(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵 I think so. 🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵 🎵Music🎵 Welcome to Leadership Live. This is a special live stream that we are doing on the subject of leadership. And we're going to be giving you some leadership principles from a biblical perspective. And we're so glad that you are with us. And like I said, this is a special live stream we're doing. And it's on the subject of leadership. And we're actually doing this in honor of something that we're launching here at Verity Baptist Church. And it is our biblical leadership institute. In fact, right now here it is 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time in California. And less than an hour from now at 7 p.m. we're going to have our first class in our biblical leadership institute. And I'll talk more about our institute later on in this live stream. But we wanted to do just a special live stream to focus on the concept of leadership. And what we want to do is just do a 30 minute live stream on the subject of leadership. And what I want to do is give a quick leadership lesson. And then also answer a leadership question. And we've asked people to either email in or to leave a comment on questions. And there's a good question that we were given. And I want to take a few minutes to answer that question. And that is a leadership question. So we're going to just jump straight into the lesson. And of course the title of this live stream is the greatest hindrance to your leadership. And I want to speak on the subject of the greatest hindrance to your leadership. And when it comes to the greatest hindrance to your leadership, I would say that it is a lack of developing your leadership. And I think what often happens is that people find themselves in positions of leadership. Either as a husband or a father or a mother. Maybe as a pastor or as an employer, a manager, a boss. And they have a position of leadership, but they don't take the time to develop their leadership abilities. I think that's a grave mistake. I often tell our church people that you should not just assume that just because you're a husband doesn't make you a good husband. Just because you're a father, that doesn't make you a good father. Just because you're a pastor, that doesn't make you a good pastor. And so on. I think that leadership is something that can be developed, that needs to be developed. And I would say that that is the greatest hindrance to your leadership is not taking time to work on your leadership skills. There's a scripture story that kind of highlights this in the book of Exodus, Exodus chapter number 18. Now in Exodus chapter 18 we find Moses having a conversation with his father-in-law, which is Jethro. And Moses in this chapter, to be honest with you, Exodus chapter 18 is just full of leadership principles and concepts. And there's lots that we could look at in this chapter in regards to leadership. But I just want to highlight the beginning of their conversation. The Bible says in Exodus 18 and verse 13, it says, And it came to pass on the morrow that Moses had to judge the people, and the people stood by Moses from the morning unto the evening. And when Moses' father-in-law saw all that he did to the people, he said, What is this thing that thou doest to the people? Why sittest thou thyself alone, and all the people stand by thee from morning unto even? So here we see that Moses is judging the people. Jethro, his father-in-law, is visiting the camp. And when Jethro sees what Moses is doing, he says to him, What is this thing that thou doest to the people? Why sittest thou thyself alone? The Bible says in verse 15, And Moses' father-in-law said unto him, The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away both thou and this people that is with thee, for this thing is too heavy for thee that thou art not able to perform it thyself alone. And then he says this, he says, And I will give thee counsel, and God shall be with thee. Be thou for the people to Godward, that thou mayest bring the cause unto God. And what I want to highlight here is that Moses is the man of God. He's leading millions of people in the wilderness. He's already brought them out of Egypt. They've crossed the Red Sea. He's been mightily used to God, of course, the Ten Plagues, all those things. But I want you to notice that Jethro gives Moses some advice. He tells him that the thing that thou doest is not good, and he tells him, Harken now unto my voice, I will give thee counsel. And he gives him some advice, and Moses takes the advice, and it helps Moses. And what I want to highlight is this, that Moses was humble enough to realize that he didn't have it all figured out, and that he could learn about leadership, and that he could learn about how to do leadership better. And I think this is something that we need in our lives. We need to be able to learn more about leadership and realize that just because maybe we are leaders, it doesn't mean that we can't learn, we can't grow. And we see that highlighted all throughout the Bible, but I think here in the story with Moses, it's highlighted very well. Also, this is something that's taught in leadership books, in secular books. In fact, just as I was preparing for this live stream, I was thinking about the very first leadership book that I ever read, and this was many, many years ago, and it's a book by John Maxwell, and John Maxwell is a leadership expert, and he wrote a book called The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. And this book is near and dear to my heart, because like I said, I've read many leadership books over the years, but this was the first, as far as I can remember, this was the first leadership book, a secular leadership book I ever read. And in this book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell gives 21 laws of leadership, and they're all pretty good, but the first one is called The Law of the Lid. And The Law of the Lid is a law in which he states that the leader will be the lid of the organization that he's leading. Now, he's of course writing a secular book, so he's talking about businesses and things of that nature, but it applies to churches, it can apply to the home, of course it applies to careers and work. And the idea is this, that if the leader stops growing, the organization will stop growing. The leader serves as the lid, and the organization and the followers coming behind the leader cannot surpass the leader. And the idea is this, that if you were to rate a leader, maybe from one to ten, and you were to say, well the leader of this business, or the leader of this church, the leader of this organization is an eight. Well, he's not going to have followers, or church members, or employers that are going to surpass that. He's going to maybe have employees that are going to be, if he's an eight, they're going to be a seven or a six. If he's a six, they're going to be a four or a five. The organization is going to be a, if he's a nine, it's going to be a seven or eight level organization. But, as a leader grows, just because you're maybe a four on your leadership skills and ability, if you grow yourself to a six, then your organization can grow. And the idea is this, that the leader is the lid to the growth of an organization, the capacity of an organization. And this is why we need to grow as leaders. This is why we need to develop our leadership skills. Because wherever you find yourself in your leadership abilities, maybe you're a one, or a three, or a six, or an eight, we can all learn and we can all grow in our leadership skills. So, what are some ways that somebody could develop their leadership skills? Well, I would say number one, that you need to saturate yourself with the Word of God. And of course, that means reading the Word of God, that means studying the Word of God, that means memorizing the Word of God, and that means going to church and listening to preaching from the Word of God. And what we have to remember is that the Bible is the original leadership manual. The Bible is the original success manual. The Bible says in Joshua 1-8, This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein. For then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. So the Bible tells us, it also says in Psalm 1, it promises that if we are in the Word of God, if we meditate upon the Word of God, that we will be as a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit and his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. So we understand that the Bible is the original leadership manual, success manual. If you want to succeed in life, if you want to prosper in life, then you need to know what the Bible says, you need to apply it to your life, and I would say that's the number one thing that we need to do in order to grow our leadership capacity. Along with that though, you can also of course read good books. And you can tell behind me here, we're in my office, and I've got a lot of books behind me, and I've read many of these books, and a lot of them are on all sorts of different subjects, but I've got a lot of books on leadership, time management, productivity, things of that nature. And someone said this, that if you're not leading well, it's probably because you're not reading well. And we need to be people that are not just people of the book, the Bible, but we need to be people that read books, and that we can learn and grow the best practices and the best ways to lead from other people who lead well. So I would say to grow your leadership ability, of course saturate yourself with the word of God, and then of course get some good leadership books, and realize that when you read secular leadership books, you're not going to agree with everything. There's going to be some things that you're going to have to ignore and not pay any attention to, but there's going to be some good things there that you can learn. And what I've learned as a pastor, as I read a lot of secular leadership books, I find that a lot of the ideas and concepts are just stolen from the Bible. And I can identify, oh they got that from the Bible, or the Bible actually says that as well. So it helps in that sense. So I would say saturate yourself with the word of God. I would say read good books. Also, make sure that you consume good content. And what I mean by that is that there is a lot of content out there to help you develop yourself as a leader, to develop yourself in productivity. And for example, you're watching this live stream right now, this Leadership Live. This is good content for you to be watching, to be motivating you to become a better leader. You could be on YouTube watching cat videos and watching, you know, nonsense, but of course, you know, you're not. You're watching this. And there's lots of content like this that you can listen to, podcasts, whatever, that can help you in your leadership development. So read the Bible. Of course, read good books. Consume good content. And of course, the Leadership Live is a good thing to be watching. And then I would also say that you can take classes. You can take courses in regards to leadership. There's lots of options out there now where you can do classes online or things of that nature that will help you grow in your leadership. And what I mean by that is as opposed to watching maybe like a podcast like this or a live stream, something a little more formal where you're going to take a class and you're going to take a test or things of that nature. An example of that, and one of the reasons we're doing this Leadership Live is because we are launching here at Verity Baptist Church our Biblical Leadership Institute. We're launching it tonight. And I want to take a moment to just talk about the Biblical Leadership Institute, just to let you know about it and to know what's going on here at Verity Baptist Church. Maybe it's something you can pray for with regards to us. For many years, I held a monthly class called the Spiritual Leadership class. And when we moved into our new building, we had a lot of work and construction to do. So we put it on pause for about a year. And I took that year to kind of revamp it. And we are now relaunching it in a new way as a Biblical Leadership Institute. And what we're doing is we've created a three-year course that we make available to our church family. And they can come to classes here at the church building taught by myself. And they can go through these courses. There's a fall schedule and a spring schedule for every year. There's a three-year program. And then there's also some at-home Bible courses that they can take. And we're working on developing those as they become available. But the way that this institute works, it has two tracks. There's a leadership track and then there's a ministry track. And what we've done is we've created the leadership track for men in our church who want to just learn about leadership. Maybe they don't necessarily want to go in the ministry. They don't want to be a pastor or an evangelist or something like that. But they just want to learn about leadership. And they can take these classes. And if they go through all the classes over a period of three years and they successfully pass, then they will receive a certificate. And the classes that we're offering are, for example, tonight we're starting with Leading Self and Personal Success. This is a six-week course on that subject. In the spring of this next year, we'll be doing a class called Followship. And it will cover the importance of being a good follower. We're doing lessons on leadership, levels of leadership, biblical leadership, judgment and decision-making. So we've got these leadership courses. But then we also have ministry courses. And the ministry track is designed for men who want to go into ministry, who want to be trained to be a pastor or an evangelist or a missionary, something of that nature, a deacon, a staff member. And for that track, we've got ministry classes. For example, we have How to Study the Bible, How to Preach, Church Leadership, How to Perform Ceremonies and Ordinances, Church Organization. We have Church Growth. So these are classes that are going to help men to be trained for the ministry. And of course, if they go through all those classes, plus the leadership classes, they'll get a diploma when they finish. And of course, going through these classes doesn't mean necessarily that we're going to ordain you and send you out. But that's something that's going to help you in ministry. And I'm just highlighting that to say this, that you should take advantage of places that offer these types of classes. Of course, if you are part of Verity Baptist Church or watching this, you should come to these leadership classes if this is something you're interested in. And I would also just say this, if you're watching this online, and maybe you are not in a good church, or maybe you're in an old IFB church, and you want to be trained for the ministry, you want to go into the ministry, but you know your pastor's not going to send you out or something like that, then you might want to pray and consider making your way out to Verity Baptist Church and being part of our Biblical Leadership Institute. Maybe you're out there and you're like, man, I'm interested in this. I'm never going to move to California or whatever. Then just hang tight. We're going to try to make some of these courses available online as well in the future, and we'll try to do that as quickly as we can. But the point is this, that if you're able to, and the Biblical Leadership Institute that we're doing is just an example of this, but if you're able to, you should consider taking courses or classes online or in person that would help you to develop your leadership. And these are things that we can do to develop our leadership, because like Moses, we don't know what we don't know. And he was doing certain things, and Jethro was looking at him and saying, why are you doing this? Why sittest thou thyself alone? The thing that thou doest is not good. He said, there's a better way of doing this. And of course, Moses was meek enough and humble enough to hear him out, and he applied those things and it helped him greatly. It's the law of the lid, and we want to grow in our leadership development. So when it comes to the greatest hindrance to your leadership, if you feel like maybe you're failing in your leadership, or your leadership's not as good as it could be, I would say that the greatest hindrance is not growing in your leadership skills. It's realizing that just because you're a manager at work doesn't mean you're a good manager. Just because you're a boss doesn't mean you're a good boss. And when you think about careers, a lot of times what happens is they'll take an employee that's really good at the job. Just an example, maybe it's an HVAC company, and maybe they'll take an employee that's a really good HVAC technician, or a really good electrician, or a really good plumber, and they'll say, well look, this individual's really good at what they do, let's make him the manager, let's make him the supervisor, let's make him the foreman, let's put him in charge. And here's the thing, and again, it's not something negative on you. Just because you're a good plumber doesn't mean you're going to be good at running a plumbing business. Just because you're a good HVAC technician doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good at running an HVAC company. And that's why we also need to develop our leadership skills, our leadership ability. We need to raise our leadership lid so that those coming behind us, those that are following us, can also raise their abilities, we can raise their capabilities, we can increase our organization. So that's a quick lesson on the subject of leadership and on developing your leadership skills. The lack of development will be the greatest hindrance to your church leadership. Now what I want to do is I want to move on to a question that we were going to answer, a question that we received. But before we do that, I just want to remind you that if you like this live stream, if you're listening to this, this is helpful to you, or you find this valuable, then we would love for you to take a moment to subscribe. And of course, we're live streaming right now on our Rumble account, and if you haven't done so yet, please make sure you subscribe to us on Rumble. And I think right now we have about 1,900 subscribers on Rumble, and we'd love, of course, to be able to grow that. We'd love to be able to get to 2,000 subscribers, so if you could help us with that, we'd appreciate it. Also, of course, we're on Facebook, and if you could follow us on Facebook, that'd be great. We also have an Instagram account. I think our Instagram also has about 1,500 followers right now, so if you're on Instagram, make sure you hit those links and follow us. And then we're also on X. We actually just recently opened our X account, so we don't have a lot of followers on there, but if you're on there, make sure you follow us, at Verity Baptist on X, and subscribe to us there. All right, well let me move on to this leadership question. And one thing we did when we were announcing this leadership live is we let people know, if you have a leadership question you'd like for us to answer, then you can leave it as a comment, or you can email it to us at info at veritybaptist.com. And we got this leadership question. We actually got several questions, but I want to focus on this one, and I feel like it's a little bit of a longer question, so this might be the only one I get to tonight. But let me kind of set it up for you. Now, this individual wrote in, and he is from Southern California. I was originally thinking of reading the question and giving the name and all that, but this particular question I think maybe has some details that I don't want to necessarily give out on a live stream, so I'm not going to give the name, and I'm not going to read the entire question. I'm going to just kind of summarize it, but I want to give you a little bit of context so you understand the question. This person says, I got saved two years ago, and he attends a fundamental Baptist church, a good church, King James only, Soling Church. He says his wife goes to a liberal NIV fun center type church, and he says, I receive reproach, rebellion, and criticism when I try to step into my leadership role as a father and a husband. And he adds, maybe my approach isn't ideal. So just so you understand the context, this is an individual that is married, and I don't have all the details, but he has children, so he's been married for a while, and two years ago he got saved, praise the Lord for that, started going to a good church and started changing his life biblically, but his wife's not on board. So here's a question. How do I get my family, and he's talking about his kids and also extended family, but I think specifically his wife, how do I get my family on board with biblical beliefs and biblical standards? And when it comes to this question, and this is actually a question that I hear a lot, and I would say this, that there's different things that you need to consider when it comes to this question. I would begin with this word perspective. As a pastor, I deal with a lot of different situations, and what I've learned is that sometimes our approach to different situations is going to be different based on the context. So for example, if I was talking to a young couple that they're 18 or 19 years old, they both grew up in church, and they're getting married, that's going to be a little bit of a different situation than maybe the one I'm being asked about right now. In this situation, we have an individual that grew up Catholic or grew up going to not a good church and got married in that context, had children in that context, and that happened for a while. And then, praise the Lord, he got saved, he started going to a good church, and he started changing his life. But I would say the perspective is that in that question is this, that your wife is the one that's looking at you as you are the one that changed. Now I agree with the change, I think it's a good change, but we should understand the perspective that your wife is now looking at you and saying, well, this is how we lived our whole lives and now you've changed it. So I think that perspective should give us some insight into how to deal with this situation. So the first word I want to give you with regards to this question is perspective. The next word I want to give you is prayer. And I would say this, that you need to make this a matter of prayer. The Bible says that the king's heart is in the hands of the Lord, as the rivers of water he turneth it whithersoever he will. And of course, we're not Calvinists, we don't believe that God is going to make anybody do anything, but we do believe in the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit can work on your wife's heart. Also, we believe that God can move circumstances and change circumstances to help your wife maybe be more open or more receptive to certain things. So I would say that you need to commit this to prayer. I was just reading something earlier today, and there was a quote that said, prayer doesn't change things, it changes people. And I would say that this is something you need to pray about every day for your wife. And I'm sure you are praying about it. But prayer is important, that the Lord would work on her heart. Then another word I would give you is this, patience. Patience. And you have to realize that people respond to truth in different ways. Even people that are saved, they're going to grow in different rates. This is why God tells us as preachers that we need to be long suffering. We need to have patience with people, and we need to just realize that as we teach people truth, they're going to respond to it in different ways, and they're going to grow in different rates. Some people grow very fast, and they have a lot of zeal. Some take some time. The other word that I would say would be persistence. Persistence. And I have found that a lot of times when somebody gets saved, and maybe they're growing very fast, and praise the Lord for that, they have a lot of zeal, and they're excited about things of God, that their families often step back, and they want to really know, is this a phase? Is this something that's going to die out? Is this something that's not going to last very long? So you have to have some perseverance and some persistence in your Christian walk, and make sure that it's not a phase, and make sure that they realize that it's not just something that's going to die out eventually. In fact, I would say this, and again, I don't know all the details about this specific marriage, but I would say this. If you were made for seven years, and you got saved two years ago, and you spent five years of your marriage not being saved, or not being in a good church, not being a separated Christian, then it might take five years of you being saved and being a separated Christian, and that persistence to really let your family know, or for them to see, okay, this is real, this is authentic, this is a real thing. So I would say perspective, I would say prayer, I would say patience, I'd say persistence. And then I'd also say this, personal focus. Personal focus. And this is something that I've often noticed in Christians, and let me just turn to Ephesians and explain what I mean. The Bible says in Ephesians 5, it says, wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. And this is God speaking to wives, and he's telling them, wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands. Then God says, husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for it. God speaking to the husbands, directing them and telling them, husbands, love your wife. Not only that, but in the next chapter, Ephesians chapter 6, God speaking to children says, children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this was right. And then he turns around and tells parents, or fathers, and your fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. So when God's speaking to fathers, he's telling fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He's talking to children, he's telling them, obey your parents. Talking to wives, he's telling them to submit. Talking to husbands, he's telling them to love. Now here's what often happens. Children will take the verse directed to the fathers, and then use it against their fathers, right, and say, well, you provoked me to wrath. Or a husband might take the verse directed at their wives and say, well, the Bible says that you're supposed to submit. Or the wife, if she feels like her husband is unloving, might take the verse directed at the husband and say, you're supposed to love. But here's the interesting thing, and here's what I think we need to understand. The verse isn't God speaking to husbands. God isn't telling, hey, husband, your wife is supposed to submit. He's not saying that. He's telling wives to submit. He's not telling wives, hey, your husband is supposed to love you. He's talking to husbands, telling them to love. He's not telling children, your parents aren't supposed to provoke you to wrath. He's telling fathers that. And the point that I'm making is this. What we need to focus on is what God has told us to do. And instead of being worried about what God has told someone else to do, we need to make sure that we are following what God has told us to do, that we are growing in our Christian walk, and that we are focusing in on our personal walk. And I think that's very important, because at the end of the day, the only person you can control is yourself. And if you can stand before God and say, I'm doing to the best of my ability everything I'm supposed to do as a husband, as a father, we need to be less worried about what God is telling other people, and more worried about what God is telling us. And then also, it was mentioned in the email, maybe my approach isn't ideal. I would say with all these things, perspective, realizing that in the eyes of your wife, you're the one that changed things, not her. Which I agree with the changes. With prayer, praying about this, bringing it to the Lord every day. With patience, with persistence, with personal focus, I think what you might find is that your approach changes. And you know, there's a very famous quote that says, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. And I think the idea is this, that as you do what you're supposed to do faithfully, then you gently try to bring your wife on board. And you have to realize that that might be slow. If it were me, if I found myself in your shoes, if my church was having a special day, then I would maybe kindly invite my wife and say, hey, our church is having this special friend day, and I want you to come, and we'll go out to lunch afterwards or whatever, and slowly try to bring your wife along. I can tell you this, at Verity Baptist Church, there are couples that either the husband got saved or the wife got saved independently of their spouse, and their spouse wasn't on board for a long time. And they followed these steps, and it took time, but I can tell you of couples now that both husband and wife are in church, three to thrive, soul winning, all of it. And it just took some time, but the Lord was able to do that work, and just realize that the Lord is on your side with these things. So I hope that helps. I hope that that's something that you can apply to your life, and it'll help you with your question. Anyway, I'm running out of time. I do just have a few things I'd like to go over real quick. We actually have a leadership quote of the day that we're going to go over here in a minute, but before we do that, let me just talk to you about our Band But Not Bound email list. We have this email list called Band But Not Bound. In fact, if you go to bandbutnotbound.com, you'll find our website. There's two aspects to this website. We have a sermon and a video library. If you click on that, it'll take you to our sermons and videos, Bible studies videos and sermon series, and all sorts of different content that we're posting on there, and we'd love for you to of course check that out. But then we also have an email list, and the email list has over 4,500 subscribers to it already, and we'd love for you to be part of our email list. That way we can email you directly when we put out new content, like the video, the live stream we're on right now, or sermons or whatever, we can get it right into your inbox. And the reason we did that is because of the current cancel culture that we find ourselves in. We often have found ourselves being kicked off of certain social media platforms, and with this email list, even if we get kicked off of YouTube or whatever, we can let you know exactly where we are by sending you links to our content straight to your email. And the way you do it is you go to bandbutnotbound.com, you hit that email to subscribe to the email list, and it'll take you to a page where all you need to do is write your name and your email address. Just enter your name, enter your email address, there is a very simple math question there that you have to answer just to make sure that you're actually a human being and you're not a bot or whatever, and then you can sign up. We'd love for you to be part of our Band But Not Bound email list. Also, if you'd like to support our ministry financially, we'd love for you to help us with that. You can go to our website veritybaptist.com, hit the donate now button, and when you hit that button, it'll take you to a page that you can fill out, and you can donate to our church if that's something that you feel led of the Lord to do. We'd appreciate your generosity with that. All right, well, let me give you a leadership quote before we end this broadcast tonight, and here's the leadership quote of the day. We are all self-made men and women, but only the successful take credit for it. And that's a quote by Darren Hardy, who's a success mentor, and I thought that was an interesting quote. I really like it. Well, I appreciate you being with us tonight for this short live stream, and this is Leadership Live, where we are teaching leadership principles from a biblical perspective. We hope that you enjoyed the live stream, that you learned something, and I want to encourage you to join us next week. We're going to be doing this for several weeks as we are launching our Biblical Leadership Institute, and we just thought it'd be good to do a live stream on the subject of leadership. So if you have a leadership question that you'd like for us to answer live on the broadcast, then you can leave the question as a comment below, or you can email it in to info at veritybaptist.com, and we'll take a look at that. We got a lot of questions, so we're not able to answer everything, but if you can send in your question, we'll take a look at it, and if it's something that we can answer on the broadcast, we'd love to do that. I'm Pastor Roger Jimenez, your host, and I'm here with Deacon Oliver in studio, which is really just my office, but I don't know what he's doing. He's pressing buttons and turning knobs, and maybe he's playing a video game, I'm not sure, but he's helping us with the live stream. We appreciate all of you being here. If there's anything, of course, that we can ever do for you, please do not hesitate to reach out, and we hope to see you next week for Leadership Live. God bless you, and good night. . .