are not in charge. We do not move because of what we know or don’t know, what we think or don’t think, but we only move when God calls us to move.

Here is an example: A young woman makes a commitment to wait on the right guy and wait until marriage to have sex. Her teenage years go with little incident and she makes it to young adulthood. She is called by God to get involved leading the young people at a church. She matures. She is excellent. She is a natural leader being used by a supernatural God. Others begin to get married around her. She prays for the right guy. A guy comes along – she sees him as so awesome and her parents love him. It starts out great but she begins to make concessions in her walk with Christ. Time with the guy begins to take away time with God. She begins to rush into a relationship instead of waiting. She begins to fail in her leadership responsibilities and the youth are gypped. God is gypped. How does she do it? Isn’t it okay to fall in love? Certainly it is okay to fall in love but not a love that comes before a love for God. Now she is not sure she is in the right place at the right time. She does not see it and may never but she is losing the Battle of the Call. She like so many others has rushed into what she wants and is absorbed by her future. She has forgotten that God placed a binding call on her life.

The call of God is not about us, cannot be removed by us and we had better be certain when we say, “God has called me to another thing.” Rarely does God call people away from something that they have not finished. He will most certainly remove them if they are disobedient in it. But call them away while they are obeying but before the task is over? Finzel, in his great book, “The Top Ten Mistakes Leaders Make”, identifies leaders leaving before they finish what they said they were supposed to do as one of the top ten mistakes.

God’s call is binding. To face a battle over God’s call to us, to stand up to the common enemy in spiritual leadership, we have to understand that God’s call is binding, came from him, is not about us, cannot be removed by circumstances or by us.

Spiritual leaders need to be certain that they: are called and commissioned by God before they start the task; remain true to the task because of God; and, don’t change the call but only allow God to change the call. Spiritual leaders who have walked away from a call to something that they wanted need to come out of denial, repent and seek their Father’s face.

As for our young couple – what would their lives be like today if they knew the call of God, understood it and hadn’t left it. How much more would the teens that they served have in Christ? I can hear it now, “You can’t make them feel guilty. It’s not fair of you. They were trying. Maybe they were right.”

Correct! I, nor you can make them feel guilty, only they could do that. Sometimes feeling guilty is common sense for those who have erred. After all, if they were right, wouldn’t their lives be more productive for the Kingdom or is God in the business of disabling his own work?