3. Limits
It was a heart-revealing moment, more revealing than I wanted it to be. I was a bit embarrassed at the moment of exposure, but it was good for me to face what was in my heart. I was speaking at a large men’s conference and was asked that if I could choose a superpower, what would it be. Others had chosen the ability to fly or to be incredibly strong, but I immediately said, “I wish I had the power to create ten days in a week.” In so doing, I was once again confronted with the fact that I hate limits. I want more time so I can do more than time allows. I want more strength so I can accomplish more. I want more wisdom so I don’t have to invest so much time researching and learning. I want to be infinite and almighty. Yes, it is true; there are still moments in my life when I want to be God.
I wish I could say that I am free of the frustration of the limits God has set for me, but I can’t. I wish I could say that I never am tempted to work outside those limits, but I can’t. I wish I no longer had to pay the price for denying those limits, but I still do. In ministry it is tempting to try to do more than you can realistically and healthily do. It is tempting to write job descriptions for others that ask more of them than they can responsibly handle. And it is tempting to let a leader work way beyond his limits because his work seems essential to the success of the ministry enterprise.
———
She represented thousands of lonely, frustrated, and discouraged ministry wives who have watched their husbands give themselves to ministry while denying the limits that God had set for them. She had watched her husband progressively wear down and burn out. She had watched ministry rob him of exercise, sleep, healthy community, quiet devotional meditation, and good diet. But most discouraging, she had watched him become an absentee father and a distracted and distant husband. He lived and worked as if he had no limits, and his family paid the price. She tried to talk to him about it, but when she did, he was defensive. His view was that he was doing the Lord’s work. He was using the gifts God had given him. He lived with love for the church, zeal for the gospel, and commitment to God’s kingdom. His busyness and his zeal blinded his eyes to the danger he was in and that he had placed his marriage and family in. When she tried to talk to him, he would leave the conversations angry, hurt, and discouraged. But on this weekend together, she was determined that they had to talk because she was afraid of what would happen if things continued as they had been. This time she didn’t talk about him but rather told him that she was done; she just couldn’t live this way any longer. The conclusion for her was this: “It’s me or your ministry. I can’t do this anymore.”
I wish I could say this is the only such story that I’ve heard, but it isn’t. I am afraid that in the excitement, opportunities, and busyness of ministry life, many of our leaders forget, deny, or ignore the fact that they have limits. The only limitless being in the cosmos is its Creator. Everyone and everything has been designed by God with limits, and it never works, never results in anything good, to attempt to live, minister, and lead outside the boundaries of the limits God has set. Identifying those limits and what it means for the way a leadership community makes decisions and does its work is a vital aspect of what that community needs to do to assure that its members remain spiritually, physically, emotionally, and physically healthy. Every leader is a package of God-given gifts and God-assigned limits. It is dangerous to focus on the one without humbly remembering the other.
If you’re a leader, you don’t know everything, you can’t do everything, you aren’t completely mature, and you don’t have inexhaustible energy. You are not just a package of strengths, gifts, and experiences; you are also a collection of weaknesses and susceptibilities. It is here that the gospel is such a sweet encouragement. We do not have to fear our limits because God doesn’t send us out on our own; where he sends us, he goes too. We do not have to curse our weaknesses because our weaknesses are a workroom for his grace. We do not have to hide or deny our places of immaturity because God is able. Our limits and weaknesses are not in the way of what God can do through us, but our denial of limits and our delusions of independent strength are.
So I want to consider with you four areas of limits that God in his Creator wisdom has set for us and how constant recognition and humble admission of these limits help a leadership community assess its plans, assign its work, and evaluate its health.
Four Limits
Embedded in Paul’s teaching about gifts in the body of Christ is the clear understanding that gifts are limited (see Eph. 4:1–16 and 1 Cor. 12:4–31). Paul’s word picture of the human body argues this powerfully. The eye has been specifically designed for sight, and because it has, it has no ability to pick up objects. The design determines the limits. The same is true of every gift that has been given to members of the body of Christ and surely, therefore, is true of every leader gifted by God for ministry in his church.
No leader is designed to know or do everything. No leader is meant to do his work alone. It is dangerous for any leader to be so dominant that the gifts of others don’t get expression, leaving that leader to do things he wasn’t gifted by God to do. No leader, because he has powerful gifts, should view himself as the smartest person in the room. Smartness is a subset of giftedness. Every leader needs to rely on the contributions of other leaders who are smart in ways that he isn’t. Ministry must always be done in humble, respectful, and submissive community because the gifts God has given us come to us with built-in limits. By God’s grace I am an influential leader, but I get up every day and do the work that has been assigned to me by people who work with me and are smart in ways that I am not because they bring gifts to our work that I do not have. I would be silly and proud to dominate every discussion and make every decision and assign every task.
Every leader needs to humbly assess not only where he is gifted but also, and as important, where he is not. It is only when I humbly acknowledge the limits of my gifts that I can then surround myself with people who are gifted in ways I am not, smart in ways I will never be, and strong in areas where I am weak.
I am afraid that one of the reasons the ministry leadership community is broken is that we have idolized domineering leaders who fail to recognize the limits of their gifts, who disrespect the God-given gifts of fellow leaders, and who have been allowed to think that they are smart, gifted, and strong in ways that they are not. So they try to do what they were not designed by God to do, they try to manage what they were not designed to manage, and they try individually to do what will only ever be properly done in respectful community with other equally gifted leaders. Pride in one’s own giftedness coupled with devaluing the gifts of others is a recipe for leadership disaster. Independent, domineering leadership is functional denial of what the Bible teaches about both the nature of the body of Christ and the gifting of those called by God to lead it.
If God-given gifts have limits, the fruit-producing ministry is always the result of the recognition and employment of a community of gifts operating in cooperation with one another. No gift should be esteemed over another, and no gift should dominate to the exclusion of others. Leaders must push the gifts of others forward, willing to listen and willing to submit to the wisdom of others who are gifted in ways that they are not. Humble leaders surround themselves not with ministry clones but with leaders who have gifts that they do not and are therefore smart in ways they are not and strong in areas they are weak. This kind of community will always produce a quality and longevity of fruit that won’t ever be produced by a domineering leader. It is unbiblical for any leader to tell himself that he does not need the full expression of the gifts of others in order for him to do the work that God has gifted him to do.
But there is more to be said about ministry leadership gifts. We have witnessed too many uniquely and powerfully gifted leaders begin to view themselves, because of their gifts, as entitled to a level of power, position, and lifestyle that others are not. It needs to be said that when a wonderful gift is given, the only one entitled is the divine giver. He is entitled to our honor, gratitude, and worship and our commitment to steward that gift well.
Being given a gift tells me about me in that I am not self-sufficient but rather needy and dependent. It tells me I have no ability to do God’s work without God’s gifts. I can’t take credit for my gift precisely because it is a gift. My giftedness doesn’t make me worthy of human deference, affirmation, or submission, because my gift doesn’t point to me but to the one who has given it to me. My gifting shouldn’t make me arrogant and boastful. It shouldn’t cause me to think I am deserving. And the gifts I have been given were never designed to function in isolation from the gifts of others. It is sad to see leaders who are influential only because of their gifts take credit for what they could never have done without these gifts, which have been graciously given to them by the hand of God. It’s sad to see leaders use their gifts to accumulate power and acclaim and an enriched lifestyle.
Rather than view our gifts as a doorway to entitlement, perhaps we should view our gifts as a call to be willing to suffer. Permit me to explain. Yes, it is a huge honor to be gifted to speak the gospel, to disciple God’s children, and to lead his church. But hear the words of James: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). Or hear Luke: “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more” (Luke 12:48). With ministry leadership gifts comes a weighty burden of responsibility. The size of your expectancy of yourself, the size of your responsibility, and the size of God’s righteous judgment are connected to the size of the gifts he has given you.
In reality, when God gives you ministry and leadership gifts, he is calling you to be willing to suffer. Because of your gifts you will suffer a kind and severity of temptation that others don’t face. Because of the public nature of your gifts, you will suffer dangerous adulation and harsh criticism. The demands of your ministry life will tempt you to neglect your personal devotional life. The attractiveness of public ministry will tempt you to neglect the private ministry of marriage, family, and friendship. You gifts will tempt you to be demanding, irritable, and impatient with people of lesser gifts or who happen to be in the way of what you want. You will be tempted to confuse your giftedness with your level of spiritual maturity. Yes, it is true: your gifts mean you have been called to suffer for the sake of the giver and what he intends to do through you (see 2 Cor. 1:3–11).
No one leader is gifted in every way, and every leader suffers because of the gifts he has been given. Recognizing the limits of God-given gifts and the responsibility and suffering that come with those gifts is an essential part of a ministry community establishing and maintaining not only its fruitfulness but also its ongoing spiritual health. A leadership community that humbly recognizes the limits of God-given gifts will establish a ministry culture of respectful, appreciative, and joyful cooperation.
Time has been set for us; we didn’t have a vote, and we have zero ability to escape. The time structure that shapes the existence of all God’s creatures bursts off the page of Genesis 1. In one of his first and more significant acts as Creator, God lays down the structure of seven days, along with the structure of Sabbath rest. As a leader, you simply cannot ignore the limits placed on you by this plan and maintain spiritual and relational health and a life of long-term ministry effectiveness. It seems ridiculously obvious to say, but nonetheless important, that you will never get thirty hours in a day, and you will never grab nine days in a week. And you will always need Sabbath rest no matter how mature you become or how many leaders work alongside you.
Every limit that God has set for us has been set because God knows whom he’s created; he knows how we were designed to live and in love does not require more of us than we are capable of doing. Limits not only reveal his wisdom; they also express his love. Limits are not a prison; they are a grace. You cannot allow your leadership community to assign more work to a leader than can be done in the time allotted to him or her. You cannot ask a person to pile work upon work, day after day, without periodic Sabbaths of rest. There are few more important things for a spiritually healthy leadership community to consider than the time limits that God designed for his creation from the get-go.
One other observation about the time contraints we live within. These were part of God’s perfect plan for people and for a world that had not yet been damaged and complicated by sin. If in a perfect world these were seen as a necessity for sin-free people in an undamaged world, how much more significant are they for us as we now grapple with the exhausting complications, discouragements, brokenness, and temptations of the surrounding world and with our own divided heart and its conflicting motives? Sin causes us to push against God’s wise and loving boundaries. Sin causes us to deny our susceptibilities and to assign more power to ourselves than we have. Sin tempts us to think that we know better and that we do not need what God knew we would all need.
But let me make even more practical the importance of a leadership community recognizing and submitting to God-given limits of time. I want to paint a visual in your mind. Picture a triangle of interlocking circles, with one circle at the top point and two interlocking circles forming the bottom of the triangle. So there are three interlocking circles of the same size. Those circles are meant to represent the three vital dimensions of your life. The top circle is your spiritual life (I know that all of life is spiritual), that is, your life of personal worship, devotion, and spiritual discipline. The left bottom circle is your relational life, that is, marriage, parenting, body of Christ, friends, and neighbors. The right bottom circle is your labor life, that is, your life of gospel ministry and church or ministry leadership. These are the three major areas of your life that God has designed to fill your 24/7, along with the Sabbath of leisure and rest. Above, below, right, and left of this pyramid of interlocking circles of calling and responsibility, you have nothing, because you will never have 29/7 or 24/10.
Now, stay with me here. This means that as one of these areas of your life grows, it can’t grow outward, because there is no outward. God chose to give you only twenty-four hours in a day and seven days in a week, and you will never get anything more. So if one of these three circles grows, it will of necessity cause another circle to shrink. This is where a leadership community gets into trouble. When you unwittingly deny God-given limits of time, you assign more ministry work than a leader can do without shrinking the amount of time he can invest in other vital and unavoidable areas of calling and responsibility. How many ministry families have been damaged because ministry work began to take up family time? So more ministry means the leader spends less than the needed time investing in his marriage, parenting his children, fellowshipping with his church family, and serving his neighbors.
As leaders in the body of Christ, we have to quit acting as if balancing family and ministry responsibilities is the inescapable catch-22 of ministry life. God is too wise, loving, patient, and kind to ever do that to us. We have to resist a “try harder, do more” leadership culture that results in unrealistic expectations, achievement idolatry, and a whole basket of bad fruit. I’ve written and spoken about this before, but I must also mention it here: in the New Testament there is no lengthy or detailed discussion of the tension between ministry and family that we seem to take for granted. This discussion is not there, because the Lord of the church would never call us to one area that would necessitate our neglecting or disobeying another such area. One of the reasons that tension is so often there is that we tend to ignore or deny the wise and loving time limits God has set for us. It really is possible to have a spiritually and relationally healthy family (circle of fellowship and friends) and have a dedicated and productive ministry life at the same time.
The limits of time is yet another argument for ministry always being done in community, so that no single leader attempts or is assigned to do more than he can responsibly do while also giving proper focus to the other things that God has called him to. Are your leaders working too long and too hard? Are their assigned responsibilities setting up tension with other areas of life? Do you have a mechanism for monitoring this? Are your leaders worn out? Have you watched leaders burn out? Have you talked to wives or friends to see how those relationships have been affected? Are your leaders too busy to give adequate time to worshipful devotions, meditative study of Scripture, and a robust life of prayer? Is this concern a regular part of your discussions together as a leadership community? Do you provide Sabbaths of rest for your leaders? How often does the issue of time come up when you gather together? Is ministry and the desire for ministry achievement balanced with a commitment to relational and spiritual health in each of your leaders? As you think about God-ordained limits of time, what changes are needed in your leadership community? A spiritually healthy leadership community always does its work with God-designed limits of time in view.
Let me just say it from the start here: none of us is infinite, self-sustaining, self-sufficient, or self-rejuvenating. We all are a package of limited energies coupled with certain weaknesses and held together by divine grace. So a spiritually healthy leadership community that produces long-term ministry fruit is aware that every leader is created by God as a duality. We are not a community of disembodied souls. Everything you are and everything you do is shaped by the fact that you are both spiritual and physical. As I listen to the conversation of the church and ministry leadership community, I hear a lot about spiritual health but little about physical health. By God’s plan, you and I have limited energy, and not stewarding our physical selves will seriously sap whatever natural energies we do have.
Physical health must be part of the conversation and the shared responsibility of every member of the leadership community. Just as we care about one another’s spiritual health, we should have concern for and care for one another’s physical health. This should not be a taboo topic. It should not be viewed as intrusive. Leaders should not be resistant or defensive when this issue is put on the table. It is one of the ways we are called to love and pastor one another. This is where Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 9:24–27 are interesting, in that as part of his gospel calling he keeps his body under control. You may be thinking, Control to what, for what? The answer is, control to the Christ of the gospel for the sake of the spread of the gospel. What Paul is saying is that until the Lord returns, we will have colliding passions in our hearts. Perhaps it is my passion for food colliding with my passion to invest my energies in gospel ministry. Perhaps my passion to chill out collides with the fitness I need to get up and do spiritual battle every day.
In order to finish the race and not be disqualified, we all must say no to passions of the body so that we can run the ministry or leadership race we have been called to run. Bringing our body under subjection doesn’t begin with diet and exercise, but with searching for and confessing idols of the heart that interfere with the discipline to which we have been called and which grace makes possible. You see, the stewardship of our physical body is not an addition to our gospel ministry calling; it is a significant part of it.
Several years ago I looked at myself and had to admit that not only was I overweight but I was overweight because of acceptable Christian gluttony. Here’s how it happened to me (and I know I am not alone). If you gain a half a pound a month, you will not notice it, but that’s six pounds a year and thirty pounds in five years. My eating was an acceptable form of idolatry, which did not portray the power of the gospel and robbed me of natural energy. I knew that diets don’t work, because you can’t starve yourself forever. So I confessed my sin, completely changed my relationship to food, and got serious about exercise. Over several months I lost forty pounds and have maintained that weight now for many years.
As a leader moves through his thirties, forties, and fifties, he can’t continue to eat as he once did, and he surely can’t follow whatever food passions he has. I know I am stepping on toes here, but I am convinced that widespread church and ministry leadership gluttony is robbing us of both gospel consistency and physical energy. The church is sadly inflicted with lifestyle diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and fatty liver. A ministry leader once told me that his physician told him that if he lost fifty pounds, he would no longer need his diabetes and blood pressure medication.
Regular exercise boosts and builds energy. Perhaps many of us are tired all the time not because of the rigorous demands of ministry but because of the lack of rigorous physical exercise in our normal routine. It is my love for my Savior and his gospel that causes me to eat with discipline. It is my love for the gospel that makes me get up and go to the gym or get on my road bike morning after morning. There are mornings when this is very hard to do, and there are times when I am self-excusing. But, for me, these are not ancillary issues; they get right to the heart of how the gospel empowers me to live and to the heart of the gospel race I have been called to run as a gospel leader.
I know this conversation is hard, but it is one we need to have. I would never judge others because of their weight, but I think we must talk about stewarding physical health in our leadership-community conversations. Because our Lord created both our spiritual and physical selves, because he knows our battle with our passions, and because the gospel permits us to be unafraid of candid conversations, we should be glad that we can put hard topics on the table before a God of glorious love and with the community of love that he has blessed us with. This conversation is not about being legalistic or judgmental but about joyfully living in the freedom of the gospel, which is not only our core message but the daily hope of everyone in our leadership community. A spiritually healthy leadership community cares not only for the spiritual health of its leaders but for their physical well-being as well.
I have written extensively about maturity in Dangerous Calling, so I won’t say much here, but limited spiritual maturity of every member of the leadership community needs to be the assumption of everyone in that community. What I mean by this is that every leader is a person in the middle of his own sanctification. No matter how long we’ve been in ministry leadership, no matter how well trained, no matter how theologically mature, we are all still in need of future spiritual development. We all have blind spots. We all have areas of susceptibility to temptation. Each of us has character weaknesses. We are all still in need of the rescuing, convicting, transforming power of the gospel.
So a leadership community must not make assumptions about its leaders that keep them from having gospel concern for one another and candid community conversations. Leadership communities need to commit to pastoring every member of that community. We cannot allow any member to live in spiritual isolation and separation. God has called us not just to the external work of gospel ministry but to leadership “one anothering” as well. I will repeat throughout this book: it is my experience, as I have dealt with fallen or lapsed pastors, that around them was a weak or dysfunctional leadership community that failed, in pastoral love and care, to protect that leader from himself.
Every leader needs to be the object of ongoing discipleship, every leader needs at moments to be confronted, every leader needs the comforts of the gospel, every leader needs help to see what he would not see on his own, and every leader needs to be granted the love and encouragement to deal with the artifacts of the old self that are still within him. If this is so, then we cannot be so busy envisioning, designing, maintaining, evaluating, and reengineering ministry that we have little time to care for the souls of the ones who are leading this gospel work. A spiritually healthy leadership community participates in the ongoing personal spiritual growth of each one of its members.
Until we are on the other side, we will live, minister, relate, and live with limits. Those limits are not in the way of what God intends to do through us, because they are all the product of his wise and loving choice. What he calls us to is possible to do inside the limits that God has set and that we will not successfully escape. So it is part of our gospel calling to have those limits before our eyes and in our leadership community conversations. We must resist the temptation to live outside those limits or to make the assumption that we are all dealing with our limits in ways that are humble and wise. God is not afraid to call limited people into gospel leadership, so we should not be afraid, with gospel humility and hope, to put those limits on the table, not just once, but again and again, knowing we will need to retain this commitment until God’s work in us is complete.