Unity is far from us when we do not agree on mission objectives. Then, when we agree on mission objectives, we must surrender to a strategy to move forward together.
“I Just Do My Part”
I hear apostles say, “Well, I know what I’m supposed to do, and I’m going to pour my life into that.”
I applaud that sentiment. That’s what it takes to get the job done!
I also know that Jesus has a strategic plan for His entire kingdom that presupposes oneness more than unity. The picture Jesus and Paul paint points to a schematic for the whole of the kingdom to move together as a matrix of ministries. It is a spiritual ecosystem built to function as an ekklesia in a spiritual kingdom.
So, when God gives an apostle blueprints, the blueprints overlay with someone else’s blueprints, and no apostle can hope to fulfill his assignment in a vacuum. No amount of belligerent myopy and undying commitment to a silo of kingdom building can fix the reality that individual ministry success alone never produces the fullness of Ecclesia.
To personally succeed, you must participate in the kingdom at a level or scope beyond you. You must align with other blueprints leaders as a blueprint leader, and the entire kingdom citizenry must align with blueprints leaders.
The King has a kingdom-wide mission objective and a kingdom-wide strategy.
The “I Surrender All” Conference
We should seriously consider a conference that goes far beyond the present level of conferring, a meeting of blueprint leaders who are willing to lose all they have to build something that will never be theirs. They would not lose it all, but even if they did, they would succeed by surrendering it all to the King.
- No matter how right you are about your piece of the puzzle, you cannot produce more than a hint of the total picture alone.
- No matter how well you get the pieces put together in your metron, you cannot succeed without humility before the greater kingdom mission objectives.
- No matter how high you push the leaders you rear and mature, they cannot reach individual stature doing anything other than what benefits your portion of the kingdom because all of that mission must help something greater.
- No matter how much you build and how many believers you accumulate, the majority of your mission objectives lie beyond the silo you construct in the name of your assignment.
- No matter how celebrated you are in the internal structures where you are honored, the measure of your kingdom success cannot come exclusively from what you produce in that tiny aspect of the global mission of the King.
- No matter how big your influence, the “well done” you desire from the King comes from contributions to something vast and eternal, not personal and temporal.
- No matter how well you fulfill your personal mission objectives, you are a kingdom leader, and your personal mission must disappear into the King’s mission objectives as a living sacrifice.
Consumed or Committed
You host meetings to build something you sell as the needed fix for the apparent problems. People gather and hear you tell them, “This is it, brothers and sisters! If only everyone were as committed as we are to this strategy, we would win the day!”
You are so wrong. You are so arrogant. You are so childish. You are so myopic. You are so silly in light of the King’s court of angelic observers. You look like a trinket from a Cracker Jack box.
Come on! If you were wildly successful in your scope of influence, without connection to a matrix of ministries, your success would not last long, and the end product would be a blip on a Christian Wikipedia blog. He also did something that we forgot.
God isn’t asking you to become to stand still for your bronze statue memorial. God is commanding you to be poured out wine and broken bread for something the King planned by obeying orders that produce a blended operational strategy to alter the course of nations.
Your ministry is not the point of reference. Your ministry is not the plumb line of regional or universal beauty and joy. Your effort should be suddenly shifted to discover and discern how what God assigns you and those assigned to your assignment, who are committed to alignment with that assignment, overlays a more significant assignment.
Do you know how difficult it is for you to get people committed? Well, you are even less committed to the greater blueprints than they are, demanding that they commit to your thing when you have not consecrated your thing to the King. Do you realize the King is having a harder time with you than you are with those assigned to you?
You are not to be committed. You are to be consumed. You put yourself and your Isaac on the altar. You put your ministry and assignment where it will disappear at the moment of its most exceptional fullness. You posture yourself, so when someone records the moment, you disappear from the camera frame. You start something that takes two or three spiritual generations to complete.
To Die Is to Win
High horse leaders watch from a knoll while others fight and die. Real leaders say, “If I am not expendable enough to fight in the trenches and die for what I am called to accomplish, all the leadership in the world will not perpetuate one victory won while I watch.”
Watch the mighty ones who become a memorial position the most excellent ministries for ruin. Watch them! They wish to leave a legacy named for themselves without leaving a generation consumed by the mission objectives of the King.
