“When you’ve ministered in the power of the Holy Spirit, you will never want to minister in any other way,” affirmed Richard Blackaby, president of Blackaby Ministries International and author and co-author of more than 40 books, including “Spiritual Leadership.”
Blackaby addressed “The Preeminence of Christ in Spiritual Leadership” during the Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference on Nov. 10 at Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville.
Blackaby stressed that he was not referring to speaking in tongues or the spectacular. “I’m just talking about when God puts His hand over your life, over your sermon, over your ministry and over your Bible teaching.”
The nationally known speaker and son of the late Henry Blackaby shared an experience from his first pastorate in Canada about 40 years ago. “I had aspirations of some large church with throngs of people in rapt attention as I unpacked the Word of God. But God took me to probably the most dysfunctional church in our entire convention in Canada,” he recalled.
After several months, he told his wife, Lisa, that “I think we’ve made a really big mistake. … Some of you have been where you felt God wanted you to be and you were as faithful as possible, but one day you began looking at the assignment and the problems and you say, ‘This is too big for me. I don’t have what it takes. … That’s where I was.”
Taking his sermon from John 3, Blackaby shared a familiar passage with a different twist. “Typically, when you read John 3 you preach it evangelistically because Nicodemus is told he must be born again. But I want you to look at this story in terms of spiritual leadership,” he said.
He noted that Nicodemus was a respected Pharisee and worked hard to minister to the people. “Nicodemus realized something was missing,” Blackaby observed. “If all you see is with your physical eyes, you will never understand what God is doing around you.
“I’ve worked with a lot of pastors who seem to know how to use only their physical eyes. They can see how many people are sitting in the pews … and they can count the money in the offering plate but they don’t have a sense of what God is doing in His people’s hearts.
Blackaby noted in John 3:6 that Jesus said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.”
“I think one of the greatest problems in the church today is that there are too many spiritual leaders doing their work in the flesh.”
He acknowledged that a pastor can get people to the altar with a sermon from the flesh, but “it doesn’t last, and it doesn’t honor God.
In order to be a spiritual leader, one must learn to walk in the Holy Spirit and “you have to have eyes that see what God is doing while not trying to follow your own agenda,” Blackaby said.
“Spiritual leaders are people who minister not in the power of their flesh. We all have unequally gifted flesh. You may not be as smart or as gifted as other people, but you can have just as much of the Holy Spirit as anyone else. He’s the one who is going to make all the difference.”
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