I knew far more when I was younger than I do now!

Most of us picture the wise leader as the one with the answers: quickest to diagnose the problem, first to speak, always with a view. We assume wisdom is a kind of cleverness that comes with seniority.

Scripture sees it differently. Much of the Book of Proverbs was written by leaders for leaders. David passed his instruction to his son Solomon, and Solomon passed it on. When the wisdom books of the Bible finally get to the bottom line, it isn’t about intelligence at all.

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man’s all.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13, NKJV)

The top of wisdom isn’t knowing everything. It’s fearing God. And the fear of God shows up in two places most leaders don’t think to look.

The wise know they don’t know

The first place surprised me more than anything else I’ve learned about wisdom: the wise keep learning.

You’d think it would be the other way round. But the mark of a fool is that he’s wise in his own eyes, and the wise don’t think of themselves as wise at all. Because of that, they’re hungry. They ask questions. They listen. They keep reading. They’ll take a lesson from anyone and anything.

“A wise man will hear and increase learning, And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel,” (Proverbs 1:5, NKJV)

What do you notice? The wise man is already wise, and he still hears. He still adds to what he knows. Wisdom doesn’t stop being hungry.

An old saying puts it well. Wise people learn from the experience of others. Most people learn from their own. Fools learn from nobody’s.

This matters for leaders more than for anyone. The longer we lead, the more people defer to us, and the easier it is to stop learning without noticing. We’ve seen this before, we’ve tried that, we know how it goes. Each of those can be experience talking. Sometimes it’s just a closed door.

Great leaders never think they’ve arrived. The older they get, the more they realise how little they know. And when the leader keeps growing, the organisation keeps growing too.

So the questions are simple. Who are you learning from right now? When did you last change your mind? If you’re always the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Wisdom isn’t a technique

There’s a trap here, though, and it’s a subtle one.

Today a lot of leadership teaching treats wisdom, and especially integrity, as a strategy. Be honest because honesty builds trust. Keep your word because it’s good for your reputation. Treat people well because that’s what successful companies do.

It isn’t wrong exactly. Integrity does build trust, and leadership runs on trust. But notice where it puts the motive. If I want to succeed, I’d better be honest. Integrity becomes just another route to success.

So what happens when honesty looks like it will cost you the success?

That’s when you find out where your wisdom actually comes from.

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“So He said, ‘Come.’ And when Peter had come down out of the boat, he walked on the water to go to Jesus.” (Matthew 14:29, NKJV)

Jesus never said Peter’s name.

“Come.” The invitation wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. Any of the twelve could have climbed over the side. Only one did.

We usually treat courage as a personality trait, something certain people are born with. I don’t believe that. Courage is a decision someone makes while the others are still holding onto the side of the boat.

Fear doesn’t leave first

Most of us are waiting for the fear to go before we move. We tell ourselves we’ll make the call once we feel sure. We’ll confront the issue once it’s not so awkward. We’ll launch, plant, hire or resign once the nerves settle.

They won’t settle. Leaders who refuse to move until fear has subsided never make progress.

Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s feeling the fear and doing the thing anyway. Joyce Meyer calls it “doing it afraid.” If you weren’t afraid, you wouldn’t need courage. You’d just be doing something easy.

God knew this about Joshua. He didn’t tell him the job would feel comfortable. He commanded him:

“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:9, NKJV)

Courage is commanded because fear is expected. And the reason Joshua could obey wasn’t confidence in himself. It was the last phrase: God would be with him wherever he went.

Courage starts small

I wasn’t born with a bold streak where other leaders were concerned. As a young minister I found other preachers fairly intimidating.

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Driven people find that hard. We can run on empty for a long time and call it faithfulness.

Over the years I’ve become convinced that a church grows to the level of its leadership strength. So does a business. So does a team. We love to blame the ceiling on something outside ourselves: the building, the budget, the staff we can’t afford yet, the city we’re planted in. Sometimes those things are real, and if they are, fix them. Far more often, though, the organisation has grown to the size its leader can carry, and there it stays. Manageable.

Paul knew where strength comes from. His prayer for the Ephesians -

“that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man,” (Ephesians 3:16, NKJV)

Look where that strength lands: the inner man. God strengthens the person first, and the work follows.

We rise to our lowest ceiling

Strength isn’t one ceiling. It’s several. There’s a spiritual one, a physical one, an emotional one, a mental one and a social one. You can be strong in four and weak in the fifth, and the fifth decides how high you go. We rise to our lowest ceiling. Talent won’t lift you past it. Neither will education, or a lucky break.

When our spiritual life is smaller than our responsibility, we will be overwhelmed. Prayer and the Word stop carrying us. Forgiving others who have wounded us gets harder, and when a leader can’t forgive, people scatter. Temptation hits harder. Faith under pressure dissolves. We read circumstances naturally, not spiritually.

The physical ceiling is the one we love to ignore. Charles Finney saw around 200,000 people come to Christ across America in roughly ten years of revival. He’s said to have taken only seven days of rest in all that time. Eventually he had to halve his workload. In his own words: “My health soon became such that I found I must relinquish one of my fields of endeavour.” How much more could he have done if he’d been well?

I hear leaders say “I never take a break” or “We haven’t had a holiday in years” as if it were a badge. It’s macho idiocy. Even God rested after six days of creative work. Who do we think we are? When I’m tired, I’m less effective at everything. My gifts don’t work at their best. If we won’t rest, illness eventually rests us anyway.

The emotional ceiling shows up when leadership asks for something hard: correcting someone’s attitude, holding a line when others won’t, or making a decision that disappoints people. Trying to keep everyone happy is the secret to misery. For some of us, this ceiling is the inability to delegate. We’re too anxious to let go of anything important.

Our social ceiling is quieter, but it’s real. If other people’s opinions matter too much, every relationship gets heavy. You have to be able to say “no” as often as you say “yes”. Friends sometimes ask me to arrange for them to preach in churches I know. That strains my relationship with those pastors. They don’t want to turn me down, and they’re not sure they want my friend in their pulpit. So I made a policy: I don’t arrange itineraries for others. I’ll introduce them with a text, and then the pastor decides. My policy carries the weight, and the friendship stays intact.

How you know you’ve hit one

The signs aren’t subtle. Our conversations include how exhausted we are. We feel negative about the church or the company we used to love. We resent people bothering us, and the phone ‘never stops’. We grumble about the pay. We keep wishing we could escape.

Complaining tells us something specific: our situation has become larger than us. We sigh, blame others, and get discouraged.

If you feel accused, hold off on the guilt for a moment.

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Jesus drew the line Himself:

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. The hireling flees because he is a hireling and does not care about the sheep.” (John 10:11–13, NKJV)

Look at the reason Jesus gives. The hireling doesn’t run because he’s weak or unskilled. He runs because he doesn’t care. Running away only exposes what was already true. In calm weather you can’t tell the two apart: same staff, same field, same flock. Danger reveals the difference.

We picture the wolf as something dramatic. Sometimes it is. More often, though, the wolf arrives looking like a sheep and saying all the right things.

A young father in our church died of cancer. We supported his widow and her family through their grief. About a year later, a man new to the church began pursuing her, and she welcomed it. They got engaged. We felt uneasy about him. Nobody really knew him, and then a shadowy history came to light. He wasn’t who he seemed. We warned her. She didn’t want to hear it. She gave him the six-figure settlement from her late husband’s will, and then he was gone.

After years of pastoring, I know that warning people is hazardous. They’ll tell you not to judge, that you don’t understand, that it’s between them and God. Warning them is necessary anyway. Hirelings keep quiet because silence is safer for the hireling. Shepherds speak up, and they’re not always thanked for it.

Not every threat comes with bad intentions. Some threats are sincere. False teaching pulls people away from Christ. Cynics who have grown bitter want company. Zealots can be as dangerous as backsliders. The zealot tells everyone the church is never on fire enough, never godly enough, never whatever enough- the kind of fire that’s unsustainable- and sincere believers who catch it crash and burn. C.S. Lewis saw this in The Screwtape Letters: if the devils couldn’t make a Christian lukewarm or cause him to backslide, they’d turn him into a fanatic.

Your job is to keep God’s people in God. That means keeping them away from worldliness, but without legalism, so they discover the beauty of holiness instead of straining under an impossible list of rules. It means keeping them away from the wolf, and also out of the ditch on the other side of the road.

Guarding is only half of it

You can guard a flock perfectly, but they still need feeding.

Shepherds feed. “He makes me to lie down in green pastures” (Psalm 23:2). Sheep don’t lie down hungry, and they don’t lie down afraid. They rest when they’re fed and feel safe.

I will always treasure the memory of our children falling asleep in my arms. That’s trust, and it was high because I’d been there for them. Mind you, children will fall asleep in a stranger’s arms too. But if the person holding them is nervous, the child senses it and squirms. A calm, confident leader creates a climate where people feel safe. They rest.

Pastors of growing churches sometimes get accused of stealing sheep. Mostly, they’ve simply grown good grass in a peaceful field. If a preacher isn’t diving into the Word of God with personal passion, he shouldn’t be surprised when people leave to find food somewhere else. Some preachers are so tedious it’s a miracle they don’t doze off in their own pulpit! If the people are sleepy in church, wake up the preacher!

That’s why preaching the Word is the primary call of my life as a pastor. Not administration, not management, not counselling, but feeding. I set aside at least one day every week to prepare for Sunday. If a pastor is too busy for that, he’s too busy.

This reaches well beyond the pulpit. Whatever you lead, your people need feeding: vision, truth, clarity, a word in season. If all they ever hear from you is the roster, the targets and the problems, they’re hungry, however well protected they are. And hungry sheep go looking.

Jesus put it like this:

“Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his master will make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season?” (Luke 12:42)

Look at the ruler’s job description. It isn’t to be served. It’s to hand out portions. Authority is given to the servant so the household is fed.

So, two questions:

1. When trouble came recently, which leaders stayed and which didn’t?

2. And what did your people eat this week?

Chapter 18 of You the Leader goes further into guarding and feeding the flock. If you’re leading a flock right now, it’s worth an evening.

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That word bothered me. People are not a base. They are not a launch pad for our calling, a resource for our vision or an audience for our gift. They are God’s people. The moment we start using them for something we think matters more, we’ve stopped shepherding our flock.

Jesus saw crowds differently.

“But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36, NKJV)

Notice what moved Him. It wasn’t their potential or their usefulness to the mission. It was their condition: weary and scattered. Sheep without a shepherd get tired and lose their way. Jesus was moved to action by compassion for people.

That’s where Kingdom leadership starts. You might lead the deacons, the choir, the youth, a start-up team of four or a company of four thousand. Either way, the first requirement isn’t talent or strategy. It’s that you actually care about the people. In my early days as a pastor, one leader said, “The ministry is all about God and people.” I’ve never found a reason to improve on that. If we’re not interested in people, we’re not ready to lead them.

And people can tell. A congregation very quickly works out whether the preacher loves them or loves the ministry. A team knows whether the boss sees them or sees straight past them to the next quarter. You can’t fake it for long.

The shepherd is there

The shepherd is a “there” person. When he’s absent, the sheep worry. When he’s visible, present and felt, everything settles. Sometimes presence is the whole ministry. Job’s friends got plenty wrong later on, but they got the first seven days right: they sat with him and said nothing.

When tragedy hits someone you lead, move. Don’t put it in the diary for next week. Drop what you’re doing and be there. Good shepherds are prompt. They don’t just turn up, either. They help.

I need to be honest with you here, though, because I’m about the last person you’d want at your bedside in hospital.

I’m not built for it

When our church in Sydney started growing, I tried to do everything the only pastor I’d ever known did: counselling, hospital visits, weddings, funerals, baptisms, preaching, and endless meetings. Most of it drained me. The hospital was the worst. I faint at the sight of blood.

One day a young couple asked me to come and help them say goodbye to their baby, who had suffered peritonitis. I ran up the stairs into intensive care, felt the heat of the room, saw little flashes of light in front of my eyes and knew I was going down. So I leant on what I thought was a bench. It was a trolley. It rolled out through the swing doors, and I ended up on the hallway floor, staring at the ceiling, with a nurse’s voice coming from somewhere far away. Then I had to pull myself together and face that grieving young couple.

I’m not built for hospital visitation. So I stopped doing it. I stopped doing most of the things “the pastor” was supposed to do, and I handed them to others. Most of them were volunteers, and they were far better at it than I was.

That didn’t make me less of a shepherd.

This is where leaders can get jangled. They think having a shepherd’s heart means carrying a shepherd’s to-do list. They think caring for people means personally being at every bed, every crisis and every coffee. So they burn out trying. Or they quietly decide they’re “not a people person” and stop caring at all.

Both are wrong. The heart is not negotiable. The tasks are.

Moses sat judging the people from morning to evening until his father-in-law told him plainly, “The thing that you do is not good” (Exodus 18:17). Moses cared. That was never the problem. The problem was that one man’s care had become a bottleneck for a whole nation. Jethro’s answer was to multiply the shepherds, not to remove the shepherding.

So when someone in your world is hurting, ask one question first: are they cared for? Don’t ask “Did I personally go?” Ask “Is someone there, promptly, who loves them?” If the answer is yes, you’ve led well. If it’s no, then you go.

A leader who builds a team of carers hasn’t abandoned the flock. He’s made sure more sheep have a shepherd. A leader who never builds that team will eventually leave people uncared for, no matter how hard he works.

What you can’t delegate is the heart. You can hand someone the hospital roster. You can’t hand them your concern for the people. That has to be in you. When it does, it shapes everything: how you talk about your people when they’re not in the room, whether you see individuals or numbers, and whether you’d lay something down for them or ask them to lay everything down for you.

We don’t ask people to sacrifice their lives for us. That isn’t God’s way. The shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

I tell more about how I learned to hand this work to others in Do It Now! If you’re worn out trying to be everyone’s everything, start there.

Who is one person in your team or church right now who needs a shepherd and hasn’t got one? Tell me in the comments what you’re going to do about it this week.

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Remember, the beginning is just the start of the journey. It’s less than ten per cent of realising a dream. The other ninety per cent gets done by the person who no longer feels the vision with the same intensity as at the beginning. But they keep doing it anyway.

Motivation is an attitude. It’s the spirit of action. It’s the posture that says, “Let’s make it happen.” Leaders don’t wait to see what will unfold; they create their own outcomes. Too often, we wait to see how it turns out rather than making it happen.

If motivation is an attitude, you can rebuild it on Tuesday when nothing about your circumstances has changed.

Three things standing in the road

Distraction, laziness and discouragement. That’s the list. They’re not glamorous enemies and they don’t announce themselves.

No-one repents from distraction, because each distraction looks legit.

Laziness in leaders rarely looks like idleness. It can be being busy about things that don’t push the needle. It says, ‘I can’t be bothered’, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’, the hard conversation waits another fortnight.

Discouragement is the serious one, and Scripture takes it seriously. When the exiles came back to rebuild Jerusalem after seventy years, some of the builders were old enough to remember Solomon’s temple. Gold everywhere. The columns. The glory of God descending on that building. Now they’re standing in front of rubble that had to be cleared before anything could even begin, and when they finally laid a foundation, it looked pathetic to what they could remember.

Zechariah 4:10 says, “Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin, to see the plumb line in Zerubbabel’s hand.”

God wasn’t comparing their foundation to Solomon’s. They were. He was pleased because the work had started.

That’s when we can lose momentum. The vision hasn’t died. We measure today’s rubble against a memory, or against somebody else’s finished building, and the comparison drains us.

So what do you actually do about it? The instinct is to go looking for fresh inspiration. Another conference, another book, another late night reworking the vision until it feels exciting again. Sometimes that’s right. But in my experience, when a leader has stalled it’s almost never an inspiration problem.

It’s two other things, and they’re both fixable right now.

The first is that you haven’t actually decided

Our super-power is commitment. The will is strong. Decisions unleash a force inside that propels us forward. Trying to achieve something without commitment is a pipe dream.

You can tell the difference in about thirty seconds of conversation. One person is hoping. The other has decided. The hoping person has more information, better arguments and a longer list of conditions. The deciding person has less of all that and is already moving.

In the early days, I preached a message telling our congregation to go buy a house. Mark and Bernadette Kelsey were on our leadership team. They went home, and the next morning Mark told Bernadette he was going to buy a house. They had no money. But they had a decision. They found a house, then found the money, and entered the very difficult (for young people) Sydney property market.

When we take a step forward, we get support. Sometimes the opposite increases too. This deepens our determination. The level of opposition tells you the value level of the dream. Mark and Bernie got their house.

We don’t decide recklessly though. Sit down and count the cost, get advice from people who know more than you, pray it through properly. Then decide, and stay the course until you get there.

The second is that you’re running on empty and calling it commitment

Unlike a car, we don’t have a fuel gauge. We do know when we’re exhausted. Or do we? Some of us have such a high drive we don’t notice we’re depleted. We soldier on.

So I use indicators. I check my levels of negative thinking, complaining, discouragement, avoiding conversations, being peopled out, and imagining the way out. When those start rising, that’s my gauge, and nothing is more important at that moment than stopping to refuel.

Look at that list again, because every single item on it will feel to you like a considered response to your circumstances. It won’t feel like a fuel reading. That’s exactly why you need the list written down somewhere and agreed in advance, when you’re well.

When you refuse to stop, the cost lands on other people. Poor decision-making has costly mistakes. Relationships get shallow because you can’t connect with people. You stop caring for people you actually love. Everyone becomes an interruption.

And when we’re that tired, we reach for cheap fuel. Five hours of Netflix will distract you. It won’t re-energise you. The best battery charge is a trickle charge, not a fast one, because the fast charge shortens your ‘battery’s’ life.

Work out what burns your fuel and what refills it, then refill on purpose. Encouragers fill your tank. Keep company with people who believe in you. Read, and listen to great communicators. The finest minds in history can sit in your house and talk to you privately through their books. Music lifts me every time, particularly praise and worship, which puts me in a God-focused state and lets the Spirit work on my soul.

I’ll add one more that some people find uncomfortable. I keep an eye on what others in my age group and my stage are achieving, and it gets me going. Seeing what someone else is doing sparks possibilities for me. I believe in competitiveness. Paul used it. He told the Jewish people what God was doing among the Gentiles, provoking them, and he told the Macedonians about the generosity of the Corinthians, and the Corinthians about the Macedonians, and both churches gave more because of it.

While you’re at it, put your highest priority work where your energy is. For many people that’s roughly six to eleven in the morning and four to seven in the evening. Find your own peak hours and place the top of your list into them. It works for teams too. Your early meetings will be more creative than at two in the afternoon.

The third is to lighten up

Good humour is born from a great attitude. Never take yourself too seriously.

I cannot remember meeting a great leader who did not have an equally great sense of humour. Humour confirms sanity. People trust someone who can laugh at genuinely funny things far more than someone who has outlawed the emotion. The court had a jester because kings needed relief, and so do you.

This is not a personality footnote. The atmosphere around a church reflects the leader. People do not grow in a heavy atmosphere where free expression is choked. In a lighter atmosphere, people feel confident being themselves, and that confidence is where their contribution comes from. If you’re free, your team will be.

Proverbs 17:22 says, “A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.”

Even Francis of Assisi, who gets painted as relentlessly solemn, understood it. He wrote that when we stand in the middle of the devil’s cloud of doubt and accusation, and instead of breathing that choking dust we refresh ourselves in the water of God’s joy until it overflows in holy laughter, not a single demon can harm us.

Here’s what I want you to take from all of it. Delaying joy until something happens to justify being happy guarantees a miserable life. You will always be able to find the reason to postpone. The building isn’t finished, the numbers aren’t there yet, the person hasn’t apologised.

Joy is within you right now.

So start where you can start. Make the decision you’ve been circling. Book the day off you’ve been promising yourself since March. Ring the encourager. Put the hard thing in tomorrow’s morning slot instead of pushing it to Friday afternoon again.

I’ve written a whole book on this exact problem of the gap between knowing and doing. It’s called Do It Now! If that gap is where you’re stuck, that’s the one to pick up.

And I’d genuinely like to know: what’s the first honest indicator that your tank is low? Not what you tell people. What actually shows up first. Put it in the comments, because someone else reading will recognise theirs in yours.

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Most of us treat attitude as weather. It arrives. The email lands, the offering is down, the staff member resigns on a Tuesday morning, and we assume our mood is simply the honest report of the facts. We say things like “I’m just being realistic.” Then we lead the whole day out of that.

Great leaders control their attitude. They don’t wait to see how they feel. They understand how they want to feel, and they choose to feel that way. Their moods are the result of their choices, not the other way round.

That’s not denial. It’s leadership, applied first to yourself.

Proverbs 16:32 says, “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.” The person who cannot govern their own spirit ruins their whole life. The person who can, takes a city. Why? Because they have already conquered the inner one. We accomplish outside what we accomplish inside.

So here is the question I’d want answered before I looked at anyone’s strategy, budget or growth chart. What is the state of the city inside you?

The upside is always there

A positive attitude is essential to achieving anything at all. Not the plastic kind. I mean the discipline of recognising the upside of a situation while everyone else is cataloguing the downside.

Optimism identifies opportunity. It sees what could be built here, what this setback has just made possible, who this problem is going to develop. It illuminates the people around you, and people are drawn to light. Every one of us has met the negative crowd. Cynical, suspicious, disheartening. Nobody follows them anywhere, and if they do, they don’t stay long.

This matters more than leaders like to admit, because your mood is contagious. In Leadership 101 I quoted research showing that upbeat moods lift cooperation, fairness and performance, and that of all emotional signals, smiles are the most catching. Leaders who run irritable, touchy, domineering and cold repel people. Nobody wants to work for a grouch. Churchill said it in one line: “Emotional sterility is death to great leadership.”

You set the temperature of the room whether you intend to or not. Walk into your staff meeting flat and watch what happens to the ideas in that room.

But positivity on its own isn’t the whole of it, and it isn’t even the hardest part. There’s a second attitude that decides far more about your future, and most leaders think they already have it.

Willing

Willingness is a key to life. An unwilling personality never does anything quickly. They always have a reason why they can’t. The reasons are usually good ones, too. That’s what makes it so hard to confront.

Kenneth Hagin told the story of being called out of pastoring into itinerant ministry. He had no money. He was driving on tyres so bald they were singing. He reminded God of the promise in Isaiah 1:19, “If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land,” and pointed out that it wasn’t coming to pass. The Lord replied, “You’re obedient, but you’re not willing.” Hagin said he became willing in a flash.

That distinction will sit with you for a while if you let it. Obedient and unwilling is a real condition. It’s the team member who does the task and lets you know what it cost them. It’s the leader who takes the assignment and spends the next six months explaining why it was never really their gift. The work gets done. Nothing gets built.

I love the “can do” crowd. Success comes in a can, not a cannot. Working with a team of willing people is a dream. No problem is too big, no vision impossible. Achievement doesn’t rest solely on faith, education or talent. It rests to an enormous degree on willingness.

Thankful

Shakespeare said there’s no wind as cold as the wind of ingratitude. “Blow, blow, thou winter wind! Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.”

Thankfulness beats positivity, and here’s why. Positivity can curdle into a cold, insensitive arrogance, the leader who is relentlessly upbeat and completely unaware of who carried the weight. Gratitude can’t do that. It builds humility into the same soil, because thankfulness admits it wasn’t only us who achieved anything. It credits the people who deserve credit. It credits God.

A grateful heart pleases God and draws us near to Him. It is not possible to have a great attitude without one.

The word for this is spirit

Daniel 6:3 says, “Then this Daniel distinguished himself above the governors and satraps, because an excellent spirit was in him; and the king gave thought to setting him over the whole realm.”

Spirit there means attitude. Daniel was promoted over men with more political capital than he had, in a foreign administration that had no reason to favour him, because of the spirit he carried into the work.

That should change how you read your own career and how you read your team. What we do does not guarantee anything. The spirit in which we do it decides most of it. The borders of the Kingdom are not geographical, they’re attitudinal. When we’re walking in love we are under the dominion of the King. When we’re walking in unforgiveness or resentment we’ve crossed a border, and we’re now operating under a different authority, in our own house, with our own staff.

Attitudes are choices we make with the heart. The New Testament commands a great many of them. We choose to love, to be patient, to believe, to be generous, to forgive, and we regularly choose these things while our emotions are arguing hard for the opposite. That’s what it means to lead yourself.

Don’t try to fix it with a title

One more thing, because this is where the teaching gets expensive.

In the early days I installed someone with a bad attitude, hoping the job would fix the problem. He had complained to me that he’d been serving faithfully and was ready for a leadership role. He was right about the serving. He had been faithful. But he now felt there ought to be some evidence of reward, some career path. The concept was right. The attitude was wrong, and I knew it. Against my better judgment I made him our youth leader, because I figured he’d either mope around complaining to others or leave if I didn’t use him.

He led the group badly. Late, unprepared, unsteady on his feet as a teacher and as a leader. He lasted a few months and we spent a long time mopping up.

Giving people a job to fix their problem is doomed. They have to fix the problem before they get the job. And when you promote skill over spirit, you have just taught everybody watching that attitude counts for nothing around here and results count for everything. That lesson takes years to unteach.

So when you’re choosing leaders, look for the excellent spirit first. Teachable. Humble. Easy to work with. Enthusiastic about the house. Willing-hearted. Skill comes third on my list, because willing people learn almost anything you ask of them.

Start with yourself. Post the watch on your own heart this week, before you assess anyone else’s. Notice what you’re rehearsing when nobody’s listening. Notice whether you’re obedient but unwilling. Notice whether you’ve thanked anyone in the last seven days for something you were quietly taking credit for.

I work through all four of these attitudes in Chapter 17 of You the Leader, including the one I’ve not touched here, which is motivation. If your attitude is the thing under pressure at the moment, start there.

And tell me this in the comments, because I’d find it useful. Which of the three is currently costing you the most: positive, willing or thankful? Name it honestly and you’re already halfway to governing it.

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Read the order of events, because it matters.

The hip goes first. The blessing comes after. Jacob is holding on to God with a dislocated hip, in the dark, having already been injured by the very One he is asking to bless him, and he will not let go.

Most of us would have let go at the hip. We would have taken the injury as the answer. Well, that settles it, then. Clearly this is not God’s will, otherwise it would not hurt so much.

Here is what I want you to consider. It can seem like God hesitates to answer our prayers. That delay is not denial. It is doing something to us. It makes us desperate, and it makes us a great deal less complacent in the way we come to the Almighty.

Every leader I know has a thing they have stopped asking for.

The site. The breakthrough in that city. The prodigal. The healing. The finance for the building. You asked for years and nothing moved, and rather than admit disappointment you quietly reclassified it. You called it wisdom. You called it maturity. You said you had come to peace with it, and some of that may even be true, but if you are honest there was a night somewhere in there when you let go of the man’s arm because your hip hurt.

Jesus taught persistence more bluntly than we like to preach it. A man runs out of bread at midnight because travellers have turned up at his house. So he goes and hammers on his neighbour’s door. Understand what that means in an eastern house built around a courtyard, where the animals and the servants and the whole family are all asleep in the middle of it. He is not just waking one man. He is waking a household and a herd. His friend tells him to go away.

He keeps knocking anyway. And he gets his bread.

The King James margin has a wonderful phrase for what Jesus is commending here: unashamed barefacedness. Not a quality we normally associate with holiness. But Jesus plainly says this is what gets answers.

Now let me take you somewhere that makes most believers uncomfortable.

We are careful with God. We word things delicately. We soften the ask. We put “if it be Thy will” on the end of prayers, not because we are surrendered but because we are hedging, so that if nothing happens we have not embarrassed ourselves.

Look at Job. The devil tormented him, but he could not do it without permission from God, and Job knew that. He felt God was against him. He said so. And still he would not walk away.

Job 13:15 “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. Even so, I will defend my own ways before Him.”

Read the second sentence, not just the first. We quote the first half on posters. The second half is Job telling God he intends to argue his case.

That is exactly what he did. He stood his ground. He would not abandon his trust in God, and he would not accept that he deserved what was happening to him. He complained boldly. He did not play fair.

And God was pleased with him.

That should reorganise something in you. God is not fragile. He invites it. “Come now, and let us reason together,” He says in Isaiah. He tells us to state our case so that we may be proved right. He is not looking for leaders who are too polite to bring Him the real thing.

The Canaanite woman is the other one. She asks Jesus to free her daughter. He ignores her. The disciples try to move her on. And when He finally does answer, He refuses her and calls her a dog. Any of us would have gone home wounded and told everyone the Lord had closed that door.

She persisted anyway. And Jesus called it great faith.

What wrestles with God? Great faith.

So let me say this plainly to leaders, because I think a lot of us have the wrong idea about what humility looks like in prayer. Boldness obtains the promises of God. Do not imagine that timidity impresses Him. Self-deprecation may feel humble, but it achieves very little for God, and He is not moved by it. He responds to faith. He engages with people who come at Him boldly, and that includes coming boldly when you have made a mess of things and feel you have forfeited the right to ask, which is precisely the moment Hebrews tells us to come to the throne and get the mercy and grace we need.

Now, hear the balance, because I am not telling you to sit and wait for everything.

I have spent a good part of my life telling leaders to move. Stop deliberating. Stop researching a decision you already know the answer to. Do it now. That is not in conflict with any of this. Persistence in prayer is not passivity, it is work, and it is usually accompanied by action. Abraham did not wait around for a sign, he saddled the donkey and walked three days.

But there are things you cannot achieve by moving faster. Some things only come by holding on.

And this is where our faith gets tested, in the areas we are most vulnerable, because unproven faith is not faith at all. We need no faith for what we can already see and already accomplish. Faith is for what we cannot see and cannot achieve. Doubt is not disqualification either. Doubt is part of the journey, and it simply shows us the current limit of our faith. That is the moment to start declaring what God has said, and watch the limit move.

God tested Abraham in four areas.

1. Worship: whether he loved God above his own son.

2. Obedience: whether he would do anything God asked.

3. Surrender: whether he would withhold anything at all.

4. And Faith: whether he believed God could raise the boy from the dead.

That was the test, and Abraham told his servants at the bottom of the mountain that he and the lad were going up to worship, and, “we will come back to you.” That was his first great statement of faith, and he made it before anything had been resolved.

Smith Wigglesworth put it in five words: “Great faith comes from great trials.”

So do not despise the night you are in. Do not read the injury as the verdict. And do not let go.

I want to know, in the comments, the thing you stopped asking God for. You do not need to explain why you stopped. Just name it, out loud, where somebody else can see it. That is often how a person starts holding on again.

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Which is exactly why so many of us are worn out by the one thing that will not move.

You have prayed about it. You have restructured around it. You have read the book, taken the advice, tried the other approach, waited, pushed, waited again. And it is still there. And somewhere underneath the tiredness is a quiet suspicion that you are failing, because a competent leader would have sorted this out by now.

Let me offer you another possibility. Some problems are processes. They are not there to be solved. They are there to make you.

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Ephesians 2:10 “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

Workmanship. Something being made. In the beginning God determined to make man, and He has never changed His mind about that. He is still making man. He is still making you, and He is not in nearly as much of a hurry as you are.

Look at Jesus. Thirty years in Nazareth. Thirty years of a carpenter’s shop and family arguments and ordinary Tuesdays, and then three years of public ministry that changed the world for ever. Ten times as long being formed as being seen. If that is the ratio the Father used with His own Son, we might want to relax about our timeline.

Jeremiah sends us to the potter’s house to watch how God works on a person, and it is worth sitting in this story, because most of us have only ever heard the tidy version of it.

It starts with a shapeless lump of clay dug out of a riverbank. Not promising. The first thing the potter does is throw that lump through a wire, again and again, cutting it in half to pull out the bits of stone and grass and weed and the pockets of air.

That is where the call of God begins. Not with anointing. With removal. God takes out whatever will hinder us later, and I want to be honest with young leaders about this: undealt-with issues torpedo your life in later years. Do not think you can carry a well-hidden problem and still succeed in ministry. You might, for a while. But cracks in a foundation only get wider as the load gets heavier, and eventually the whole thing comes down.

Then the clay is kneaded until it is soft. The Holy Spirit softens hearts so they can be moulded. Nothing hard can be shaped.

Then the wheel. Round and round. And this is the part nobody warns you about, because we thought we were going to preach and heal the sick, and instead here we are going to church, going to work, going to church, going to work, round and round and round. Right there, in that dull-looking life, God is doing serious business. You are growing staying power. You are learning to hold steady under pressure, which is a thing you cannot learn in a seminar.

Then water pours over you. At last, you think. This is my moment.

No. Not yet. The water is so the hand can shape you. And notice where the thumb goes. Not around the outside where everyone can see. Straight into the centre, deep, opening you up on the inside. God goes to work on the areas nobody else can even see.

The hands get firmer. More water. You are squeezed and you start to grow taller, gaining shape, gaining profile. And this is where it gets serious, because if you held on to one of those little stones, if you kept a weed you should have let go of at the beginning, this is where it surfaces. As the walls get thinner the hidden lump starts to wobble the whole vessel, and then the stone cuts straight through the wall of the spinning pot and ruins it.

Back down to a lump. Back to the wire. The stone comes out. The potter begins again.

We cannot afford bad attitudes. That is not a slogan, it is a structural fact.

Then, finally, movement. A spatula slides underneath and you are going somewhere. At last. You say, “The door is over there,” and instead you are carried to a dull corner of the room and put on a shelf.

Noooo.

But on the shelf you go, because you need to calm down and dry out a bit. And time passes, and it feels like forever, and this is where good people begin to doubt their calling altogether and wonder whether God is ever going to use them.

Then the movement comes again. Yes! Except the door is over there and we are not going to the door. We are going towards the hot part of the room. The one you have always wondered about. He is opening it. “Not that one, Lord. The other one.”

Into the kiln we go.

The kiln shows up any crack immediately. Under heat, God decides whether He will use us. We imagine we are choosing Him. It is His Kingdom and He chooses His servants, and He does the choosing in the heat.

Isaiah 48:10 “In the furnace of affliction, I have chosen you.”

Three Israelite boys found out that Jesus was in the furnace with them, and it was in there that their ropes burned off. The fire is where they were set free.

Isaiah 43:2 “When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned.”

Through. Hold on to that word. Through has an end to it. Fire is not a place you live.

And when the firing is finished, you come out tough and glazed and colourful, and the strangest thing has happened. You are no longer desperate to move. Personal ambition has been burned out of you. Impatience has given way to surrender. You would be perfectly happy for God to use somebody else, and you feel less qualified to serve Him than you did when you started.

That is exactly when He can use you. He carries you out of the room, filled with fresh water for the thirsty, new wine for the despairing and the oil of joy for the depressed, and He says, Go.

Now, a caution, because this teaching gets abused.

“It’s a season” is not a valid answer to laziness, and “God is dealing with me” is not a valid answer to a budget you have not looked at or a conversation you are avoiding. Some problems really are just problems, and they will sit there indefinitely until somebody does the work. If the thing that will not move would move if you made a decision, then make the decision. That is not a process. That is a job.

But if you have done what you know to do, and it still will not shift, and something inside you is being changed by the waiting, stop treating it as a failure and start cooperating with it. Ask God what He is forming rather than only asking Him to remove it. Hebrews 12:11 says “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”

Afterwards. Not during. During, it just feels like a shelf.

I write about this from another angle in the chapter on sons in Leadership Excellence, including four things worth remembering while you are in it: you will be rewarded afterwards, it will not go on forever, the trial is the doorway to your next stage, and it will not be more than you can bear.

So here is the question I would love you to answer in the comments. Not what is attacking you. What is being made in you? Name the thing you have been treating as an obstacle that you are starting to suspect is actually a process. Somebody else on that shelf needs to hear a leader say it out loud.

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Many sincere leaders exhaust themselves trying to decode a message that was never sent.

Ecclesiastes 9:11 “The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favour to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all.”

‘Time and chance!’ Life happens. The usual course of life includes problems, and there is no deep meaning in every single one of them. Stuff sometimes just happens. We become neurotic if we think God directs every detail of our lives, and that is neither biblical nor sensible.

None of which means He is passive. The Lord absolutely arranges things, and when He does, you can usually tell. Those divine coincidences have a fingerprint on them. God is not a poor communicator. He does not make His will deliberately hard to find and then punish us for missing it.

So storms come. Jesus said when they come, not if they come.

Luke 6:48 “He is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock. And when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently against that house, and could not shake it, for it was founded on the rock.”

Notice He does not promise the flood will stay away from people who build properly. The flood arrives at both houses in that parable. The only difference is underneath.

Here is where I want to push you, though, because “build on the rock and endure” is true, but it is not enough on its own. James says something easy to read past.

James 1:2: “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials.”

Various. Not one kind. Several kinds, and they do not all demand the same response from you.

This is where we can lose years. We meet trouble with whatever our default setting is. Some of us rebuke everything. Some of us apologise for everything and assume we must have sinned. Some of us go quiet and endure things we were supposed to fight. Every trial gets the same answer, and most of the time the answer does not fit the question. (The man with just a hammer thinks every problem is a nail).

Knowing the nature of the trial we are facing helps us respond to it. So before you do anything, work out what you are actually up against.

If it is warfare, you resist, rebuke and renounce the devil. James 4:7.

If it is the Lord, you stop resisting. Surrender and worship Him. James 5:13.

If it is you, get disciplined. 1 Corinthians 9:27. No amount of spiritual warfare will fix a problem your own habits are creating.

If it is persecution, love your enemies. 1 Peter 3:9. Do not return evil for evil, however satisfying that would be.

If it is temptation, shut down the source and leave. Romans 8:13. Do not stand there negotiating with seduction.

Five different battles. Five different responses. Get the diagnosis wrong, and you will apply good medicine to the wrong illness and wonder why nothing changes.

I learned this the hard way at one of our Christian City Church international conferences at Collaroy, on Sydney’s northern beaches. Peter Morrow, a wonderful servant of God from New Zealand, was preaching on the power of the Word of God. While he was speaking, I became aware of a demon crouching in front of me. That is the first and only time in my life I have ever seen one. It was muscular, powerful, positioned like a strongman about to pounce, and it watched me like a sheepdog, ready to block whichever way I moved.

Under my breath, I told it to get out.

Nothing.

I told it again. Still nothing. I am sitting in the front row telling a demon to leave, and it is not leaving, while a man preaches about the power of the Word about three metres away from me. Eventually I realised the two things were connected. This was not a fight where I used my words. It was a fight using God’s.

So I asked the Lord which Scripture to speak, and He reminded me of Romans 8:28, “that all things work together for good to those who love God.” My honest reaction was that is not a fighting verse. It felt far too gentle for what I was looking at. I spoke it anyway. The demon sneezed, wiped its nose, stared at me and resumed its post.

I kept going for about twenty minutes, as forcefully as you can do anything under your breath in a meeting, and as far as I could see, nothing shifted at all. But somewhere in there I understood what I was fighting. That was what was blocking our building. We had been trying for seven years to rezone that land. Beaten three times. National television running stories about a wealthy Pentecostal mob wanting to build a theme park like Jim Bakker. The local paper against us. Neighbours against us. Middle-of-the-night phone calls to an unlisted number from people telling us they were making sacrifices against us, screaming and gurgling down the line. Morale in the church over that building had dropped through the floor.

That was not chance, and it was not chastening. It was war.

Once I knew, I didn’t stop. The preacher finished; I closed the meeting, went back to my room and kept praying. The demon was there again, but smaller. Further away. Weaker. Hands hanging by its sides. I prayed a while longer, though I did not really need to. Later that day I saw it a third time, bound in chains, straining and unable to move, and the Lord said to me, ‘The strong man is bound.’

Within weeks, the mood of the council and the residents completely turned. We lobbied, adjusted the plans with the architects, resubmitted, and the vote came back unanimous. No opposition. Every application since has gone through without trouble. That whole story is in the warfare section of Chapter 16 of You the Leader, along with what God said to me afterwards about what we were really building on that land, which changed how I have seen church property ever since.

But the point for you is not the outcome. It is the twenty minutes of speaking a verse that felt too weak while nothing appeared to happen, and it is the sentence before that: I realised what this was.

So take what is currently wearing you down and name it honestly. Is it the enemy, or is it your calendar? Is it persecution, or did you handle someone badly and this is the bill arriving? Is God dealing with you, in which case fighting Him is the worst possible use of your strength? Or has life simply happened, as it does for everybody, and the only thing required of you is to keep going and stop reading omens into a flat tyre?

Ask the Lord. He is not hiding the answer.

And then respond to what it actually is.

In the comments, tell me about a trial you misdiagnosed. What did you think it was, what was it really, and how long did it take you to work it out? Let’s encourage one another.

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Almost nobody sees the other fight. The one at eleven at night, going over the same conversation for the fourth time. The one where you decide whether you are going to be bitter about this or not.

That second fight decides the first one.

Proverbs 16:32 “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”

Look at what Solomon is comparing. On one side, the mighty man, the one who takes cities, the general, the conqueror, the leader with the win on the scoreboard. On the other side, a person who keeps their temper. And Solomon says the second one is the greater achievement.

Don’t miss what is being said here: we hand out awards for taking cities, when really the true reward is ruling your own spirit.

And here is the part we miss. The person who masters their spirit has also acquired the ability to take a city. It is not either or. God calls some people to take cities, and He selects them from among those who have cultivated discipline. He is not going to hand a city to someone who cannot govern themselves.

The reverse is just as true.

Proverbs 25:28 “Whoever has no rule over his own spirit Is like a city broken down, without walls.”

No walls means no defence. Every attack gets through. Every offence lands. You are emotionally overwhelmed at every turn, and the enemy walks in whenever he likes because there is nothing to stop him. Inside a person like that, everything breaks down. Learning, healing, communication, judgement, energy. Your city is open.

So the leader must be a private overcomer.

We will never solve public problems if we are not private overcomers.

Now, obviously, it is impossible to be an overcomer unless you have got something to overcome. This is where leaders get confused. We keep waiting for the season when the trouble stops so the real work can start. That season is not coming, and the trouble is the real work.

Psalm 34:19 “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, But the LORD delivers him out of them all.”

Many. Not few. Not occasionally. Trials are not strange to believers. If we are surprised by pressure, we are badly prepared for the Christian life, and we will be disappointed if we have swallowed a gospel promising Disneyland Christianity. The greater the calling, the greater the trials.

Somebody studied three hundred highly successful people, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi and Einstein. A quarter of them had severe handicaps, blindness, deafness, crippled limbs. Three quarters were born into poverty or broken homes or badly disturbed situations. Nearly all of them started behind. They found what it takes to win anyway.

Raise the overcomer in abject poverty and you get Abraham Lincoln. Burn him so badly the doctors say he will never walk again and you get Glenn Cunningham, who set the world one mile record in 1934. Write him off as ineducable and you get Einstein.

None of them chose their disadvantage. All of them decided what to do with it.

Here is why this matters for the people you lead. You cannot take people where you have not been. You do not know the way. You do not know how to get there. Leading people into victory is impossible without gaining the victory first. Once you have it, you can explain the steps in simple terms anyone following can actually use.

Look at David. He killed Goliath, and after that the men around him started killing giants too. The spirit of a giant-slayer got into them. They received it by being near him. A person who has beaten an enemy owns that victory in their spirit and can hand it on. A person who has only read about it can only talk.

So the question is not whether the pressure is coming. The question is where you go when it arrives.

Quick fixes and cheap thrills are not your hiding place.

In the fire you go to God, not from Him. He is your refuge, not the world. You reject fear and you go to faith. You speak faith to your own soul, out loud if you have to, and you praise God for the answer before you can see it.

Please do not read this as an instruction to pretend. Ruling your spirit is not pasting a smile over a wound and calling it faith. Get the facts. Talk to somebody wise. Let people close enough to help. But make the decision about your attitude before the pressure makes it for you. A leader in a panic leads badly, and a team watching a panicking leader starts making poor decisions and operating at a fraction of the level they normally operate at.

Win the battle in private this week. The public part will take care of itself soon enough.

I unpack all nine of these battles in Chapter 16 of You the Leader. If you are in the middle of one right now and cannot work out which one it is, that chapter is where to start.

And tell me in the comments: what is the private fight you are having at the moment that nobody in your organisation knows about? You do not have to name it. Just name the fact that it is there.

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Here’s a rule I trust completely: do the hard bits first.

Anything worth doing takes longer, costs more, and meets more resistance than you expected going in, every single time. Cover the hard yards early, and you get to enjoy the easy parts later.

I learned this at school, of all places, from something as unglamorous as a plate of vegetables. We had a sit-down lunch every day, and the food was terrible: stringy carrots, wooden parsnips, soggy cabbage, and we had to eat all of it. So I made myself eat the vegetables first and save the meat for last. I tackled the food I didn’t want to eat before I let myself have what I did. That small act of discipline turned into motivation. I knew the good part was still coming, and so I persevered through the parts I dreaded. It’s hard to tackle the hard parts if you’ve only done the easy parts first.

That’s the whole principle, really, just scaled up. Be thorough in the planning. Don’t rush to the finish. Measure twice, cut once, as carpenters say, because doing it right the first time means you’re not doing it again a second or third time later. Cover every base in the plan, and execute simply. Failure traces back to poor preparation, not bad luck.

However, even the best-prepared plan will face resistance.

After building our suite of church buildings at Oxford Falls, along with buildings for our school across the road, people would often say, “Wow, hasn’t the Lord blessed you.” And I agreed completely; He had. But there was something in me that mildly resented the comment too, because it left out what the person didn’t see. We’d fought a long, hard battle just to get permission to build on that land. The congregation and leadership had worked exhaustingly hard to raise the millions it took. We faced real opposition, in the press and from local residents, at every stage over eight years. And the land itself was a literal pigsty: rusted tractors, dead horses, old chicken sheds. Nobody driving past the finished buildings ever saw any of that. They just saw the blessing, not the years of resistance the blessing came wrapped in.

Opposition is not a sign you’re wrong.

The level of opposition tells you the value of the dream.

Something worth building doesn’t go unchallenged. The strength you grow in yourself as you press through challenges serves you in every other area of life afterwards. Don’t fear resistance when it shows up in the middle of a good plan. It’s not proof you’ve taken a wrong turn. It’s proof of the opposite, and it’s shaping you into that person who can carry what you’re building.

This is the pattern of the people rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem after their return from exile. Some of the older builders remembered Solomon’s original temple, the gold, the towering columns, the glory that had filled that place, and that discouraged them badly. All they could see in front of them now was rubble to clear before they could even begin, and once they did begin, the new foundations looked pathetic by comparison to what they remembered. But God wasn’t measuring the foundations against the old glory. He was pleased simply that people were taking action. Don’t despise small beginnings, the prophet told them, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin; even a plumb line in someone’s hand was enough for Him to rejoice over.

Whatever you’re building right now will follow the same journey: small beginnings, stops and starts, opposition, failures and hard lessons along the way. Don’t expect a new venture to start where your last success finished. It won’t. You need to keep moving. You’ve started. God works with people in motion, however small it looks next to the memory of former glory or the size of the dream still ahead.

So here’s the shape of this series. See the vision clearly. Find the right path. Break it down into steps small enough to actually take. When the plan meets resistance, eat the vegetables first. Do the hard bit now.

I tell the Oxford Falls story, and unpack the “small beginnings” pattern from Jerusalem’s rebuilding, in Do It Now!. If you’re in a hard middle stretch right now and wondering what the resistance means, that’s the book to open this week.

What’s the hard bit you’ve been quietly leaving till last? Name it in the comments. It’s usually the very thing worth doing first.

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I’d been asked to speak at a church in Dunedin, a very cold Southern city on the South Island of New Zealand. I arrived late the night before and was staying at the pastor’s house. I went to bed almost as soon as I got in, because I was speaking the next morning. Got up early, pulled on lightweight running gear, and headed out into the freezing dark for my run.

About thirty minutes in, running through unfamiliar streets in a city I’d never been to, it hit me. I couldn’t remember where the pastor’s house was. Not even a rough idea, no memory of it at all. And then, to make it really bad, I couldn’t even remember the pastor’s name. No address. No name. No map. Just me, in the freezing cold, a long way from anywhere.

So I stopped.

Not slowed down. Stopped. Stood there in the cold with no idea which direction to go, and no motivation whatsoever to keep moving in any direction, because for all I knew every step was taking me further away from where I needed to be. There is no motivation at all to run, or even walk, when you have no idea where you’re going, or whether you’re headed the wrong way entirely. I eventually found my way back, somehow retracing my steps. Lesson well and truly learned.

I tell you that story because it’s the best picture I have of what happens inside a team when the leader has cast a vision, built belief, set the direction, but never actually hands people a map. They don’t rebel. They don’t quit. They just stop, the same way I stopped on that road, freezing and directionless, because there’s no motivation at all in moving when you don’t know where you’re going.

This gets missed regularly because the leader has the map in their head. They’ve walked the road a hundred times in their mind, they know exactly where every turn goes, but they forget that nobody else does. The vision is vivid to the person who saw it. It’s fog to everyone else until somebody draws it out, clearly, and puts it in their hand.

So what does putting a map in someone’s hand actually look like, in practice, week to week?

Think about an airport. Airports are extraordinarily good at one thing: reducing anxiety through information. The people who design them understand exactly how much stress a traveller carries, worried about missing a gate, unsure which terminal, anxious about a delay they haven’t heard about yet. So the signs are everywhere, and they’re relentless. Gate numbers. Boarding times. Which way to baggage claim. Updates the second anything changes. Nobody wanders an airport wondering vaguely what’s supposed to happen next, because the whole building has been built to tell them, constantly, without them having to ask.

Most teams are not run like airports. Most teams are run like that road in Dunedin, dark, unfamiliar, with the person out front assuming sees what they see.

We need a plan and a vision, yes, but we also need to communicate both constantly. Every sign illuminating the way needs to be clear, and it needs checking, regularly, because signs fade and situations change faster than people update the ones in their head.

This is where an uncomfortable saying earns its place: people don’t do what’s expected, they do what’s inspected.

Not because people are lazy, but because without someone checking the signs are still accurate and still being followed, everyone quietly drifts back to doing whatever felt normal before the plan existed. Simple, repeated actions become rails which the team runs. An overseer makes sure everyone understands the direction they’re going.

There’s a mechanical picture worth holding onto here too. In any car, every wheel depends on the others. Let one wheel run out of alignment and the whole car runs badly, no matter how well-tuned the rest of it is. Christian Schwarz’s research into church health found the same pattern again and again: a church rises only as high as its lowest-functioning area, regardless of how strong everything else is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your vision casting is, or how gifted your team is, or how sound your finances are, if one part of the pathway has no map, no signage, no inspection, that’s the part that will quietly cap everything else. The leader’s job with the path isn’t just to draw the main road. It’s to work every wheel.

None of this is glamorous work. Drawing the same map again for the new team member. Re-checking the sign that’s been up for two years to see if it’s still accurate. Walking the finance team through the plan in language that actually makes sense to them, not just the language that makes sense to you. This separates the team that keeps moving and the one that stops, freezing, in the dark.

You may have already done the hard work of seeing the vision clearly and believing it fully. Don’t let it stall for the lack of a map, handed to every single person who needs one, checked regularly, and adjusted when necessary to keep everyone on track. It’s the job keeping everyone moving.

I unpack this more in the Pathmaker chapter of Leadership 101. If your team has gone quiet lately and you suspect it’s not motivation but direction, that’s the chapter worth reading this week.

And ask yourself this: has your team actually got the map, clearly, in writing…or is it mostly still living in your head? Tell me in the comments which part of your pathway hasn’t been drawn out yet.

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You see the thing clearly. You believe it. You’ve told everyone about it more times than you can count, but when you sit down to actually plan it, the size of it sits on your chest like a stone. Where do you even start with something that big? So a lot of us don’t start. We wait for the conditions to feel right, for the resources to line up, for a breakthrough moment that makes the whole thing suddenly achievable in one leap. That moment doesn’t come. It isn’t supposed to.

The path to a big vision is never one giant stride. It’s built the same way everything worth building gets built: one brick at a time.

Once you understand how much you actually want to achieve, and by when, you can break that long-term goal down into what needs to happen each year. Then each month. Then each week. Then each day. That’s the whole trick, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple to say but genuinely hard to do, because it means resisting the pull towards the dramatic and committing instead to repeating the ordinary, for a long time.

Henry Ford said it about as plainly as it can be said: nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs. The vision isn’t hard. The vision is thrilling. It’s the day-by-day division of it that we’re tempted to skip, because dividing a dream into small jobs feels like shrinking it, when it’s actually the only thing that will fulfil it.

Aim at growing a goal rather than expecting a breakthrough to deliver it. It’s remarkable what you can achieve simply by refusing to try to do the whole vision at once. One step. One brick. One bite at a time. That’s how we get there, and it’s the only way anyone ever has.

Once our goal is broken down to small steps, it’s no longer abstract. Each team member sees how much they need to achieve, in their area, by when. Clarity makes accountability, not awkward, because nobody’s guessing whether they’re on track. Clear, simple strategies release far more energy and commitment in a team than vague goals, no matter how inspiring the vision sounds.

Here’s where we stumble. When we break down the vision into these small steps alone.

Our temptation, especially for a founder or a strong visionary leader, is to retreat somewhere quiet, work out the whole plan ourselves, and then tell the team the finished, polished strategy. It feels efficient. It feels like leadership. But, this produces a faulty plan with no ownership from the team.

I learned this properly with a building programme. I had a vision for a new building, and in my head I’d already timed it: one year. I brought it to the team, expecting agreement on the timeline along with the enthusiasm. What I got instead was something better than agreement. They said, essentially, “Pastor, this vision is fantastic, we believe we can do it. But it probably needs three years to come together properly, with the finances, the council authorities, the design work. And we’d be wiser to stagger it, build the ancillary rooms first so we can start holding services there, then build the main auditorium afterwards.”

It was obvious. I didn’t defend my own timeline; I agreed, and we were on our way. Their strategy didn’t dilute the vision. It made it believable. And because they’d helped shape the plan, they became its champions, not just workers. That’s not a small difference. A team executing a timeline they helped build fights for it.

None of us is as smart as all of us.

Gone are the days of the lone leader arriving with one big idea to save everybody. This is the day of a team working collaboratively, taking ground step by step, patiently and systematically, thinking bigger together than any one person manages alone. Strategic thinking takes the complex and breaks it into pieces manageable enough that people can actually hold them. Everything becomes simpler with a plan. A clear plan, built by people who own it, does something a private, unilateral plan never does: it gets followed.

Without a plan, a team is confused, no matter how clear the vision is. People don’t thrive in confusion. A leader who charts a genuinely clear course will still get plenty of questions, and some people will drag their feet a while before they fully embrace it. That’s normal, but understanding where they’re going and what’s expected of them makes a workplace healthy.

Ordinary, repeatable actions become systems. That’s what lets a church, a team, or a business run on more than the leader’s memory and constant presence. It’s not glamorous. Bite by bite, step by step, year by year, it rarely looks like much on any single day. But it’s the only strategy that has ever actually worked, and it’s available to you starting with whatever you’re planning next.

I tell the story of that building programme, and unpack the year-by-month-by-week-by-day breakdown, in the Pathmaker chapter of Leadership 101. If your vision feels too big to plan, that’s the chapter to work through, slowly, this week.

Where does your vision currently exist only as a big idea, with no year, month, or week attached to it yet? Pick the nearest one and tell me in the comments what the very next bite actually looks like.

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This is the work of the pathmaker. The leader is a strategist. Great leaders are also great strategists. It isn’t enough to see the future, you have to see the way there, the actual road, the steps, the sequence, the plan. A leader who can see the destination but not the path is only half a leader, and the half that’s missing is the half that gets anyone anywhere.

Now let me name the thing most leaders get wrong when the vision isn’t moving, because it’s nearly universal and it’s costing people years.

When progress stalls, the instinctive response is to try harder. Work longer hours. Push the team. Raise the intensity. Add more effort to the same activity and assume that’s what’s been missing. It feels responsible. It feels like leadership, but mostly it’s fruitless, because effort was never the problem.

Here’s the picture I keep coming back to. A ladder is a brilliant strategy for climbing a wall. But if your ladder is leaning against the wrong wall, the strategy is useless, no matter how fast you climb it. You can be strong, committed, hardworking, up before dawn, last to leave, and pouring every ounce of that into scaling a wall that was never going to get you where you needed to be. If you’re on the wrong path, going faster and working harder will not get you there. It’ll just get you to the wrong place sooner, and more exhausted.

So the pathmaker’s first question is not “how hard are we working?” It’s “are we on the right wall?” Two things have to be true at once for a path to be a path at all: the right destination, and the right strategy to reach it. Get the destination right but the strategy wrong, and you stall. Get the strategy right but aimed at the wrong destination, and you arrive somewhere you never wanted to be. Clear destination, right route. None of us want to hear the Captain on the Air plane say ‘Our directional instruments are down, so we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making good time’.

Which raises the real question, the one that actually matters for the leader in limbo right now. If working harder isn’t the answer, and the path isn’t obvious, how do you find the right wall in the first place? How does a leader actually come to see the way there, and not just the destination?

Start with the thing that’s quietly blocking most leaders from ever seeing the path: doubt.

This sounds like a spiritual point, but it’s intensely practical. If you don’t genuinely believe you’ll reach the vision, you will not see the pathway to it. You’ll see something else entirely. You’ll see the obstacles. You’ll see the reasons it can’t be done, the shortage of money, the lack of people, the state of the economy, the competition, the thousand legitimate-sounding problems. And you’ll use them, quietly, to justify not stepping out. Doubt doesn’t just discourage you. Doubt blinds you. It literally stops you from seeing the road. Remember the disciples on the road to Emmaus? So depressed with doubt, they couldn’t see Jesus who walked with them for seven kilometres.

Watch the difference belief makes. When I don’t believe we’ll get there, every problem looks like a wall. When I believe we will, the same problems start looking like things to be solved, steps, not walls. Marcus Aurelias said , ‘The obstacle is the way’. Nothing in the circumstances changed. My sight changed.

The unwilling heart is the worst of all, because an unwilling attitude doesn’t just blind the leader, it shuts down strategic thinking in everyone around them too. A team led by someone who half-hopes it won’t work will never find the path, because nobody’s looking for it.

So the first move of the pathmaker is inward before it’s ever strategic. You have to settle the belief. Not vague optimism, but the settled conviction that this thing will be done, so that your mind is freed up to actually go looking for the how instead of rehearsing the why-not. Faith that you can do it is what opens your eyes to the way there. Once you truly believe you’ll reach the destination, your mind starts doing something remarkable, it starts finding routes, spotting steps, seeing sequences where before there was only fog.

Then comes the honest work, and it’s less glamorous than people expect. Strategy begins with a brutally accurate reading of where you actually are today. Not where you wish you were. Not where you tell people you are. Where you genuinely stand, right now, with the real numbers and the real situation. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, put it plainly:

Strategy is first trying to understand where you sit in today’s world. Not where you wish you were or where you hoped you would be, but where you are.

Most of us skip this step because it stings. We’d rather start from an inflated version of the present. But, then the plan can’t work. A path drawn from a false starting point leads nowhere real. If it took you ten years to reach your first hundred, you cannot think you’ll get to the second hundred in the next year. That’s not faith, that’s fantasy.

Right destination. Honest starting point. Belief strong enough to keep your eyes on the road instead of the obstacles. That’s the ground a real path gets built on, and until it’s in place, no amount of hard work will save you, because you might just be climbing, brilliantly, but, unfortunately up the wrong wall.

The map itself, how you make the path so clear that every person on your team knows exactly where they’re going and what to do next, is a piece of work in its own right, and it’s where a lot of good strategy still falls down. A plan that lives only in the leader’s head was never really a plan. But first the leader has to be on the right wall, and that’s the work to do this week.

I lay out the strategist’s work, the right ladder, the honest starting point, the compounding plan, in the Pathmaker chapter of Leadership 101. If you’re clear on your vision but stalled on the how, that’s the chapter to sit with this week.

Here’s a question worth answering honestly. Is your ladder against the right wall? Not “are you working hard”, you probably are. Are you pouring that effort into the right path, or just climbing fast up the wrong one? Tell me in the comments where you suspect you might be on the wrong wall.

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So our question is not how to do more. The question is what do I not do. Who do I not give attention to?

Many of us have never decided. We just respond. Whoever is loudest, saddest, angriest, or nearest gets what’s left of us, and we call that pastoring.

We must stop and rethink this. For me it was a passage I’d read many times and never really grasped.

Jacob’s rods

The Bible is the best leadership book ever written, and it doesn’t always tell you it’s teaching leadership. Sometimes it just tells you a story and leaves you to notice. There’s one in Genesis that reorganised how I lead, and it’s about a man with a corrupt boss and a herd of sheep.

Jacob has an employer who keeps changing the job description and lessening the wages.

Fourteen years in, Jacob negotiates a wage that sounds like he gets nothing. Give me the speckled and spotted sheep, Laban. Keep the rest. Laban thought he’d won the lottery, because solid-coloured sheep produce solid-coloured sheep. Every farmer in that country knew it.

But God had given Jacob a strategy.

“Jacob took for himself rods of green poplar and of the almond and chestnut trees, peeled white strips in them, and exposed the white which was in the rods. And the rods which he had peeled, he set before the flocks in the gutters, in the watering troughs where the flocks came to drink, so that they should conceive when they came to drink.”

(Genesis 30:37-38, NKJV)

Streaked branches, in the water, at the exact moment the flocks conceived. And what they saw, they became. Speckled. Spotted. Streaked. “Thus the man became exceedingly prosperous, and had large flocks.”

I’m not teaching livestock husbandry. But look at what Jacob did. He didn’t sit back and wait for the vision to arrive. He built it and put it where the flock would see it while they were drinking.

That’s a picture of church. Worship, the Word, hearts open, defences down. That is the moment you put a picture in front of people. Because God speaks in pictures. When God speaks, pictures come out of His mouth. Pictures are the language of the Holy Spirit.

And what you’re putting in front of them is not mainly the building or the ten-year plan. It’s who they are.

The weakest link in people is self doubt. That’s why God meets a frightened farmer hiding grain in a winepress and calls him a mighty man of valour (Gideon). That’s why the Father speaks over His Son at the Jordan, and why the devil’s very next move in the wilderness is “if you are the Son of God.” He doesn’t attack what Jesus does. He attacks who Jesus is. He’ll do the same to you, and to every person you lead.

So you stand it in front of them, week after week saying ‘you are a new creation.’ You are crucified with Christ, nevertheless you live, yet not you but Christ in you. Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. Thanks be to God, who always causes us to triumph.

People receive that, and even when the trouble hasn’t resolved, and everybody is facing something, they begin living above it.

That much I’d understood for a long time. Then I read the passage more carefully, and found something I’d walked straight past for years.

He took the rods out

Look at what Jacob does next. He doesn’t do it for all the sheep.

“And it came to pass, whenever the stronger livestock conceived, that Jacob placed the rods before the eyes of the livestock in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods. But when the flocks were feeble, he did not put them in; so the feebler were Laban’s and the stronger Jacob’s.”

(Genesis 30:41-42, NKJV)

The strong animals shouldered their way to the front of the trough. They took it all. Once they were satisfied, they dropped back, and the weaker ones came forward, and Jacob removed the vision.

He deliberately put the picture in front of the strong.

That’s what I felt God saying to me out of this Scripture. Give your attention to the strong. And it seemed completely counterintuitive to the heart I have for God’s people, because it sounded like the opposite of everything I thought a shepherd was for.

What we think caring means

As a pastor, you care about people. That’s not a flaw. It’s the calling. So the instinct is always to run toward whoever is struggling most.

But the devil can use that instinct as leverage. He can manipulate you through it.

Here’s the thinking, and it sounds noble right up until you look at what it produces. I’ll look after these poor, weak people. The strong ones are fine. They’re okay. They don’t need me. I’ll give my attention over here, where the need is.

But I found that giving my attention there didn’t actually change much. People generally stayed quite weak. If they improved, it wasn’t huge. It was a measure.

Then I felt God speaking to me out of this passage, and it went against the grain: give the attention to the strong. And as I did, they took it on board, became extraordinarily effective, and multiplied themselves. There was a proverb sitting there the whole time telling me why it works.

Much increase comes by the strength of an ox

“Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; but much increase comes by the strength of an ox.”

(Proverbs 14:4, NKJV)

Solomon’s farmers relied on oxen for productivity. Ministers are the oxen of church life. If they’re strong, they bring increase, and the level of increase reflects the strength of the ministers.

Notice the first half of that verse, though, because it’s honest about the cost. No oxen, clean stall. Bring in strong oxen and you’ll have messes to clean up. Strong people have opinions. Definite purpose. Ambitions. They know they can achieve significant results on their own, which raises a fair question about why they’d stay on your team helping you achieve yours. The strong do not follow the weak.

Fine. Clean the stall. That’s part of it.

Because when you feed the strong, they don’t just grow, they carry others. And instead of everyone concluding the attention goes to a select few, so that’s just how it is here, the opposite happens. The weak straighten their shoulders. They stand up. They put their hand up. “I’m up for training. I want to become a leader.” The whole church gets healthier.

This is also how a leader stops going under. When we feel trapped and guilty and obligated, when we’re living on edge and drowning in the sheer amount of need around us, feeding the strong is the way out. You can say to them: look after these people. Give them the kind of attention that helps them grow and become healthy. And it gets done, and often it gets done better than we were doing it ourselves.

None of this means a leader never attends to those who struggle personally. There are moments when you must. A death, a crisis, a family you love. Go. But if every one of those has to be you, you’ll live on edge and never get out from under the weight, and the people you gave yourself to will be the same next year as they are today.

A hospital or a life development centre?

I think a lot of this comes down to what we believe the church actually is. And somewhere along the way, we picked up the idea that it’s a hospital.

There are elements of that. People arrive wounded. Healing happens here. But no. It isn’t a hospital.

Nobody lives in a hospital.

I’ve always seen the church as a life development centre. A place where people maximise their potential. Where the best version of who they could be rises up, because they’re in Christ, and they’re building their life on the Word of God, and that Word is healing them, and the power of the Holy Spirit is refreshing and regenerating them.

You don’t develop people by hovering over the ones least likely to move. You develop them by putting the vision in front of the ones who will carry it, and then trusting them to carry others.

That felt wrong to me for at first. It stopped feeling wrong when I watched what it built.

So, leader: choose where you put your attention. Choose it deliberately, this week, before the demands choose for you.

Who are the strong ones in your house? When did you last put the vision in front of them, look them in the eye, and tell them who they are becoming?

Go and do that. And then ask them to go and do it for someone else.

I deal with this at length in the chapter “Leading the Strong” in Leadership Excellence. If you’re carrying more need than you can hold, start there.

What happened the last time you gave your best attention to a strong person on your team? I’d like to hear it.

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It takes a long time to come to pass.

Far longer than you expect.

You see it clear and certain. You assume it’s just around the corner, a year or two of hard work and we’ll be there. Then a year passes. Then five. Then ten. And what you saw so vividly is still mostly out there on the horizon, refusing to arrive on your schedule.

Every leader carrying vision from God hits this, and most of us read it wrong.

We think the vision is taking too long, therefore something has failed. Maybe we heard wrong. Maybe it wasn’t God. Maybe I’m not the person for this after all. The delay feels like a verdict, and the verdict feels like no. So we quietly lower the vision, or abandon it, or grow cynical about the whole idea of God-given dreams, all because it didn’t show up when we thought it should.

Habakkuk 2:3 ‘The vision is for an appointed time…..though it takes a while, wait for it, it will not take long’.

Here’s what’s actually happening in the wait, and this understanding changes everything.

The vision isn’t what’s taking the time. We are. It isn’t the dream that needs to mature. It’s us. When a vision from God tarries, the holdup is almost never the circumstances out there. It’s the gap between who we are now and who we need to be to actually carry it once it comes. So God spends the years closing that gap. The waiting isn’t dead time before the vision. The waiting is the vision, doing its first and deepest work, on you. Think Moses, 40 years in the palace, 40 in the wilderness. Then his original burden for his people takes shape in his call to set them free.

Look at how God does it in Scripture, because the pattern is unmistakable. Abram became Abraham. Same man, different name. Jacob became Israel. Sarai became Sarah. Simon became Peter. Saul became Paul. Same people, but they became so changed, they needed entirely new names, as if the old person and the new one were two different people. And notice when the new name comes. Right at the start of the vision, spoken over them as God’s declaration of who they will be, long before they’ve become it. The name is given first. ‘Simon, you are Peter, and on this I will build My church’. Then come the trials, the failures, the waiting, the fire, the long middle where the person becomes the name already spoken over them. The vision was given to one kind of person and fulfilled through another, and the years in between were where the one became the other.

That’s the part most of us resist. We want the vision without the becoming. We’d take the Promised Land and skip the wilderness, gladly. But it doesn’t work that way, and once you see why, the whole experience of waiting changes.

Watch what God does with Abram, because it’s extraordinary. Abram is seventy-five, childless, and God changes his name to Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.” Then Abraham starts signing it. Father of a multitude. With no child. For years he signs his name that describes a reality that does not yet exist anywhere except in God’s word over him. God changed Abraham’s vision of himself before He changed a single fact of his circumstances.

That’s the secret of the wait. You become a product of your future instead of a prisoner of your past. You start behaving as the person the vision requires, not the person your history says you are. The world around you, the scientists and the sociologists and the steady drip of your own discouragement, all insist that you are basically fixed, that your past determines your future and real change is mostly a fantasy. God says the opposite. He names you by your destiny, not your track record. He calls you what you will be, not what you are now, and then He spends the waiting years making the name true.

And this is where the trial does its work. As we soften, then melt in the fire, we get poured into the mould of what we’re looking at. We transform into what we see. Which tells you exactly where to fix your eyes when the pressure is on, and it’s the most practical instruction in this whole series.

In the fire, you will always have two things you could look at. You can look at the people causing the pain, the ones who opposed you, who let you down, who made the hard season harder. Or you can look at the vision. Look at the people, and you’ll become bitter, it’s automatic. Resentment grows in that soil without any effort at all.

Joseph, whose brothers wanted to kill him, sold him as a slave, told his father he was dead, was falsely accused of attempted rape, thrown in prison, forgotten in prison, until the day, many years later, his teenage dream came to pass, becoming the most powerful man, next to the king, in all Egypt. When his brothers finally met him, rather than exacting revenge, Joseph embraced them, saying ‘you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good’. Joseph kept his eyes on God and the vision God had given him through all his trials. He became better, not bitter.

Look at the vision, and you’ll become better, not bitter, because you’re being shaped by what you behold. Same fire. Two completely different people come out the other side, and the only variable is where they fixed their gaze. If we look at the people causing the pain, we grow bitter. If we look at the vision, we grow better.

Keep your hope alive through the long middle, not just wishful thinking, but because hope keeps your eyes on the vision instead of the wound, and your eyes are what’s forming you. We move towards our dominant thoughts. We become what we think about most. We are, in the end, our own self-fulfilling prophecies, for better or worse. The leader who keeps the vision dominant in their mind is quietly being remade into someone who can carry it.

So if you’re in the wait right now, and the vision you were so sure of seems no closer than it was years ago, I want you to hear me. You are not stuck. You are not failing. You are not waiting for the vision. The vision is at work in you, and the delay you resent is the exact process turning you into the person who can finally hold what you saw. Abram had to become Abraham before the multitude could come. You’re in the becoming. Don’t despise it, and don’t go bitter in it. Keep your eyes on what you saw, and let it do its long work.

When you see the end and believe it, the path to it will open up in front of you, and somewhere along that path you’ll meet the person you became on the way. Same you. New name.

This is where the whole of vision-casting finally rests, not in the seeing, not in the casting, not even in keeping it alive, but in being remade by it. I talk through this transformation, how the trials pour us into the mould of the vision, in Leadership 101. If you’re deep in the wait right now, that’s the chapter to read–slowly.

Where are your eyes fixed in the hard season you’re in; on the people who’ve caused the pain, or on the thing God showed you? You already know which one you’ve been looking at. The becoming starts the moment you lift your eyes back to the vision.

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The harder part comes eighteen months later, when the room has gone vague. People are still working, but they’ve drifted back into their own corners, and the big picture you painted has faded to the edges of people’s minds. And a quiet, slightly offended thought starts forming: I already told them this. Why do I have to keep saying it?

When we started, our Overarching vision was - ‘Sydney, a city for Christ’. Over 45 years later, people in our congregation still use that phrase. The mission we used then was, ‘Save lost people, make disciples, empower saints’. Our new pastor for C3SYD, Alexander Lee, has developed his own new phrase - ‘Know Jesus, Find Community, Discover purpose’. It’s on the landing page of their website, and repeated in most of their services. No one is in doubt of the church’s true north.

Here’s what most leaders believe about communicating vision. They think of it as an event. You cast the vision, clearly and powerfully, at the launch, the vision Sunday, the start of the year. Tick. Done. Now everyone knows, and the leader’s job moves on to other things. Vision communication was a box, and the box is ticked.

But vision was never an event. It’s a frequency. The leader doesn’t cast the vision once and step back. The leader is the bell-ringer, the trumpet-blower, the drum-beater. Those aren’t instruments you play once. You ring the bell, the sound fades, you ring it again. That’s the job. Not because the people are slow, but because that’s simply how human beings work. We drift. Everyone drifts. Everyone gets distracted, and when we’re distracted, our attention quietly leaks away towards the distraction. Your people aren’t disloyal. They’re just human, living busy lives, and the picture you painted needs repainting more often than your pride would like.

Mention the vision somehow virtually every time you stand up. Every time. Not as a slogan you bolt onto the end, but woven through whatever you’re actually talking about, so the team starts to see everything through that lens. A vision from God sets people on fire, but fire needs feeding, or it settles into embers and then into ash, and the leader stands there wondering why the room went cold.

Now, back to that offended thought. “I already told them. Why must I keep repeating myself?” I want to name that honestly, because it’s more dangerous than it looks.

That feeling has a name. It’s pride. And it’s one of the quietest killers of an organisation, because it disguises itself as something reasonable. You’re respecting people’s intelligence, right? They got it!

Leaders’ pride in us doesn’t want to repeat itself. It feels beneath us. We’re leaders, not parrots. We said the important thing once, clearly, and saying it again feels like admitting the first time didn’t work, or like we’ve run out of new and impressive things to say. So we don’t repeat it. We move on to fresh material without including the overarching reason for what we’re doing.

Our constant task is to keep bringing the primary purpose to the forefront, again and again, because that repetition fuels the organisation. It’s what reminds people why they’re going the extra mile, why they’re making the sacrifices, why any of the hard parts are worth it. Leaders’ pride talks us out of doing the single most inspiring thing we could do. It tells us we’re above fuelling what keeps everyone on fire.

So repeat yourself. Gladly. Without apology. The strongest leaders I’ve watched say the same core things so often their teams could finish the sentences, and they say them again anyway, because they understand that what’s obvious to them has gone hazy for everyone else.

But raw repetition alone goes stale, so let me give you how to keep casting without the vision wearing thin.

• First, say the vision at least once whenever you stand up in front of people. Staff meeting, Sunday, conference, a quick team huddle, it doesn’t matter. Once, every time, woven in. Make it reflexive.

• Second, carry it on stories, not just statements. A statement informs. A story moves. When you tell the story of the life that was changed, the person who found freedom, the family that was put back together, you’re not decorating the vision, you’re letting people feel the why underneath it. Your team may have heard the story ten times. Tell it again. It re-centres them every time, and it lands on the newcomer who’s never heard it once.

• Third, honour the people who are living the vision out. Call out the volunteer who went the extra mile. Name the achievement in the staff meeting. When you celebrate the person who embodies the vision, you’re teaching everyone else what it looks like in the flesh, and you’re doing it without a single line of correction. People love seeing one another honoured, and the whole culture leans towards what you celebrate.

• Fourth, let the team carry it with you. Share the dream and let them shape it into something workable. When people help build the vision, they stop needing to be told it, because now it’s theirs as much as yours. The leader who insists on holding the whole thing alone ends up being the only one who can see it. The leader who releases it watches it multiply through a hundred other voices.

None of this is glamorous. It’s a bell, rung in different ways, but achieving the same end. But that’s leadership. The vision doesn’t stay lit because you launched it well. It stays lit because someone keeps sounding it, refusing to believe they’re too important to say the same true thing one more time.

So go and ring the bell again. Your people haven’t rejected the vision. They’ve just drifted, the way we all do, and they’re waiting, mostly without knowing it, for you to remind them where they’re going.

I lay out my own practical pattern for casting and re-casting vision into a team in Leadership 101. If your people seem to have gone quiet on a vision you know you’ve already given them, start there; the problem usually isn’t them.

When did you last actually re-sound your vision, not assume it, say it out loud to your people? If it’s been a while, that’s worth sitting with. Share in the comments - what’s kept you from repeating the vision?

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“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18, KJV)

Perish. Not “underperform”. Not “lose a bit of momentum”. Perish. He’s describing what happens to people, to a family, a company, a congregation, a nation, when nobody can see a future. They deteriorate. They go backwards. Something in them dies, slowly, while the structure around them stays standing. You can have the whole apparatus of an organisation intact and still be presiding over a quiet death, because the people inside it can’t see where any of it is going.

That’s why I’d say it plainly: vision is to leadership what oxygen is to the lungs. You don’t notice it when it’s there. You notice nothing else when it’s gone. Position does not make a leader. Vision does. A person can hold a position of real power and not be leading anybody, because the thing that actually moves people isn’t authority, it’s a picture of where they’re headed. Take the picture away and the authority just sits there. People comply. They don’t follow. There’s a difference.

Let me push here, because most leaders get this wrong.

When the energy goes out of a team, when people are flat, when the meetings feel heavy and nobody’s bringing much of themselves any more, the leader nearly always reads it as a motivation problem. So they go to work on motivation. They bring in a speaker. They run an incentive. They give the rousing talk, the one meant to fire everyone up. And it works for about a week, then the room goes grey again, and the leader concludes their people just aren’t hungry.

But low morale is rarely a motivation problem. It’s a vision problem. People aren’t flat because they’ve stopped wanting to work. They’re flat because they’ve stopped being able to see where the work is taking them. Motivation is a feeling. Vision is a sight. You cannot feel your way out of blindness. When we see the future, we cope with the present. When we see future victory, we endure current pain, because we grasp the point of the pain. Take the sight away and all that’s left is the pain with no point, and no incentive on earth makes pointless pain bearable for long.

So the real question isn’t “how do I motivate these people?” It’s “what have they stopped seeing, and why?”

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It never flew. It never does.

I want to start a four-week series on vision with that picture, because it shows you what vision is not. A lot of leaders think they have vision when what they actually have is a sentence. A nicely worded sentence they worked on at a strategy meeting, printed, and now repeat at the right moments. It sits on the wall, or in the strategy document, or in the back of the welcome pack. And they wonder why nobody is on fire.

Here’s what a mission statement can and can’t do. It can reflect. It can’t create. A good statement captures the spirit of a group, it puts words around something that’s already alive. But it cannot impart what was never there in the first place. You cannot frame your way to vision. A piece of paper is a paltry substitute for the real thing.

So what is the real thing?

Vision is something you saw. Not a thought you had. Not a wish. Not a desire. Not a clever phrase dreamed up to inspire people. Something you have actually seen, that lit a fire in you, that you now burn with whether anyone’s watching or not. The leader feels the vision before they ever say it. It’s the fire in the belly. Nobody else holds that flame for you. You saw something, and it caught you.

Many leaders believe vision is about inspiring other people. Get the words right, get the delivery right, and the team catches fire. So the leader pours their energy into the presentation, the launch Sunday, the offsite staff day. And it lands without impetus, because they started in the wrong place. Vision doesn’t begin with the crowd. It begins with you, alone, seeing.

You can’t impart what you don’t possess. You can’t lead people to a place you’ve never seen. A leader is simply someone out in front who has seen something the others haven’t seen yet, and is so gripped by it that they’ll go the extra mile, pay any price, do whatever it takes to make it real. The team logs onto the vision as the leader talks about it. They can’t see it the way the leader sees it, not yet, but they can feel the heat. That heat is the thing. No heat, no vision, no matter how good the sentence on the wall.

Which raises the obvious question, and it’s the one every honest leader is actually asking. Not “how do I word my vision better“. The real question is, “what do I do when I haven’t seen anything? When I’m running a church, or a company, or a team, and I’m casting words I worked up rather than something I’ve truly been shown?“

That’s where this gets practical, and it’s where the Bible is far more useful than any leadership seminar. Because Scripture doesn’t tell you to brainstorm a vision. It tells you how to receive one.

The prophet Habakkuk shows us how seeing actually happens.

“I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what He will say to me, and what I will answer when I am corrected. Then the Lord answered me and said: “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.” (Habakkuk 2:1-3, NKJV)

What does the prophet do before he writes one word. He climbs his watchtower. He gets in position. He stands his watch, and he stays there to see what God will say. The seeing comes before the saying, and both of them come before the writing.

Habakkuk doesn’t invent a vision and ask God to bless it. He takes up a position of prayer and waits until something is shown to him.

This is the part most of us skip. Standing the watch takes time, usually longer than we want it to. We’re activists. We’d rather produce a vision in a workshop by lunchtime than wait on a rampart for it. But you cannot manufacture something that God wants to show you. You can only position yourself to receive it. As you wait, think forward, the days to come, the months, the years. And don’t worry that God might be a poor communicator who’ll leave you guessing. He isn’t. When He speaks, it’s unmistakable. The trouble has never been God’s end of the line.

There’s a beautiful detail buried in the Hebrew here. One of the words connected to vision means to conceive. A leader conceives a reality inside themselves before the event ever happens in the world. That’s what a vision is. It’s not a hope or a wish or a desire. It’s the settled knowledge that a particular thing will happen, growing inside you the way a child grows, hidden, real, getting realer, long before anyone outside can see it. Joshua did this. David did this. They meditated on the invisible until it became solid in their spirit, not theology, not a nice idea, but a reality they could already see.

And this is why faith and vision are inseparable. Watch the language carefully. If I only believe I can get there, I haven’t really seen it yet. When I believe I will get there, not “can”, but, “will”, then the thing has been conceived in me, and I’ll start to see the path with my eyes shut. Researchers studying the largest churches in the world kept landing on the same odd finding. The pastors differed wildly in their gifts, some great preachers, some average, some strong administrators, some not. But every one of them carried the spiritual gift of faith. That was the common denominator. Not talent. Faith. The capacity to see a thing as real before it existed, and to keep seeing it until it did.

So before you cast anything, before you word anything, before you launch anything, go up the tower. What have you actually seen? Not what would sound good on a Sunday. Not what the church down the road is doing. What has God shown you about your future? Sit with that question until it stops being comfortable. Then, and only then, write it down. Write it plain. Write it so the person reading it can run.

A leader is no leader without knowing where they’re going. So the first work of vision isn’t communication. It’s sight. Get the seeing right and everything downstream, the casting, the team, the strategy, has something true to carry. Get it wrong, and you’re just another leader with a nice sentence on the wall.

I go deeper on this in Chapter 14: Faith and Vision in You the Leader. If you sense you’ve been casting words rather than something you’ve actually seen, that’s the place to start.

What have you actually seen for the congregation/company/group you’re leading? Not the version you’d present, the vision you know will happen. Put it in the comments in a sentence or two. Naming it is the first step to writing it plain.

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