Lesson 1: Focus on who you are becoming.
Why is it that so many who achieve success in one area of their lives often do so at the tragic expense of other areas?
Many have lost their health, their marriage, their family, and sometimes their life in the pursuit of the illusion of success.
If we’re not careful, success can become an idol that destroys our relationship with God and others.
Instead, we should focus on who we are becoming. After all, this is all we really have the power to control anyway.
When becoming like Christ is our ultimate goal, every area of our lives is enriched.
The more Christlike you are, the better person you will be, the better spouse you will be, the better parent you will be to your children, the better child you will be toward your parents, the better employer you will be to your employees, the better employee you will be to your employer, and on and on.
Putting our focus on Christlikeness focuses our energy on what we have the greatest power to change, ourselves.
Lesson 2: Energy management is more important than time management.
This lesson came crashing down on me in February of 2019. My wife was about to give birth to our 7th child, I had just launched a Real Estate business to supplement our income from our church planting work, and I was running on empty.
In the providence of God, I came across the book, “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal,” by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.
The principles in this book transformed my outlook and transformed my life.
This book stumbles upon what Bible students would call the “Sabbath Principle.”
Even in man’s perfect state, God created day and night, and 6 days for work and 1 for rest.
I learned that unlike time, energy is a renewable resource.
I learned ways to expand my energy capacity, focus my energy, and renew my energy capacity through daily, weekly, and quarterly rhythms.
After our 7th child was born, I knew that expanding my energy capacity was going to be critical for this next season of my life.
Since running took too much energy, I chose to replace it with lifting weights.
I decided to spread out the fatigue by training 6 days a week with only 2 exercises per training session and taking 1 week per month as a deload week.
This way, I can still expand my energy capacity while leaving enough energy in reserve to be present and productive at work and at home.
Lesson 3: Training the body is one of the best ways to train the mind and spirit.
Training the body is a gateway to training the mind and spirit; it’s a tangible laboratory where you can learn habits and disciples that you can directly apply to the intangible arenas of mind and spirit.
In 2018 I experimented with running 3 times/week with 1 rest week each quarter.
When a run started to get hard, my breathing would get faster, and anxiety would start taking over my mind.
But I learned I could reverse the cycle simply by controlling the speed of my breathing.
This was a lesson I could immediately apply to other areas of my life.
When life is getting the better of me, and I find my mind and spirit spinning out of control, I can start reversing the cycle by controlling my breathing and then focusing my mind on truth.
Lesson 4: A life without margin has no room for relationships and certainly no room for making disciples.
When you look at your calendar, is there any blank space?
That blank space is margin.
The more responsibilities you have, the harder it is to maintain margin.
One of my mentors often says, 80% is the new 100%.
If you’ve scheduled 100% of your available time, you have no margin for the unexpected disruptions much less for cultivating relationships in your life.
Relationships are the most important parts of life.
The importance of relationships is summed up in the greatest commandments, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:37-39).
A life without margin has no time for prayer, Bible study, and church.
A life without margin has no time for relationships with family and friends.
A life without margin has no time for developing new relationships with people who need Jesus.
One of the ways I create margin for relationships is with walks around the neighborhood with my family after supper.
This does two things: (1) it provides me with a time to reconnect with my wife and kids after a busy day of work; and (2) it gets us out into the neighborhood where I can build deeper relationships with my neighbors.
Lesson 5: Generosity is the mature response to God’s grace.
I used to have a hard time preaching on giving because I didn’t want people to think that I was after their money.
I have since learned that part of being like Christ is being generous toward God and others.
God displayed His unfathomable generosity toward us in sending His Son to pay the penalty for our sin and offer us eternal life by grace through simple faith.
If we want to be Godlike and Christlike, we must also learn to be generous with what God has given us.
Generosity transforms our outlook from one of scarcity and deprivation, to one of abundance and resourcefulness.
Generosity is another one of God’s powerful tools of transformation because finances are tangible.
While it can be difficult to quantify our growth in love, it’s a lot easier to measure our growth in generosity.
In fact, our generosity can help us to grow in our love for God as we learn to value His grace at work in our lives.
Generosity can also help us to grow in love toward others, as we seek to minister to needs around us.
Generosity can help us to grow in faith as we learn to give God first place in our finances and learn to live on what’s left.
Generosity can also help us to grow in our creativity and diligence as we seek to fully develop the talents that God has given us so that we can increase our capacity to give to God and others.
Again, generosity is about who we’re becoming.
Lesson 6: A Pastor Is a General Practitioner, Not a Specialist.
As a new pastor, I tried to wear too many hats.
I tried to be a one man addictions counselor, marriage counselor, trauma counselor, and on and on.
I have now come to the realization that it’s not my job to become a specialist in any of these areas.
My primary job is to preach the whole counsel of God and equip the saints for the work of the ministry.
I’m wiling to meet with any of my members for any of these issues to give general Biblical counsel.
When I discover needs that are beyond my ability, I’ve learned to point people to Biblical counselors who specialize in the particular area of need.
Even if I were trained as a Biblical counselor, I do not do a great enough volume of counseling to have the expertise that a full time Biblical counselor does.
By referring my people to qualified Biblical counselors, my people are better served, and I am free to focus my time on leading the church forward.
Lesson 7: Mastering the laws of the harvest are critical to accomplishing your calling.
(1) We reap only what is sown, so don’t expect to sow one thing and reap another.
(2) We reap in the same kind as we sow; sow evil seeds and get more evil; sow good seed and get more good!
(3) We reap in a different season than we sow, so keep on faithfully sowing good seed.
(4) We reap more than we sow, so make sure you’re sowing good seed;-)
(5) We reap in proportion to what we sow, so make sowing a daily activity, and sow abundantly.
(6) The good harvest takes a lot of work; the bad harvest comes all on its own; remember the saying, ‘If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you are willing to do what is hard, life is easy.’
(7) You can’t change what you’ve sown, so focus on sowing good seed today!
I’m still learning these lessons and have a long way to go to 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.
Let me know what God has been teaching you!
Pastor Nathan Barber
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