I train a lot of leaders around the world and when we open up time for Q&A, I almost always get asked about what was the pivotal point in our Ministry growing to over 15,000 strong. Truth is, it wasn’t one thing. It was a process of several things, doing a lot of little things a long time, until something big happened. That’s diligence.

So what about the “bad stuff” along the way? You guessed it; part of the process. In Matthew 13, we read the parable about how the Kingdom of Heaven is like the man who sowed seed in his field, but when everyone was sleeping, the enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat. When rain produced the crops, both the wheat and the weeds appeared so the servant asked, “Did you not sow seed? Where did the weeds come from?”

He replied, “An enemy did this.” The servant then asked if he would like him to go pull them up. But Jesus told him not to, and essentially told him…and tells us…to let the good stuff and the bad stuff happen… let them grow together.

In leadership as is in life, you can’t grow if you avoid the bad stuff. Whether from an enemy or from a change in life, bad stuff is inevitably going to happen (In this world, you will have tribulation). It’s part of the process. But growth from the bad stuff comes from the process, not the destinations.

If you think you’ll live and won’t be happy until you get to your destination, you’ll miss the ride. You’ll miss the day-to-day moments of God on your journey because you’re missing the day-to-day moments of life and missing the pockets of joy. Some people get so caught up in reaching the finishing line that they forget to look at the excitement and opportunity that each step brings along the way.

Destinations last for a few moments, but PROCESS lasts a lifetime.

”Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37)

For the most part, we understand what it means to love God with our heart. To love with our soul is, in essence, to love with our mind because our soul is influenced by the feelings and thoughts that our mind controls. So if it’s implied that loving with our soul is loving with our mind, why does God mention “love with your mind” twice?

The answer is that the mind has two functions. One part records your history. It replays your past and keeps those accounts there for you to remember. The other part of your mind is your imagination. It pre-plays your future and offers you endless possibilities.

As leaders, it’s up to you to choose which one you’ll live in today. God wants you to live in the mind that pre-plays your future because His thoughts are in that mind to give you hope and potential. God wants you to love Him with the part of your mind that sees a different tomorrow; one that doesn’t focus on the past. But the enemy wants you to live in your first mind; the one that replays the old records of your past that keeps you in pain.

In order to live in the mind that loves God, you have to become immersed in His Word, and guard your heart and mind. You have to pre-play every blessing that He said is yours and you have to look forward to what it’s going to look like when it comes.

Dwell on your potential and not your past. Leaders make a lot more decisions than other people, that’s why they’re leaders. Which means you, as a leader, will make more mistakes than other people. The key is staying focused on your future, because that’s where you want to lead those who follow you…into your future, not down the road of past mistakes.

God can do so many powerful things to your life that the mind that replays your failures wouldn’t allow you to do. Learn to lead by loving God with your mind, but with the mind that looks to the future.

As humans, we are so conditioned by the world around us and the pressure to succeed, to spend so much time focusing on the end results of something and the finish line of a process. That can be a wonderful discipline in business, getting in shape, running marathons, and other areas of life.

However, when it comes to relationships—whether romantic, friendship, business, or others in our life—the danger is that many times, we fail to look at the small things when trying to rebuild, repair or restore a relationship. We can get so focused on the big picture that we lose sight of the little things happening right now, every day, that add up.

One of the most powerful things we can do in relationships is stop, take inventory, and say, “how will I get there?”

In the Bible, there’s a great story of how God directed Zachariah to tell Zerebubbel to “not despise the day of small things” when they were faced with rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem. They weren’t used to starting over, especially when they had nothing to start with.

How do you get excited and motivated about starting over at small when you used to have a big thing going?

See, when we have a big thing going and we have to start over small, instead of being excited about what the small thing can turn into, we become exhausted by looking at all the work that we have to put into it.

God went on to tell Zachariah, “Tell Zerebubbel to start shouting as soon as he sees the plumb line being laid.” The plumb line was the beginning of a project, the starting point to the rebuilding of the temple. God wanted Zerebubbel to start shouting as soon as he saw the plumb line because it was a sign that they would finish what God had already started. So although Zerebubbel didn’t see any progress yet, he rejoiced anyway, believing that God already had plans figured out for the rebuilding of the temple.

Like Zerebubbel, can you look for the plumb line? If you’ve seen just a flicker of God beginning to lay a plumb line in your life, give him shouts of joy! You haven’t seen the whole building process or the end result yet, but the fact that the line’s there means God already has it worked out. Why? Because He never starts anything He hasn’t already finished!

If you’re faced with a crisis and have been sulking in it for the last few days, weeks, or months, let God purge this thing out of you. Quit sitting down and meditating on the worse case scenarios. Look for the plumb line. If you see the plumb line, you might want to prepare to start building, just like when you see a cloud, you start preparing for the rain.

That relationship you’re stressed about might have looked like it was over the other night, but then you saw something in her eye, in his eye. It doesn’t make the situation all better immediately, but the fact that you may have seen something that you hadn’t seen before is a plumb line, it’s the beginning of a process. God is already on track to helping you build a better relationship with your husband, your wife, your friend, your boss…but it’s up to you to follow in His footsteps and start building.

Remember, He said, “I’ll bless the things you set your hands to…” Give Him something to work with!

We’re not restricted in life by our own doing; we’re restricted by our own affections. Think about it: Ultimately, you’re always restricted or promoted by what you love.

Preachers don’t restrict you, religion doesn’t, and the fact that you are a Christian and attend church regularly doesn’t make you all you can be. If your life is not moving forward it’s because of what you love. When you love, you become tied to, and influenced by who you’re connected with. The people that you love are either holding your life back or propelling it toward your destiny.

If you have a great calling, but you’re running with people who don’t, you love them more than your calling. If you refuse to break off these relationships that create great inequity, don’t get mad at others, or the church, because your life and your relationships are not flowing as planned.

Check the people you run with, the people you’re tied to, and who influence you.

Every relationship you have, every bond that you form, matters.

I hear so much talk in relationship counseling circles about how people put up walls in relationships. I’ve even heard some people teach the importance of putting up walls in relationships. I certainly believe it’s important to have boundaries in your life, but when it comes to marriage, I firmly believe walls don’t work.

Building walls is nothing more than a defense mechanism where a violation has occurred.

The irony about walls is that they are put up to protect you, to keep an enemy out, but they keep you locked into your pain.

While you put up a defense to keep somebody else from hurting you the way you have been hurt in the past, you simultaneously wall off your life and restrict yourself from experiencing the life that God wants you to participate in.

Not allowing your partner to see they hurt you doesn’t stop them from hurting you. I can tell you nothing hurts me, I can say I don’t care, and I can tell you that it doesn’t bother me, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting, it doesn’t stop me from caring, and it doesn’t stop it from bothering me.

That wall is something that I present to you to try and convince myself that you can’t perpetrate that area anymore. I believe that marriages need to communicate truth. It’s the truth that sets you free, not walls—walls keep you from the truth, and you’ll never truly experience an intimate relationship if you refuse to be vulnerable.

Intimacy, by its very design, means that you are vulnerable. That’s why divorce hurts so much, because you get so much inside information concerning each other in a marriage, and everything you used to guard about each other is now being exposed for the sake of winning the kids, the house, the car, and the stuff.

Being vulnerable means sharing fears, fantasies, dreams, experiences, the good and the bad. That’s what creates intimacy in a marriage, the fact that I have knowledge that no one else possesses and the responsibility to protect that knowledge. I can trust you with this information, because I know you won’t use it against me; you can tell me you were abused or molested, you can tell me about the terrible treatment of your past relationships, and I will cover you where you’ve been hurt. Never publicly poke fun about something your partner revealed to you privately, because they’ll never tell you another thing.

Unfortunately, human behavior can be pretty predictable. Even in dating relationships so many times I see this pattern: The girl craves attention, the guy craves sex. They know how to get together and cut a deal that’s going to make them both happy, even if for a short period of time. “For a moment, I’ll give you what you need, and you give me what I need.”

Sounds pretty simple, only when they leave, the void in their lives is only bigger than it was before. They’re locked in a cycle.

They’re letting their root weakness get to them. Rather than finding their equal, they find the person who will put a band-aid on their open wound, and help them for “right now.”

Let me say it plain: Some of you never invite your equal into your life. Instead, you keep inviting trouble.

God wants your equal to come to you, but your root wants your trouble to come to you. Those things that happened to you build root systems in your life, and they cause you not only to be defiled, but to also defile everyone around you. Sometimes the root seems to disappear for awhile, but just when you are about to break yourself of the cycle you’ve gotten in, one of your roots drags you back down.

Maybe it was when you were abused, abandoned, addicted or some other traumatic event early in life. These past hurts in relationships become buried and turn into roots that plague futures. It prevents us from calling equals into our life. Our roots keep calling troubled and painful relationships into our life.

Relationship Builder Action Step: Take an honest inventory of your closest relationships. Which ones were called in, led by God, and which might have been called in by a bitter root?

I often times find myself wondering why so many people keep ending up with people that don’t suit them. In all my observations, I have noticed one thing that too often leads people to settle for someone wrong for them: Some people get married for no other reason than to justify the sexual relationship they’re involved in. They feel so much pressure from the church, from their families, from whomever, that they end up marrying a monster. They feel that getting married will justify what’s been going on, and everything will be fine, regardless of whether or not that other person truly suits them outside the bedroom.

So many people have never learned how to date without sex, how to have a courtship that does not get physical. It’s pretty simple to figure out why people have this problem: everything in our society promotes physical relationships. Everything on TV, and in the media promotes sex. People have sex before holding hands, before they dance, and in fact, dancing is practically sex now.

That’s why so many people come into church, and get saved, and seriously want to serve God, but they feel the pressure and the weight to justify what they’re doing in their relationships. They feel the only way to justify what they do physically is to get married, because the church tells them it’s all right to have a sex as long as it is within the marriage covenant. But you still have to make sure that relationship is suitable for you. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and marrying simply to validate a sexual relationship will only cause more relationship problems further down the road.

Do you know where you are going? Do you have a vision for your life? Do you know that there is a hidden assignment for your life, a secret place? Your life is hidden there, and there is something great that God wants you to do.

But to arrive at the right destiny with the right relationship, you have to bring boundaries into your life. You can’t build that business and sleep until noon. You can’t get out of debt and go to DisneyWorld on your credit card. You can’t go back to school and be undisciplined. If you have a vision, that vision demands boundaries.

You must have people in you life, intimate relationships and friends, that share the same goals and aspirations as you do. Even if their goals are not the exact same, they celebrate the ones you have. They understand them and celebrate the commitment that you have to make and keep them. The right ones won’t try to get you to slight on your commitment.

If you’ve gotten to the place where you realize that you want to save yourself for marriage and believe sex is a sacred act to be shared in a covenant, then why would you date someone whose only goal is to separate you from your clothes?

When you have set that boundary for yourself, why bother to date someone who does not have that same boundary? “Well, they are saved.” I don’t care if they are saved, because in their mind and heart they still do not see the SACRED. You see the light, and they’re stumbling in the darkness. They don’t view the world through your eyes, because they have not seen the same revelations you have. A rift is created in your relationship and an inequity is present. All the pressure of keeping your relationship pure rests on you, and you must fight to keep it pure.

Your true equal celebrates your goal and knows what it’s going to take to achieve it. They need to invest in your goal and not try to keep you from achieving it. You have boundaries you have set to help achieve your aspirations, so why should you enter into relationships with people who only question and push your boundaries, constantly wanting you to violate the boundaries you set?

When you learn who to love and who not to love, your life will begin to move rapidly forward. But when you have unequal relationships, you’re restricted by them.

Relationship Builder Action Step:
Make 2 lists. Put on one list all the people in your life that celebrates your vision and goals, and respects your boundaries. On the 2nd list, write the names of any people who constantly violate your boundaries. Next steps: Well, that’s entirely up to you, right?

Some of you prayed for the change you’re going through, and some of you just got it whether you wanted it or not. I believe many of us have been forced into change before. God brought a new unexpected start, and it was scary. Your job told you they were downsizing. A friend became ill. At work, you were asked to relocate. You didn’t ask for it, but you’re left there to deal with it.

Transitions are tough, because it’s hard to move into new things that you have no frame of reference for. I know, because whenever God is taking me into something new, He never usually leaves the new with the old. He makes me abandon the old to grab a hold of the new. Kinda like climbing a ladder; you have to let go of one rung at some point, and grab firmly the next to ascend. Sometimes it’s a good thing, especially if the old situation we were in was a bad one. However, sometimes the previous situation is the only sure thing you’ve had through up to this point. God starts saying He’s going to do something new, but all of your points of reference have been what has happened to you up until now.

Then transition comes and everything becomes unstable. You begin feeling an identity crisis, because you’re no longer one thing, but you’re not quite another. You’re stuck in the middle, stuck in transition. This is why raising teenagers is so difficult. They’re grown up enough to tell you what they want, but not enough to pay bills. They’re confused; they’re in the middle, they’re in transition.

Think about a time when you were going through a transition period in your life. You may not have known it, but you were probably difficult to be around during that time.
Faith is not faith until you have to use it. We can preach faith, sing faith, speak faith, but it’s when you’re amidst tough times, in transition, that faith is required to get you through. I can’t tell you that today is going to be the end of the change. But you don’t want the change to stop, because God knows what you are going to be, and who you’re going to become after the transition. And, with God’s transitions, it’s always better than anything you can come up with on your own.

Break ups, past hurts, and divorce can be damaging, and the effects can last long after the dust has settled.

When Jesus spoke of the union between a man and a woman He said, “What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” When you tear something apart, the remaining pieces are always left with jagged and tattered edges.

Whenever you come out of a relationship that left jagged edges and try to go into a new one without recovering, you bring those jagged edges with you into the new relationship, and end up cutting the other person.

Find a woman who’s hurting from a relationship, where she desperately wanted to talk and her partner didn’t let her speak her mind, and you’ll find jagged edges and unresolved issues in her next relationship. Look at a woman that leaves Freddy and turns to Timmy. Timmy needs new tires and asks to see her credit card and all of a sudden she blows up at him. Timmy doesn’t know that Freddy ran up all her credit cards without telling her, deceived her, ruined her credit, and all that’s left is a place that is jagged and broken and never had the chance to heal.

Hear me: You always get an overreaction in an area that has never been healed. People holler louder when you hit them where they’re already bruised.

Wherever there has been a violation, that’s an area likely to be over-scrutinized—wherever a person was violated is the place they tend to examine a lot closer. Similarly, if you violated your spouse in an area, understand you have opened yourself up to be over-scrutinized. If you were unfaithful, you can expect her to be skeptical every time you come home late with your time unaccounted for. You can expect to get questions because trust has been violated, and the violation has given her the right to scrutinize. If you maxed out five credit cards in his name and the two of you are in debt, I promise you the next time you come in the house with a shopping bag, he’s gonna ask questions. You have to let this happen, because you’ve torn the union at a trust level and now your partner has the right to over-scrutinize in that area until the trust has been restored and the jagged edges have been healed.

Relationship Builder Action Step: The next time your partner overreacts, take time to see what the underlying issue is to their reaction. It could be a much bigger deal than you ever realized, and if you can understand the bruise in a deeper way, you can help them work through their hurt, without shame and condemnation; rather, in love.