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Tag: #incarnation

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New Devotional: Building Kingdom Leadership Capacity

I am super excited to announce my new plan on YouVersion!

I believe it is my best plan yet! I took the key concepts and principles from our leadership workshop and put them into a 15-day devotional format. I am confident that it will add tremendous value to your leadership!

Link to the plan here!

Here’s a sample from Day2:

How Do We Become Kingdom Leaders?

…people rise to leadership in our society based on extroversion, which means they have a tendency to ignore what is going on inside themselves. These leaders rise to power by operating very competently and effectively in the external world, sometimes at the cost of internal awareness…In the preparation and selection of leaders, we need to look for those who are growing in self-awareness, who are willing to take responsibility for themselves and what drives their behaviours, and who have the courage to bring that self-knowledge into the leadership setting.

Ruth Haley Barton

There was a time when people thought that leaders were born not made. You either had the gift of leadership or you didn’t. This paradigm is less popular now. The new way of thinking (at least in the business world) is that leaders can be trained. Anyone can learn leadership skills and become a proficient leader. In religious circles, we have a similar type of thinking when we think that going to seminary qualifies you to become the leader of a congregation.

However, in the kingdom leaders are neither born nor trained, they are incarnated. Incarnation is the process of embodying God in the flesh. Christ embodied the Father in the flesh and we must embody Him. That’s why we are His body. You see, in the kingdom, there is only one leader, one head of the body – Christ. We are all followers. We only become leaders/influencers insomuch as Christ lives in us and works through us. Hebrews 2:10 says in the NLT translation that God made Jesus the perfect leader through His suffering. I describe the process of becoming a kingdom leader as the Three C’s of Incarnation:

  • Calling
  • Crucifixion
  • Co-creation

First, we must discern our unique calling in the kingdom. There is some sphere that we were designed to influence. We must make it our business to find out what we were created for! Secondly, we must go through the refining process of crucifixion so that our influence is untainted by our own agenda. Finally, we must learn to lead in partnership with the Holy Spirit (which I have titled co-creation mainly because I wanted another C word). We were not designed to lead alone! This process is actually more like a cycle. We discover more of who we are called to be, go through one level of refinement, and learn to partner with God to a certain degree, and then He takes us to another level and then another, and so on.

Jesus demonstrated all of these stages throughout His life. He demonstrated that He understood His calling when He read from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue and announced that He was the fulfillment of that prophecy. When He gave all of His “I am..” statements (I am the Bread of Life for example) He also demonstrated that He knew who He was. Scripture says that Jesus learned obedience through His suffering. Even Jesus had to go through processing and learn to choose God’s will over His will right up until the point of His crucifixion. And finally, we see many examples of Jesus partnering with the Father; doing and saying nothing out of step with Him.

The key point to note here is that we do not become kingdom leaders primarily by focusing on the external skill and practice of influencing others but by the internal work of incarnating Christ on the inside of us. What manifests outside of us is what exists inside of us. The greatest leader will be the one who has done the most inner work!

Journal with Holy Spirit: When you think about how Calling, Crucifixion, and Co-creation have played out in your life, what comes up for you?

Copyright 2024, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.
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Christ Became Flesh So That All Flesh Could Become Christ!

John 1:1-4 (ESV) says of Christ:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

Jesus is the creative agent of the Trinity. He is the one who manifests things. He is the one who incarnates. As Jesus unfurled creation from himself it must have been a sight to behold! Then in a stroke of creative genius, He imbued mankind with two God-like qualities – authority and autonomy. We were delegated the responsibility of executing God’s rulership and we were given the freedom to exercise that authority as we saw fit. And then we did the unthinkable… We put ourselves out of congruence with the Word, disconnecting ourselves from the Life Source and thus disconnecting all of creation from the very source that upheld it. We introduced entropy – the continual and progressive decline of all creation into disorder. We introduced corruption. We introduced death.

So, what did Jesus do? He stepped into His disconnected creation to reconnect mankind with Himself. He incarnated Himself! John 1:14 (ESV):

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus subjected Himself to the very futility, suffering and corruption that mankind introduced. Then, by His death, He took into Himself all those consequences of disconnection and cancelled its power. Death lost its sting. And then, with a final masterstroke, as He resurrected from the dead, He re-introduced His creative power into the earth by giving us the ability to reconnect to the Source of all Life! But more than that He has given us the responsibility for reconnecting the rest of creation back to this Source. Paul calls it the ministry of reconciliation.

But what does this ministry of reconciliation look like? In one place it is described as all the kingdoms of the world becoming the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. In another place it is described as His glory covering the earth. In yet another description, His Spirit is poured out on all flesh.

In short, we have a mandate to reconnect everything to Jesus. Unfortunately, I do not think we have understood this mandate of reconciliation. Many of us have had an adversarial if not superior relationship with the disconnected world. Having been saved from that mess, we now look back on it with a sense of fear of re-infection. We protect our separation from the world at all costs, not realizing that ‘that mess’ needs us. In fact, that mess is our responsibility! Every place where there is corruption and disaster in this world is damning evidence that we have neglected or abandoned our assignment!

Romans 8: (ESV)

 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

Can you see that we are agents of freedom?! Can you see that our ascension to the full authority and effectiveness as sons and daughters of God is what all creation is eagerly longing for?!! Our mission is not to hide ourselves away! Our mission is to be light; to be salt; to be the yeast of the kingdom. We have to be in the midst of the darkness and mess and bring light and redemption to every sphere of life. We cower in fear of being infected by the world, not realizing that we are the ones that are supposed to be doing the infecting!

There are some of us who understand and embrace our redemptive assignment, but our effectiveness has been dismal at best. Why? Because we have been taking Christianity and religious doctrine and feeding programmes to the world instead of Christ. We have been obsessed with educating the world instead of redeeming it or focused on alleviating suffering rather than transforming men. Consider this: Jesus did not open a school, hospital or not-for-profit organization (at least not in the traditional sense). Instead He supernaturally eliminated ignorance, sickness and hunger everywhere He went. Every teaching burned the hearts of men. Every healing was miraculous. Every food distribution demonstrated a divine source of provision. Where is the supernatural demonstrated power of Jesus in our lives?

Christ is the life source. Our #1 priority is bringing people, systems and creation itself into direct contact with Christ. This necessitates His tangible presence in our lives. He has the redemptive power. It flows from Him. Many of us talk about Christ, even preach about Christ, but our words are hollow, and our lives lack any shred of evidence that His power is at work in us. Contrary to popular opinion, our ministry is not proselytizing! Oh no! His power and love must flow through us with such voltage that everywhere we go and everything we touch is reconnected to the source!  

Our mission is to make His kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. When Jesus interacted with people His life-giving authority was evident. He lived what He spoke. Everywhere He went, love flourished, sickness (corruption) ceased and lack turned to abundance. He is on the same mission today; except He has found it fitting that it takes place through us! Our mission should look like making Jesus evident. We must make Jesus manifest in us. Wherever we go disorder should be transformed to order, lack to abundance, death to life and darkness to light. We are His delegated agents of redemptive transformation!

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Copyright 2020, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.