GYC 2018: To The End

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Kingly Power

Ron Kelly

1. Kingly Power, Alliance, and the Way Forward

2. Kingly Power and the Scarlet Letter

3. Kingly Power: Bright Lights, And the Morning Star

This message was presented at the GYC To The End in Houston, Texas.

For other resources like this, visit us online at GYCweb.org.

All right, folks, I think I'm about ready to go.

And we will take up the last seminar segment of this GYC.

Thank you, Lord, for the provision you make.

I'm asking now, Lord, that you'll help us all to have understanding and know how to relate to the information that's being shared.

May it be edifying and helpful for all the roles we fulfill, whether we're following or leading.

I ask now, Lord, that you'll set a watch before my lips and a guard before the door of my mouth, that you will make my heart sensitive and the heart of the listeners.

And now thank you that you have given us insight as to how to maximize effective influence and change, or maybe stay evil.

Now bless us to that end, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, I want to start this segment, which is going to be a segment that I've entitled, Kingly Power Bright Lights, Dark Nights, and the Morning Star.

This is a, this will be a little bit, there will be components of this that are a little bit discouraging in 1 sense.

It's just some of the sentiments are kind of heavy from Ellen White in this segment.

Along the lines of ministry, There was a period of time when I remember pulling an anonymous letter out of my mailbox.

Now, anonymous letters are not really worth the paper that the ink is written on.

And if you're not going to sign your name to what's being said, you shouldn't bother saying it because the person has no way to put a perspective on what's being said.

If I have a very respectable person come to me that has lived the Christian life, shows courtesy in what they communicate, and has balance in their private world.

I listen differently than somebody who's a chronic complainer and doesn't manage their own household well, and you should listen differently too.

You don't give everybody the equal weight of credibility in sharing sentiments with you, but when you get an anonymous letter, you have no way of knowing how to wait what was said.

Is this an unbalanced person who sent you something that really shouldn't be waited like they're waiting it?

Or it usually is that way, that's why it's anonymous.

So I had a woman that was the wife of an elder and she had been so supportive to me for probably about the first 12 years of my ministry, and I was in this church a long time, but eventually we came to a place where what she thought the church wanted and what I thought the church needed was different.

And at that point in time something went terribly wrong.

Her attitude towards me soured and whereas before she thought I was God and could get whatever I wanted, Now she saw me as the devil.

And I thought I'm gonna have to talk to this person.

I don't often do that, But I wanted to visit with them and they were willing so they came in they sat down on the love seat together And I visited with him for a while.

It was a very courteous dialogue Even though she was behaving antagonistically and by the way Kenneth Hawk in his book Antagonists in the church makes a very interesting statement.

Actually, people don't like weak leaders.

Anyway, we'll skip the quote until I get it right because it's too good to mess up.

We weren't making a lot of headway, but it was kind, it was civil, it was all those things.

But eventually it got to the place where we had to nicely kind of press into the arena of attitudinal problems.

And she wasn't really favorable to owning any personal responsibility for anything and I decided to ask her if she was the author of the anonymous letters.

I choose to believe the best about people until I'm convinced that I have to believe the worst and that's how you should lead too.

So when she told me she wasn't doing it I chose to believe her and I do think she was telling the truth but because I had pastored there for so long I had gotten to the place where I knew how people talked and what phrases they used and I'd gotten to the place where I had heard the complaint either directly or indirectly some other way and I knew where it started from because of how this person talked.

When you're in 1 congregation for this long, you learn things about idiosyncrasies and habits, and I said to her, well, you may not be writing the letters, but I think they're reading from your playbook.

In effect, what I was saying was, and as I've said in the previous sessions, you cannot not tell your story, and she was so wrought up about what was going on that she was going to the wrong people complaining, and some of those people, the seeds that she was sowing were being watered by Lucifer who came right behind her to water them and they were growing up plants of bitterness and some of those people just needed 1 real reason not to like the pastor and she was giving it to them.

Now your pastor has to deal with this kind of stuff, So don't go around talking to 6 other people about the issue.

Now, to this woman's credit through the years, I have had few people correct me in public.

She's corrected me in the prayer meeting before and you know what?

She's corrected me in private and to her credit she was typically quite good at coming and talking to me, and I knew she loved me.

At this point in time I doubted it, but I knew over the past year she had truly cared about me, a woman old enough to be my mother.

But before the meeting was over, I had to say something that was difficult to say but needed to be said, and I had to say to her and her husband, who was kind of a passive man.

She was more of the choleric leader in the home.

Through the years, she had kind of ranted towards him and nagged at him, and his device for dealing with her was to ignore her.

And of course, that only made her more frustrated.

Not that I was ignoring her, but I wasn't doing what she wanted.

And I said to the husband and the wife, I said, if you can't recognize a bad attitude, I was talking especially to the husband now.

If you can't recognize a bad attitude, what can you recognize?

Now, as we go forward in this segment right now, I just need to remind you that whether a person holds the highest position of positional authority in the church or is just sitting down to pew from you, there's not a 1 of us that don't have the temptation to go down the wrong attitudinal road.

And once we do that, it's hard to interpret somebody else's actions in the right light.

This woman would not be willing to see objectivity on my half.

Maybe it was, I knew from my years at that church that 90% of the church really didn't want what she wanted.

But she thought somehow if I leaned on it hard enough, I could convince them all and it'd be okay.

And part of the reason I was effective at getting things done was that I actually listened to people and prayed my way and invited people to pray their way into consensus.

We just had a large remodeling project at the church that I'm in.

We came close to spending a million dollars.

The church still had the same decor that it had 48 years before when it was built.

Now most of your homes don't have the same carpet that they had 48 years ago when they were built in the 60s, but this did.

And you know there's something about the minor matters that create a real opportunity to divide people.

We laugh about the color of the carpet, but I want to tell you something, that journey of remodeling that church because we were patient, we were prayerful, we respected each other, sometimes along the way the church members had to Apologize to each other on the building committee, but they did and you know what that building that remodeling project Unified that church and brought them together beautifully, and I want to praise the Lord for it when you have the right attitude You can conquer about anything, but when you have the wrong attitude you can't fix anything Especially sometimes even yourself until you admit you have it Are you responsible and are you honest with yourself?

I can't remember where I told this story, but I went through a period of time where I thought the leaders in the conference office above me, none of them were men of integrity.

I had some situations where it was clear to me that right wasn't done, and I sat on the conference committee, and I sat on the education board.

I mean, I was not looking from the outside in.

I could see from the inside some things were wrong.

And I can remember on a vacation, because my father-in-law worked for a different conference, I had such a disappointment and a bitterness towards these conference people, that on a family vacation, staying at 1 of our summer camps out east.

When I walked out of the building, I was so frustrated with my father-in-law, my wife looked at me and she said, you're pretty bitter.

And I want to tell you something, that started a completely different trajectory for my prayer life about me.

And I want to tell you today, I have a wonderful respect and appreciation for those men and those women that hold departmental leadership and officer posts in our conference, and I truly do believe.

And if I had to live those years over maybe I would have cut them a bit more slack or maybe I would have just trusted the Lord a little bit.

Don't fret because of evildoers nor be envious of the workers of iniquity.

Series

Kingly Power

3. Kingly Power: Bright Lights, And the Morning Star

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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