Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
3 13 2024
WITHOUT JESUS YOU CAN DO NOTHING!
In studying each week what to share with you. I thought of each of you as… ELDERS. The definition is: a leader or senior figure in a tribe or other group a council of village elders” An elder in the Bible is one of a plurality of biblically qualified men who jointly shepherd and oversee a local body of believers.
I know most of my audience is more mature. Parents or grandparents who oversee their families.
They guide and direct them, hopefully in the ways of God.
I thought what is it we can build around you and beneath you to give away to those under your care?
I see each of us as an elder in one manner or another.
It is something that is not just your calling but your responsibility.
THE LESSON FOR ELDERS AND PARENTS
The lesson the elders have to learn is not methods, ways, skills, or tactfulness. Although we learn them all through experience…trial and error. But I think there is a foundation that makes for the best leaders, elders, parents, and friends. The lesson is humility and brokenness before God. And who can say…
Oh wow, that’s me. I have mastered that!…
We must remind ourselves every day, through brokenness and humility, that without Him, “you can do nothing,” as Jesus is the vine and we are the branches (John 15:5)
A clever person is not necessarily capable of managing a family, a small church, or a small group!
Neither is a capable or reasonable person or necessarily competent either.
Only one kind of person can manage a family, a small group well and that is a broken person.
(not a word often thought of or embraced)
All the lessons that a spiritually minded person or elder has to learn are lessons of brokenness.
When God put Moses over His flock, Israel, He first put Moses in the wilderness for forty years, with the purpose that he might learn the lesson of brokenness.
In Numbers 12, even when Moses’ sister Miriam and his brother Aaron rose to slander him,
God’s word testifies for him, saying, “The man Moses was very meek and humble, more than all men who were on the face of the earth.”
During those forty years in the wilderness, Moses did not just learn a set of methods concerning how to manage God’s people. He learned one lesson predominately, the lesson of brokenness.
God had broken him.
When he was forty years of age, he was a Prince of Egypt and indeed a very shrewd and capable person. It was as if God said, “Shrewdness will not work; and capabilities will not work;
The fist that killed the Egyptian will not work;
All these must be torn down and broken.
God put him in the wilderness for forty years to teach him one lesson only—the lesson of brokenness.
If a man or woman is to lead a family or a small group…God’s success will follow those who have been broken and humbled and submissive to God’s word.
Kevin Zadai said in his book Mystery of the Power of Words, “If you are broken if you are devastated right now, you are a prime candidate for God to come and live with you. God will come to encourage you, build you up, promote you, and revive your heart. God dwells with these kinds of people. God has a purpose and a plan for everything that happens. God does not do bad things to you, but He uses these times when you feel broken and humble. Such times become a perfect opportunity for God to come into your life and revive you.
What is going to occur after you come to an end of yourself is that your next step becomes a supernatural event. I saw that people are delaying this death to themselves, and because they are delaying, the supernatural events in their lives are not taking place.
God is supernatural, and everything about Him is supernatural. However, we live down here in this natural world. Many people cannot escape the corruption that is in the world through lust because they have not humbled themselves. They have not let God discipline them by putting the yoke of God on them as Jesus said and walk with Him.
Luke 9:23 says. If you want to follow Him, you will have to die to yourself daily, and by dying, you live. Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live” (John 11:25).
So how does one get to the end of himself? The word of God will do that for you.
“ The Word of God is the sword of the Spirit, and the Spirit of God is going to rightly divide between your soul and spirit” (see Heb. 4:12). Whatever is of you is going to be on one side, and whatever is of God is going to be on the other side. Until that sword comes and separates,
there is no way you are going to know the difference.
It is only the Spirit of God and the Word of God that can divide your soul from your spirit.
Your soul is your mind, will, and emotions. Your spirit is the God part of you that God breathed into you when He made you a living spirit. God breathed and made you a living soul as well, but your spirit is the part that becomes born again, and that is the real you. You are in a body, and you have a spirit and a soul. There are three parts to you. I call your body your earth suit. Your soul ties your spirit to your body so that you can enjoy what is happening in your spirit”.
Moses didn’t use the methods of experience, he let God work them out. If there were any words to be said, he let God speak to the people.
Here we see a man who had wisdom, knowledge, and capabilities, yet he was a broken and humble man.
Brothers and sisters, only when a family, a small group, or a church is in the hands of such a spirit-led person can it be a vessel that truly expresses Christ.
Only then can such a person lead in the spirit.
The more we are broken and humble in serving our people, our family, and our community the more that the influence of Christ will grow and so will we begin walking in the Supernatural with Christ.
Casting Crowns Voice of Truth
