There is an old adage in journalism that tells writers, “don’t bury the lead.” This refers to placing the most important and attention grabbing elements of a story in the body of an article instead of at the beginning where they belong. As a result, the reader loses interest because no one wants to read through secondary points of information to eventually get to the main point.

I’m learning that this principle should also hold true in our lives and in the ministry of our churches. Far too often we bury the lead in our communication and present people with things that aren’t of utmost importance to either them or us with the result that we waste their time and lose their interest.

In our daily interactions with the people around us, we often spend so much time talking about the weather, the game, or last night’s episode of (fill in the blank) that we never get to what really matters. If all that your coworkers or classmates know about you after weeks, months, or even years of being around you is your ideal outside temperature, you have buried the lead.

In the church, it feels like we often bury the lead when it comes to the most important thing we have to communicate: the gospel. We have the most compelling story available on planet earth. Yet we often hide it beneath a mound of secondary matters that don’t really matter in comparison. Pastors, God’s design for sex is not the most interesting and attention grabbing thing you have to say. God’s plan for parenting is not the most pressing issue of our day. The bold, unashamed, and fresh proclamation of the gospel is. If you are so busy preaching about what people should do that you don’t have time to preach about what Christ has done, you have buried the lead.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that small talk shouldn’t be a part of our conversations. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t give people a vision for the full life Christ has come to give us by applying biblical principles.

But I am saying that there should never be a question in people’s minds about what matters most to us…and therefore to them.

One of the critiques I hear most often about large churches is that the vast majority of the people who attend them have little or no access to the pastor.

It’s true. There is a direct correspondence between the size of a church and the strength of the filter that controls who gets to have face time with the senior leader…

And there is nothing wrong with that. Because it doesn’t rob the people in the church of anything they don’t already have.

What I mean is that if people were honest about why they wanted direct access to their pastor, it would often be because they believe their pastor has something they don’t: a greater level of access to God.

The travesty of this misconception is that it prevents people from enjoying what is in fact already theirs.  If you are a believer in Jesus, there is no more access to God that you can possibly gain. If you are a child of God, there is absolutely no more power to be gained when you already have the same power that raised Jesus from the dead at your disposal.

Ephesians 2:18 says that “through him (Christ) we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” You do not need your pastor to be accessible to you when you have direct access to God through Jesus and the power of the Spirit.

Don’t waste any more time trying to gain access to a middleman. Enjoy the direct, unfiltered access you already have to the One who died to give it to you.

I was watching the Michael Jackson This Is It DVD the other day, marveling at how incredible all the musicians were.  I asked Holly, “How good would you have to be to play in Michael Jackson’s band?”
“You’d have to be the best,” she said.

Of course, she’s right.  It would have been any pop musician’s dream come true to have played with the king.  And if you ask any serious aspiring musician how hard they’d be willing to work for a guaranteed spot playing for someone of that caliber, they’ll say, “I’d do whatever it took.”

But that’s not the way it works.  You don’t get to the peak by putting in massive amounts of work once the opportunity comes your way.  That kind of opportunity only comes your way after you’ve put in massive amounts of work.

How many years do you think Michael Jackson’s guitar players played in their bedrooms before they ever played their first public gigs?  How many club gigs do you think they played before they ever played an arena?  How many arena tours do you think they played supporting opening acts before backing a headliner?  And all of this with no guarantee that the opportunity of a lifetime would ever arrive.

David fought lions and bears privately before he took down Goliath publicly.  Essentially, he was training for an opportunity that he didn’t even know existed at the time.  He’d never heard of Goliath.  He just knew that there was a calling on his life, and he needed to be faithful with today’s responsibilities to prepare for tomorrow’s opportunities.

I love Proverbs 18:16: “A man’s gift makes room for him, and brings him before great men.”
Most of us spend our lives waiting for someone to make room for our gifts…for opportunity to come knocking at our front door.
According to this verse, your gift makes room for you.  It’s by actively operating in your gift that you get the opportunity to ascend to the next level of influence.

The people who get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunities aren’t the people who wait for them to come, then prepare.
They are the people who embrace God’s preparation process long before the opportunities ever arrive.

And when that moment materializes, they realize…this is it…

Following up on yesterday’s post, I think I need to clarify something about limitations.

It is not wrong to know your limitations. An accurate self-assessment of what you’re capable of is a good thing. In fact, if you were completely unaware of yourself, the consequences could be disastrous in terms of your leadership and your pursuit of God’s calling on your life.

But it is wrong to project your assessment and knowledge of what you’re capable of onto God and what He is capable of.

A helpful distinction for us to keep in mind here is the line between being self-aware and self-conscious.

A self-aware person acknowledges their inabilities. A self-conscious person is controlled or even paralyzed by them. A self-aware person realizes that God’s power can overcome their weaknesses. A self-conscious person is so focused on their weaknesses that the availability of God’s superior ability does not even register on their radar.

When your awareness of yourself begins to overshadow your awareness of what God can accomplish in spite of yourself, you know you have crossed the line.