Alright, let us stay on positioning yourself to be used by God. In the last lesson, I went over again some of the things I have shared with you, emphasizing certain things about availability: how we show ourselves available to be used by God. I also shared some things with you about being equipped for works of service and about the relevance of being submissive to Christian leadership. In that area, we have to submit to those who are leaders over us, so that through them God may guide us fully into all the good works He wants to do through us.
Now showing ourselves available to God does not mean that we are fit yet for the good works He wants to do through us. He has to make us fit. And He will make us fit as we pray, as we study the Word of God, as we fellowship with other brethren and as we submit ourselves to the leadership of our local assemblies.
Submitting ourselves in this sense also involves showing ourselves available for them to work with. You show yourself available to work with your church leader, coming around to the front and finding out what you can do for them and with them. But it is not just about finding out what you can do for them or with them; it is also about actually doing those things you are asked to do. Doing whatever you are asked to do is very important, because it is one thing to show yourself available to work with your church leader and another thing to do what they ask you to do, and to do it in ways that will make them happy. That is one of the problems we have in the church, and I think I should begin from that area.
I have already said that the instructions that have to do with ministry in the body of Christ will mostly come to us through our church leader. So keep that in mind. God can speak to every one of us, and He does speak to us if we are His children. He speaks to you by His Spirit in you, guiding you in your personal life as to what is best for you: your marriage, your business, and all of that. But ministry is not something you do in isolation. It is what you do with other members of the body of Christ, so all the instructions you need will not come to you directly. You must understand that.
Even if God is going to use you for something independent, something that will put you in a position of leadership over others, you must know that not all the instructions and not everything you will need to do will come to you directly from God. There are things that will come to you only as you interact with other believers, and things that will come to you as you learn from others who have been ahead of you. Ministry is never done in isolation.
Since it is never done in isolation, we learn from other believers and from our leaders. Where you have to work with other believers or with the leadership of your Christian assembly, then, you have to show yourself as someone responsible, someone who can be relied on. They give you tasks, and you have to attend to those tasks diligently. They cannot keep coming back to do the things they have asked you to do. That is also proof that you are not yet fit and still need to learn more.
If a task is given to you by your church leader and he has to come back and do it himself, then something is wrong. If he has to assign that task to another person, something is wrong. If he has to ask you to go and redo it again and again, something is wrong. You see? It is not just saying, “Oh, I am available, sir. What would you have me do for you? What would you have me do with you?” Whatever they ask you to do, you have to be certain that you do it well, so that they will not have to complain about it.
I know some church leaders can be very difficult to work with. Church leaders are not to be overbearing, actually. You can read Titus chapter 1 and 1 Timothy chapter 3 about the qualities church leaders must have, the things that must not be evident in their lives. One of them is being overbearing. They must not be people who are difficult to work with or inconsiderate. Yet some church leaders are inconsiderate; some are actually ruthless. In their quest for excellence, they can become ruthless.
Excellence is okay. Excellence is what we are called to accomplish and maintain as God’s children. But at what cost? At what cost do we pursue excellence in the church? Is it at the cost of the welfare of the brethren? Is it at the cost of their reputation, or of their self-esteem? Do we have to destroy the self-esteem of those people just because we want to accomplish excellence in the church?
Of course, brethren too can become docile and lax in the way they do things, because the church leader is kind to them, gentle with them and patient with them. You give some people tasks and they do not even do them at all. You know how painful this can be for leaders in the church. They have given you tasks and expect you to go and do them, but lo and behold, the tasks are not handled, and you give excuses for not handling them. Or they give you something to manage, an aspect of the ministry, and you just kill it. You kill it completely, and it no longer exists. So, they have to keep thinking of how to wake it up because it is already dead in your hands.
That is why, when a task is given to you in the church, you have to take it as coming to you from God. That is the problem: we do not take the tasks that come to us from our Christian assemblies as coming from God. So we kill them. We do not know that God is watching. Then you wonder why God is not blessing you among the brethren and why He is not opening more doors of usefulness for you in the church. It cannot happen. It is the one who is faithful with little who will also be faithful in much. (Cf. Luke 16:10-12)
We are talking about positioning ourselves to be used by God. There are still some other aspects of this that I am going to delve into; I am just taking them for you one after the other. I will still talk to you about the pruning of the brethren to be useful to God. For now, I am talking about the diligence you bring into whatever has been entrusted to you.
A lot of times, where we find church leaders being calm, patient, and gentle with the brethren, the brethren can begin to abuse that privilege. That is because they have not been under tough, overbearing leaders. Interestingly, even some who have been under overbearing leaders, when they find themselves under leaders who are gentle and calm, render themselves redundant. People probably function better under an overbearing, ruthless leader; I do not know why that is so. That is before men. I am not talking about before God. Before men, you find that people may function better under a leader who will not take nonsense, who will not take no for an answer, who will drive them harshly, and who, if you are not willing to be driven, will just cast you aside or throw you under the bus. People may function better under that kind of leader because we want to be pressured to do what we are supposed to do.
But we are talking about service that is acceptable to God. It is not just about being driven to do what you are supposed to do; it is also about doing it in a way that God will accept, in a way that God will bless and use to bless people. So the leader also has to be careful how he leads, how he instructs and how he assigns tasks, because ultimately these things determine whether the people under him receive the praise of God for what they do.
As a leader, I will not just be after you doing this or that for the church or for me; I will also be after how it is done. Is this something you have been pressured to do or something you are doing willingly and lovingly, something you have owned? You have to own the task as your task. Do not see it as the leader’s task; see it as your task, as what God has given you, as what God will make you accountable for. When you see it that way, you will not allow it to die in your hands.
As I already said, we have leaders who are cruel, leaders who are overbearing. They will drive you crazy if you are working with them. I remember a young man in a church I used to attend. He was very good with the computer and very eager to serve in the church. Then, at some point, there were certain certificates that the church wanted to give to some people, and he was meant to work on them. He worked on those certificates, making beautiful designs, and went ahead to print them without showing them to anybody to go over. That was the mistake he made.
So, when the certificates were presented to the pastor, as I was told, he first took a glance at them and said, “This is fine. This is beautiful.” Then he saw some mistakes and typographical errors on the certificates, and he was furious. “What is this? What nonsense is this?” he said. And right before the brother, he tore everything up. That shook the brother to the core, and for some weeks it affected his commitment.
The man wanted excellence, but it was at the cost of somebody’s self-esteem. It took some people talking to the brother, counseling him and encouraging him, before he began to get involved in any service in that church again. More so, anything that came from the pastor’s office, the brother did not want to be a part of. If he was a part of it at all, he would take it around to almost everybody in the church office to look over before it was completed. Why? His self-esteem had been badly hurt.
We do not have to pretend; things like that happen in the church. There are church leaders like that. They want excellence, and if you are not going to give them excellence, they are ready to throw you under the bus and would not care how you feel. If you are unhappy about it, that is your problem. I have been in assemblies like that. If you are unhappy about a decision the leadership has made, that is your problem. You can get out of the church if you want to. So, I saw people leave their church offices and the leaders did not care. Instead, they would use those people to teach the brethren about faithfulness, saying that those people were not fit to handle ministry and all of that. So they were the ones who suffered. Even after they had left, the church kept on putting them down. Things like that happen.
I said all of that to draw your attention to the fact that when you are given a task in the church, you have to handle it diligently. You have to handle it in such a way that the task will flourish under your care, not that you will kill it. That is the problem with the church. We need to wake up. I am sharing these things with you so that you can wake up. It is not just for you to hear these things; it is also for you to begin to act on what you hear. The church leader cannot keep coming around all the time to wake you up from your slumber. He is praying for you. He is feeding you with the Word. What are you doing with these things?
We can make the ministries of our church leaders of no effect because of our attitude, just as the children of Israel, whom Moses led out of Egypt, made his ministry of no effect. He received the Word of God for them. He prayed for them. He interceded for them in all kinds of ways. He fed them with the Word of God. He bore their burdens. Moses did all these things for them, and for what?
He did not even partake in the sharing of the land. Also, God did not choose Moses’ family for the priesthood. Think about it: despite all that Moses did, God did not choose his family for the priesthood. And that was fine with him. Becoming the priest was not his focus. His focus was leading the people into the Promised Land. That was his joy; that was what he had always wanted.
Mind you, God did not just choose Aaron to be the priest; He also chose his family. Yet that did not bother Moses. He did not quarrel with Aaron because of it, and he did not engage in any kind of competition with him. He just faced his own business. And that is what is expected of you: to face your own business.
But I am saying that the people Moses led out of Egypt made his ministry of no effect among them. They made him look like an ineffective leader because of their attitude toward what he was doing for them. You can make your church leader look like an ineffective leader. God will not see him as ineffective. But those around him will, because you are docile. You are not diligent. You are not active. He has to keep coming back to look over his assignment with you. You do not own anything you are given. You do not see yourself as the owner of any task you have been given, so that you can profit with it and flourish with it. That is terrible, and we have this problem in almost all assemblies. We find only a few people who own the tasks they are given. And so the ministry of a church that could have gone to the ends of the earth may remain locked in for years. It may remain locked in for decades. And why?
Recently, someone and I were talking about an assembly in our city, about whether it should get a projector for use in its meetings. Then I asked myself: that is an old assembly. Through that assembly, God has raised different kinds of people who have gone to different parts of the world. Even currently, we have academics and rich people in that assembly. An assembly like that should have a projector for projecting things in their meetings. But the person I was discussing with said, “If we buy a projector for the assembly, who is going to handle it?”
So, I asked myself, “What are you talking about? An assembly as big as that would not have people knowledgeable enough to handle a projector?” I am not there. But those who are there have the opinion that they may not be able to handle it. I thought about it and said, “This is bad. This is an old assembly whose ministry should be reaching the ends of the earth. Great pastors have served there. Great prophets of God have served in that assembly. And in this current hour, we are still debating whether they need a projector or not.” But why is that so? It is the brethren. That is it.
Today, in many of our Christian assemblies, there are brethren who are good with the internet and with social media platforms. And they can use these platforms to aid the ministry of the church. But where are they? What are they doing? Even if you give them tasks along that line, they will kill those tasks. And yet they would say, “God, use me. God, use me.”
I was listening to a message by the late Kenneth Hagin. He was talking about an occasion when someone who had been insane (for how many years I cannot remember) was brought to him so that he might pray for her. The sister of the insane had been told to take her home because there was nothing more the government could do to make the woman well. But if she were taken home to be among family members who would care for her, the government would not mind even giving them money to do that. So they brought her home. And it was about that time that they thought of inviting a preacher to minister to her. Hagin, then, was the one consulted at the time.
So then, he said he called his wife and, I think, two other women. I cannot remember the exact number. But four or five of them were there to pray for the woman who had been insane. However, because of the things he had learned about her, all the while they were praying, he was looking at the entrance and the exit, trying to keep himself close to one of them so that if the woman should begin to have an episode, he could quickly run out.
Then, as they were praying, the Spirit of God began to minister to him, telling him to go and place his hand on the woman and command the evil spirit in her to leave. He heard that, but he was struggling with the thoughts. He said, “How can I go close to her, lay my hands on her, and ask the evil spirit in her to leave? What if she jumps on me? What if she grabs my hand? What am I going to do?” He was struggling with that in his mind and would not move. Yes, this man of God was praying, but all of that was going on in his mind.
See, when people are praying, you may not know what is going on in their minds. You may think people are praying a prayer of faith, but their prayer may be far from faith, completely soaked in unbelief. To know what is going on in the hearts of people is something some would pay for. Somebody said that if the thoughts of a man were written on his forehead, almost everybody would be wearing a hat.
In any case, while he was struggling with that thought, one of the women praying with them began to speak in tongues. This time she was not just praying in tongues; she was giving a message in tongues. As she gave the message, he could understand everything she was saying. He could interpret it.
Now if the woman had been speaking to somebody else, he would have been able to interpret it to that person. But she was speaking directly to him. So he did not need to interpret the message to anybody. The message was coming straight to him. And what was the message? To paraphrase what he said, the woman began to speak as God would speak: “All the time, you keep saying, ‘Use me.’ Now I am asking you to go and lay hands on her and drive out the demon in her, and you are not going to move. Yet you will be crying, ‘God, use me. God, use me.’”
That, of course, is how it is for many of us. We pray to God from time to time, “Use me.” And when some of us find ourselves in a very charged atmosphere, praying, we will be saying, “God, use me. Use me for Your glory.” We sing it and all of that. But the simple tasks that God is asking us to do, we will not do. Instead, we will kill those tasks. That is a bad thing, or what do you think?
Well, eventually, Kenneth Hagin went, laid his hands on the woman, and commanded the spirit in her to come out. And when he commanded the evil spirit to leave, the woman did not even blink. It did not even appear as though the evil spirit had heard what he had said. But he had done what God asked him to do. So he just forgot about it and told them, “I have already told the spirit to leave. The spirit has left.” He told the sister that there might be some tantrums later, but not to worry: the evil spirit had already left. Then he asked her to take the woman home, and she did.
About the third day or so, the sister called him, and he said, “What again? What is the problem again?” Then she said something like, “She is having a terrible episode now. What should I do?” Then he said to her, “I already told you: even if she is having an episode, know that the evil spirit has already left her. I have already done what God asked me to do.” And indeed, the woman was having an episode at that time because the evil spirit was leaving her life. After that episode, the woman became well, and that was the last time she manifested insanity.
The manifestation of what the man of God had said did not occur immediately. It occurred some days later. But the evil spirit left. Sometimes we command an evil spirit to leave, and then we see it throwing tantrums and think it has not left. No. The word has been given in the name of Jesus, and these evil spirits are bound to obey it. We also must not change our minds. When we have given the word of God concerning the leaving of an evil spirit or of a sickness, we must not change our minds. We have already given the word of God in the name of Jesus, and that word will stand; the evil spirit will obey.
What led me to that is the fact that, to position ourselves to be used by God, we have to do whatever tasks we have been given. We have to take them seriously. We have to do them diligently. We must not do them anyhow. Otherwise, nobody is going to entrust us with more responsibilities or more tasks. We are also making it hard for our leaders when they have to keep coming back to review what tasks they have given us, again and again, or to remind us to do what they have asked, something we should have owned.
We are limiting the church, if we are acting like that. We are limiting the ministry of the assembly. That is why many assemblies are just all by themselves. These are people God could have been using to reach people all around the world. Yet they are stagnant, in one place. It may not be that they are not being fed adequately with the Word of God or that they are not being prayed for adequately. It may just be that the brethren are sitting on the knowledge they have, sitting on the gifts of God and the abilities God has enabled them to acquire, and doing nothing.
Now as the leaders of our various Christian assemblies keep praying that God will send laborers to help them, at some point God will have to leave those of us who have been entrusted with so much and are doing nothing with it, and begin to bring in new people to do the work. That is when some of us will wake up. Some people will not wake up until they find other people around them, people who are not as knowledgeable or as educated as they are, doing what they should have been doing. Then they begin to compete with them. That is one of the reasons for the competition we see in many of our Christian assemblies. The people who ought to have been doing things will not do them. And when somebody else begins to do them, they start competing. They start making it look as if they had been abandoned, as if they were not being recognized.
You should be ashamed of yourself, if you are like that. God has been speaking to you all along about doing these things, but you would not do them. And when somebody else begins to do them, you start complaining. You start finding fault with what the person is doing. You may say the person is not doing it well or that it is not necessary. Or you may begin to compete with the person, trying to do exactly what the person is doing and making it hard for the person to progress. Something is wrong with you. You have a wrong spirit. You have a wrong attitude, and you need to be cleansed of it. I will be talking about our cleansing by the Lord also, which is, by the way, one of the reasons many of us are not being used as God would want to use us. We are not being cleansed. We are not being pruned of certain things that are making it difficult or impossible for God to use us in the ways He wants to use us.
The point I am making, in any case, is that when God, through the leadership of your church, has given you tasks to do, you must do them well. And even if He has given you those tasks directly, do them well. There are some of us who have been given tasks directly by God, things He has told us to be doing in a Christian assembly. Yet we are inconsistent in doing those things. We do them for one week or so and then leave them. We just keep going back and forth in handling such tasks. So the leadership of our church cannot rely on us for anything, because we are just not consistent. It cannot be like that. This is going to affect the entire church. The ministry of the entire church will be affected because you are not consistent.
For some of us God, has spoken to us about supporting our preachers with our resources, making sure that they have resources, not necessarily for ministry but for their own personal use, so that they can be focused and can concentrate. The Spirit of God has spoken to you about this, but you are not consistent.
Now that is probably what you can do at the moment. You may not be able to do anything else. Remember the woman who brought the alabaster jar of some very expensive perfume to anoint Jesus’ feet. She anointed Him with all the content of the jar. Remember that Jesus said that she did what she could (Mark 14:8). She could not preach as Jesus would. But she could anoint Him with what she had.
In like manner, we had some other women like Mary Magdalene who were supporting the ministry of Jesus with their own substance. These were ones were not teachers of the word of God. But they could support the Lord with their substance. And they gave themselves completely to doing so.
Also, think of the woman called Lydia in the bible, the woman that Paul met in Philippi. She was not a preacher of the word of God. All she could do was support the ministry of Paul and his companions, so that they could fully focus on doing their apostolic work in Philippi. And that is the task some of us have been given. We have been given the task to keep on supporting our preachers with our resources. But we are not consistent. Instead, we keep making excuses. (Cf. Acts 16:11-15)
Now your leader may not know that God has already spoken to you about supporting him with your resources. So, he keeps trusting God for the supply of his resources. But God has already supplied. It is just that those who are supposed to give him the supply are refusing to do so. So, they allow him to be discouraged or distracted. This is why some preachers keep looking for money from various places, instead of focusing on praying and teaching their brethren the word of God. Then the work begins to suffer.
Do you, then, think God will not hold you responsible for that? He will. Truly, He will also hold such a leader responsible for abandoning the task given to him. But He will not consider guiltless those who pressured him to do so through their refusal to support him. And if He should hold you responsible in that manner, how do you think you will fare?
We will continue in the next lesson. God bless you.
Summary
This lesson teaches that being available to God is only the starting point; being used by Him depends on how faithfully and diligently we carry out the tasks we are given. Ministry is never done in isolation. So, much of the direction we need comes through church leaders, and we must submit to them and actually do what they ask, doing it well, without making them chase us.
The speaker warns against two extremes. Some leaders are overbearing and crush people’s self-esteem in pursuit of excellence, as in the story of the young man whose certificates were torn up. Some believers, on the other hand, become lax and docile under gentle leaders and let their assignments “die in their hands.” Believers are urged to treat every task as coming from God, to own it, and to be consistent.
Using Moses, who did not quarrel with Aaron over the priesthood, the speaker teaches contentment with one’s own assignment. Using Kenneth Hagin’s account of the prayer for an insane woman, he shows that people can cry “God, use me” while ignoring the simple instructions God gives. Unfaithfulness limits the church, and when some will not act, God raises others, which often leads to jealousy and competition.
Discussion Questions
- The speaker says availability does not mean we are fit yet. What are the ways God makes us fit, and which of them are you giving the most attention to right now?
- Why is ministry “never done in isolation”? Name some things we can learn only through other believers and leaders.
- What does it mean to “own” a task you have been given rather than treat it as your leader’s task? How does that change the way you do it?
- The speaker describes both overbearing leaders and lax believers. How should a leader assign and correct tasks so that excellence is pursued without damaging people? How should a believer respond when correction is harsh?
- In the Hagin account, he prayed “God, use me” yet hesitated over a simple instruction. Where might you be asking God to use you while delaying a small task He has already given you?
- What can we learn from Moses’ attitude toward Aaron and the priesthood about handling the success of others in the church?
- Why is consistency so important in service, and what practical steps help you avoid being erratic in your assignments?
- Why does the speaker say faithfulness in little leads to being trusted with much? Share an example from your own experience of a small task that opened a larger door.
Message questions
Position Yourself to Be Used by God
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