Podcast Host (0:03)

Welcome to Mariners Church Weekend Message Podcast. Inspiring people to follow Jesus and fearlessly change the world. Discover your purpose and get connected by visiting MarinersChurch.org or click the link in the show notes.

Eric (Senior Pastor) (0:27)

I'm really thankful for Joseph who's watching at our Huntington beach congregation right now for you who serve in our ESL English as a Second Language classes. What an amazing way that we get to serve our local community. If we haven't met yet, my name's Eric. I'm the senior pastor here. I'm so glad that you are with us today. I want you to think about a question as I teach this morning and that is the question is are you living out of convenience or conviction? Is your life about convenience or is your life about conviction? I'm really thankful for the modern conveniences that we have in our world. A lot brought to us by technology. When I was a kid we had one television in our house and it was on the other side of the living room and I would have to get up from the couch, walk two miles in the snow to go and change the not two miles, but I had to get up from the couch and walk to change the three channels. We had 4, 6 and 8 on a dial. So I'm really thankful that I have a remote control now and many more channels to watch. So technology has brought all kinds of conveniences into our world in the last several years. There's AI, artificial intelligence. I have ChatGPT on my phone. I've never been able to do this, but recently I've learned I can go into a restaurant and if I'm trying to hit a protein goal for the day, I can ask what should I order? And it tells me exactly what to order. If I'm dealing with a publisher on a book thing, I can upload the contract that they've sent me into AI and it will give me deal points that I should consider pushing back on if I'm taking K my wife on vacation. ChatGPT knows me. I don't even know how they know so much about me, knows me and I can say we're staying in this city and based on the restaurants that ChatGPT knows that I like, they will recommend the different kind of parts of the city that we can stay in. So I'm really thankful for the conveniences of technology. But there is a trade off that many are starting to wrestle with. It's wise to operationalize basic decisions in our life so that we free up mental capacity for the most important things. But we never want to live Our whole lives based on convenience. So mit, the famous institution, recently did a study on college students using ChatGPT. And they concluded they put these college students into groups and those who were using AI to write papers. This is what they found, that over time they consistently underperformed at neuro, linguistic and behavioral levels. And they found that the college students who kept using AI to write their papers over time lost the ability to critically think and no longer were writing with conviction. They were just writing whatever AI said to put into the paper. They lost a sense of, I believe this. It's an ethical conversation. That many, I'm sure your industry is having these conversations. And in my space, being a pastor, some pastor friends have asked Eric, will you use AI to write a sermon for you? And I, I, no, there's no way. First I, I just couldn't do it. And secondly, my people are so smart, they'd be like, that's not you, that's not you. I want to preach from conviction, not from a place of convenience. I want to really believe. And, and you want your life. You want to be a person who has conviction, not a person who just lives with convenience. We're walking through the Book of Nehemiah and we are seeing this incredible book in the Bible that points us to J. Nehemiah is going to regather God's people. And from God's people is going to come Jesus, our Savior, who rescues us. But also, the Book of Nehemiah is known as one of the first leadership books ever written. So there's incredible leadership insights for us. Last week we saw that Nehemiah was a person of vision. He had a burden for the broken walls in his city and he believed that God could fix them. And the mixing together of his burden and belief created the vision. This week we're going to see conviction. And what is conviction? You want to be a person who doesn't live out of convenience, but out of conviction. You want someone to look at you and say, that's a person of conviction. She lives her convictions. He believes his convictions. A conviction is a belief that you hold so deeply that you cannot imagine not holding it. So a conviction is a deeply held belief that you have to hold. And you hold it so tightly that the conviction starts to hold you. So you not only hold the conviction, the conviction starts to hold you. And conviction for a leader. And in the Book of Nehemiah, I'm challenging you to see yourself as a leader. Because if you're a Christian, Jesus has not only saved you from your sin, and shame. But he's also sent you in to wherever it is that you influence people, your home, your neighborhood, your career. You are a person who influences others because you represent Christ. And conviction shapes a leader. Conviction sustains a leader. Conviction, if you really believe something as a leader, will shape your agenda, will shape your calendar, will shape where you put your time and your energy and your resources. Let me just give you one example and then I'll bring us to the text. In the end of 2019, several leaders here at our church, we had a conviction that God was leading us to launch one new Mariners congregation every year starting in the fall of 2020. So early 2020, like January, from this very place, I announced in the fall, we're going to start launching one new Mariners congregation a year for the next five years. Well, that was January of 2020. You know what happened three months later? Covid the pandemic. And most people believed that the announcement to launch one new congregation every year for five years was rendered irrelevant by the global pandemic and by the gathering restrictions that were placed on churches in California. But our team had a conviction. And so if you have conviction, it. The conviction causes you to see everything through the lens of your conviction, even a global pandemic. So we believe, no, even though, yes, the world is shut down some kind of way because God exists outside of time. And he gave us this conviction. He perhaps will even use the global pandemic to speed forward the conviction that he's given us. So In July of 2020, we started having Mariners in the neighborhood. If you were around our church back then, you may remember this. We started small gatherings in coffee shops and open air restaurants, in back alleys and in parking lots. And we came out of the pandemic not with one new congregation that was launched, but with five new Mariners congregations. So the pandemic actually sped up the launching of congregations throughout Southern California. Now we clap over that. That's beautiful. Now, it was painful then. Conviction shaped us, but conviction also sustained us. You know, if you were leading anything in 2020, it was a painful time to be a leader. There was decisions that were being made all the time, and that was the decision. We believe God led us in that direction. But daily I had critical emails from both sides. There were some that, that early when we announced that we were launching these Mariners in the neighborhood that said it's so cruel that you would gather in the middle of a pandemic, that you would gather at all, even though we were gathering outside, spread apart at first, as safely as we could. Some said we were being cruel. Others emailed and said, it's cowardly what you're doing. You should gather in July. You should gather everybody in the big auditorium at Irvine. And you gather and you show everybody that they can't shut us down. And so they were some who were emailing that, some who were emailing this. It was painful. But what keeps a leader going is conviction to not listen to either side, but to go with what God has said to do. Conviction. Conviction shapes, but conviction also sustains. You want conviction in your life. You don't want to make decisions as a leader only out of convenience. We're going to learn a lot about conviction by looking at Nehemiah, chapter to page 42 in the magazine that we handed you. You will see chapter two. We ended last week in the month of ChaseV. And we're going to see this week the month of Nissan. It's a. It's a month. It's not only a truck, it's a month in the Jewish calendar. And it's four months after chisel. So we ended chapter one. Four months passes, and now it's chapter two. At the end of chapter one, Nehemiah has an overwhelming burden for the broken walls in Jerusalem. And then he holds this burden. He's waiting for the right time to talk to the king, King Artisan, the king of Persia. And then chapter two starts and boom, here we are. We're now in the setting of him speaking to the king that he works for. Here is God's word. During the month of Nisan in the 20th year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was set before him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had never been sad in his presence. So the king said to me, why do you look so sad when you aren't sick? This is nothing but sadness of heart. I was overwhelmed with fear and replied to the king, may the king live forever. Why should I not be sad when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire? Then the king asked me, what is your request? So I prayed to the God of heavens and answered the king, if it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor with you, send me to Judah and to the city where my ancestors are buried so that I may rebuild it. This is God's word. Let me stop here for a moment. I want to pull some leadership insights from this passage that I believe will be helpful for you. You learn a lot about how Nehemiah leads Up to his leader in Nehemiah. Chapter 2. See, all of us have a leader that we report to. Some of you, it's the chairman of your board. Some of you, it's the vice president. Some of you, it's your team leader. All of us have someone that we're accountable to. And leadership is not only leading the people that we are, are responsible for. It's also leading up to our leaders. And, you know, you notice a lot about how Nehemiah leads up to artist Xerxes, really incredibly. First, you notice that he's never before been sad. That's amazing. He's never been sad in the king's presence before. So he gains a lot of credibility with his leader because he's not the guy who's moping around the office, always negative and always complaining. Some people wonder why they're never promoted at work. Listen, if you're the person who's always complaining and always negative, you're never gonna get promoted. Because if your leader promotes you, your leader is gonna be promoting that. That attitude. Nehemiah is not that. He's not the sad guy at the office. He's never been sad in the king's presence before. Number two, he knows how to appeal to the values of his leader. He listen. The reason Nehemiah wants to go is because he wants God's people to worship Yahweh in God's city, Jerusalem. But that's not what he says to Artaxerxes. Although what he says to Artaxerxes is true. He. He appeals to what would matter? Artaxerxes. What would matter to Artaxerxes, according to history, is where the ancestors are buried. Persian kings valued the condition of the place where ancestors were buried. And so Nehemiah leads with something that matters to the king. He says, my ancestors are buried there and it's in ruins. Artaxerxes would have cared about that. He's being really savvy and wise to appeal to his leader with something the leader cares about. And then, number three, we'll see. He's really, really clear. Nehemiah also does not live with this false dichotomy that some Christians live with, which is, do I pray or do I plan? What do I do? Do I pray or do I plan? Nehemiah prayed and he planned. He prayed to the God of heavens and he planned deeply all that he was going to share. And then he asked to be sent to Jerusalem. Now, to be sent to Jerusalem was not a promotion. It wasn't even a lateral move. He was Saying to the king, I want to go to a city in complete ruins. I want to live, leave the place of influence and affluence for this broken city. It wouldn't have made any sense to somebody who was watching. And you may receive a conviction from God that won't make sense to anyone else, but you're going to know it is from God. This is what happened with Nehemiah. So then he shares with the king more. Keep reading with me. Verse 6. The king, with the queen seated beside him, asked me, how long will your journey take and when will you return? Notice the clarity. So I gave a definite time, and it pleased the king to send me. I also said to the king, if it pleases the king, let me have letters written to the governors of the region west of the Euphrates river, said they will grant me safe passage until I reach Judah. And let me have a letter written to Asaph, keeper of the king's force, that he will give me timber to rebuild the gates of the temple fortress, the city wall, and the home where I will live. The king granted my request for the gracious hand of God was on me. Nehemiah is really clear how long he will be gone, the resources that he needs, including timber for the home he's going to build for himself and the authority he needs for all of the people that he will pass, all the governors and regions west of the Euphrates. He's a very clear leader. Okay, we're going to skip down to verse 17, and it's an amazing verse in between. What I just read in verse 17 is many months. Nehemiah travels from Persia to Jerusalem over 800 miles. Takes many months to get there. When he arrives, he inspects all of the broken walls. Here's why he does it. He does not do what some leaders have mistakenly done. He does not import the values he learned at his last job to this job. He doesn't grab the strategic document from his last role and apply it to this role. He walks around Jerusalem and sees the brokenness in this city and has his heart broken for this city. And then he shares a vision in verse 17. Now, I'm about to read to you verse 17. Those of us who are Christians, we receive this as God's word. But even leadership theorists who aren't Christians look at verse 17 and say, wow, that's an amazing vision. It's super simple. It's really clear. It's catalyzing. It invites people to be a part, and vision is presented as a solution to a problem. So he doesn't just, hey, here's a great idea. There's a problem that must be solved. So notice how wise the vision that Nehemiah shares is. So I said to them, verse 17, here's the vision. You see, the trouble we are in. Jerusalem lies in ruins and its gates have been burned. Come, let's rebuild Jerusalem's wall so that we will no longer be a disgrace. I told them how the gracious hand of my God had been on me and what the king had said to me. They said, let's start rebuilding. And their hands were strengthened to do this. Good work. Now he's expecting there's going to be some pushback. As a leader, you're always going to receive some pushback. When Sanballat the Hornonite, Tobiah, the Ammonite official, and Gesham the Arab heard about this, they mocked and despised us and said, what is this you're doing? Are you rebelling against the king? I gave them this reply. The God of the heavens is the one who will grant us success. We, his servants, will start building upon building. But you have no share, right or historic claim in Jerusalem. This is God's word. We see. Nehemiah is a man and a leader of conviction. Convenience would have kept him in the palace. Conviction dragged him to Jerusalem. You want to have conviction as you lead. You want to have conviction as you live. You don't want to live merely out of convenience. And here's what conviction is. Here's how you get it. It's the intermingling of clarity and courage. So you want to be a person of conviction. You need both clarity and courage. The fruit is conviction, and people want the fruit. You want someone to look at your life and say, she's a person of conviction. She believes what she believes and lives by it. He's a man of his word. He's a man of conviction. If you want the fruit of conviction, though, you have to get to the roots of both clarity and courage. And so let me show you the clarity and the courage in Nehemiah and then help you think about the clarity and the courage in your life. Marcus Buckingham said, of clarity, he's a leadership author. That clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. That if you're going to be an effective leader, you have to be preoccupied with being clear. Nehemiah was clear to his leader, Artaxerxes, but he was also clear to the people that he led. As I've coached leaders before on being clear, here's a tool I've used. Maybe this will be helpful to you. I'll try to work through this really quickly. Nehemiah did not speak with marbles in his mouth when he spoke to Artaxerxes, nor to the people that he led. He was clear on very important questions that you have as a leader. Why are we doing this? What are we doing by when? Who's doing it with us? And how are we going to get this done? And so here's what Nehemiah. Here's how he viewed these questions. And these are some tools that you can use as well. The why is really your sense of mission. If you lead a team or you lead an organization and you are the one responsible to clarify what the mission is, you want a mission statement, which is not gonna change much. It's gonna be consistent. The mission that Nehemiah had wasn't to build the wall. That was the vision. And it's gonna be accomplished in only 52 days. The mission lasted longer than that. The mission that he believed for God's people was before the wall and after the wall. It was to be God's people in the land. We should not be a disgrace. Our mission is to bless the nations surrounding us. That was his sense of mission. He also, though, was very clear on the vision. Let's rebuild the wall so we will no longer be in disgrace. Now, the vision was short term. And if you want to be really clear as a leader when it comes to a vision, whether you've been asked to lead a project at work or you're starting a new business or you're an entrepreneur, a vision, if you want it to be really sticky and really clear, you want to be able to say, here's what we're doing by when. What by when? For Nehemiah, it was really simple. Let's rebuild the wall. Nehemiah also was really clear on who would be on his team. You saw at the end of the chapter in verse 20, he tells a group of people, you're not a part of this. You're not on the team. And a tool to help you have the right people on your team as you were leading is a really clear set of values. Here's how we live around here. This is what matters to us. This is what is important. Values will help be the filter that brings the right people onto your team and keeps the wrong people off your team. It's not as if they're bad people. It's just not the right team for them. What I've learned as a leader is values for them. To be strong enough to attract the right people have to be strong enough to repel the wrong people. Values that are not strong enough to repel the wrong people won't be strong enough to attract the right people. Nehemiah was really clear on who wasn't going to be on the team. Nehemiah was also really clear on the how. The how was how the wall was going to be built. It is a strategy. Oftentimes leaders confuse strategy and vision. Vision. Here's what we're going to do. Vision's the big picture of what we're going to do. Strategy is how we actually get it accomplished. We will see Nehemiah's strategy next week in chapter three. He's an incredible leader who coordinates a whole lot of people along a wall to build it. He was really clear. So conviction is clarity, but it's also courage. And I want you to see Nehemiah's courage. It's super inspiring to me. Nehemiah, when he stood before the king Artaxerxes, he was terrified because the king had saw him sad. And because he was sad, the king could have thought. Nehemiah's about to take a coup to take me out. Why is he acting this way? He's never been sad before. And notice what Nehemiah says in verse two. He says, then I was terrified, but I was terrified, but I kept going. I was terrified, but I kept trusting. I was terrified, but I kept believing that this was from God. Listen, as a leader, you're going to have moments when you are overwhelmed with fear. You're going to have moments where you are overwhelmed with the magnitude of what you're believing you are supposed to accomplish. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is moving in the midst of being afraid. Courage is. You are terrified, but it's not the end of the sentence. I'm terrified, but I'm going to keep going. This is Nehemiah. And here's how Nehemiah is able to keep going. He was afraid before the earthly king, and he traded his fear before his earthly king for fear, and all for his eternal, everlasting king. In fact, if you flip the page to page 45 in your book, you'll see that Nehemiah does this throughout the entire account of Nehemiah. He gets to moments as a leader where he can be overwhelmed with fear or with the magnitude of the vision. And he rejects fear of man and he replaces it with fear for God. He rejects. No, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna allow the sight of this to discourage me. I'm gonna replace my fear of this, my fear for people, for all, for God. I'm gonna turn my eyes away from what's happening here, and I'm gonna turn my eyes up to my eternal king, the one who deserves all of my all. I'm gonna look to him as a leader. You're gonna have moments where you're completely overwhelmed. There are many moments as a leader where I have been overwhelmed. Maybe some of you are like me. When I'm overwhelmed, it's often at night when I'm trying to go to sleep. And in my worst moments as a leader, my thoughts can spiral. At night, I wish somebody would nod as if I'm not the only one. Okay, thank you. And it can get dark. It can get dark. It has gotten dark. What if this happens? What if this goes wrong? What if this doesn't happen the way I thought? I mean, the scenarios. I can spiral. I can spiral. And then, because I've invited people to be a part of things. Oh, man. It gets painful if my thoughts spiral. She left her career to join this. He moved his family across the country to join this. They gave money for this thing. If this doesn't happen, I'm going to look like a fool. Fool or a fraud or I'm not going to ever have trust again. I'm going to lose credibility in front of people I love. I'm going to be embarrassed. Oh, my gosh, am I the only one? Spiral. Spiral. On my worst moments as a leader. On my worst moments. Worst moments, I just spiral. My best moments as a leader are in those moments I reject fear of man and I replace it with. With fear of God. In the middle of the night, when I have that pang of energy that, oh, it hits me and I'm can't go back to sleep. My best moments is when I turn my eyes to Jesus and look full of his wonderful face. And the things of this earth go strangely dim in light of his glory and grace. In my best moments, I look to him. My best moments, I. I look to him and I say, God, remind me of how faithful you've been. So many times you've been faithful to me. I'm gonna recount the times that I've been praying this way and you've come through. You've never left me. You'll never leave me or forsake me. Remind me that I am your son and that you have me. I'm gonna keep praying to you until I fall asleep. God, I'm gonna keep trusting you. I know that you were able to do immeasurably more than I ask or imagine. I'm bringing these prayers to you, God, and you're able to do more than I'm even thinking. Thinking you're able. You're so much bigger than my thoughts, Lord. I'm trusting you. I'm trying to reject fear. I'm trying to trust you now, Lord. Help my heart to trust you, Lord. You say in your word that you meet all of my needs according to your riches and glory. So I'm trying to trust you now, Lord. Meet all of our needs. Lord, I want to go back to sleep. I need to go back to sleep. Help me go back to sleep and know that you are the God who never sleeps or sleeps. And because you never sleep or slumber, you watch over me. And I can sleep because you're not sleeping. I don't have to work right now because you're always working. You're always working on behalf of your son. And so, Lord, help me trust you. In my best moments, I take spiraling and I transfer my all to my everlasting, eternal king. And that's what you can do, too, as a leader. You'll have moments where you're overwhelmed sometimes with the scope of the very vision that God's given you. Sometimes you'll be overwhelmed with the scorn of other people. I had a leader one time, a mentor. Tell me, Eric, listen, if you want to make everybody happy, don't be a leader. Go sell ice cream. Don't be a leader. Napoleon said that anytime he announced the direction to his people, a third of the people said, that's the best idea ever. A third hated the idea, and a third waited to see which of the other two groups were right. Most leaders don't like those odds. And so as a leader, you're going to have moments where you are challenged and overwhelmed. And you must do what Nehemiah did. You must replace earthly fear for all, for your eternal king. You want to be a person who has high conviction and high clarity. And when you do, or high courage and high clarity, you're a person of conviction. You want to live in the upper right box. You want to be a person of conviction. Some of you, right now, if you're honest, you're not living in that box. You have high clarity, but you have low courage. And if you have high clarity and low courage, you're frustrated right now. You have a vision. You have a sense of what your next season in life should be or what your next leadership journey should be or what this initiative should be at work. You have clarity, but you don't have courage. And so you're frustrated all the time. Some of you have worked for a leader in the bottom right box. High courage, but low clarity. High courage is someone who's all, they're willing to make a decision, let's go. They're willing to say what? Let's go, let's go. But really low clarity, not thoughtful, not intentional, wants to build 100 walls at once. And you can't build a hundred walls at once. That person just creates chaos for everybody. The worst place to be, though, is if you're in that lower left box where you don't really have clarity or conviction. You're just existing apathy or living out of convenience. The people who should be the absolute best at conviction are Christians because our Savior Jesus is full of clarity and full of courage. When Jesus entered this world to rescue you, he was really clear on his mission. The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost. And he was full of courage as he was in the Garden of Gethsemane, about to go to the cross to die for us. And he prayed to God the Father, if there's any other way. I don't want to drink the cup of God's wrath. I don't want to drink the cup of sin. I'm the pure One of God, the Holy One of God, the only one who is not sin. Sin. If there's any other way, let this cup pass from me. But not as I will, but as you will. And with great courage, Jesus embraced the cross, endured the cross, scoring its shame so that he could rescue you and me from our sin and our shame. He had great clarity of his mission and great courage to fulfill his mission. And those of us who've been rescued by Jesus, we also can have great clarity and great courage because we have His Word, which is clear direction for us on how to live.