CULTIVATING FRIENDSHIPS: BE INTENTIONAL

A great man, Oral Roberts, once told me as I literally sat at his feet: “Son, if you come to the end of your life with about 4 or 5 good friends, you’re a blessed man”.

I’ve come to understand, as a leader, a different definition of friend. For leaders, a friend is someone who knows your weaknesses and who you are when you’re not operating in your gift, but still believe that there’s greatness on the inside of you even after knowing all of your flaws and inconsistencies. These people are a true and rare find. However, every life needs them. I remember a few years ago, when I was in the midst of one of the most difficult seasons of my life in what most would refer to as a low point with many struggles; I knew I really needed a friend; I really needed someone to talk to, who could listen and understand.

It was at that low moment when it dawned on me: I didn’t have anyone in my life I didn’t lead.

That’s a very dangerous place for a leader to arrive, where every single person in his life is someone he leads. The danger is you never become completely transparent with people you lead, because of the fear that one day they’ll expose your weaknesses and use them against you. Because that’s generally the nature of people, it puts a leader in a constant guarded state because leaders know they cannot lead people that don’t respect them.

Jesus never committed himself as a friend to the people who followed him because of his gift, and that’s a very powerful and critical distinction to recognize. Your gift is not you, and your gift is God-given. A gift doesn’t say anything about you; it does, however, say a lot about the giver. For instance, I could give you a gift, and you could leave me, betray me, forsake me, and never speak to me again. But you still have the gift, and the original intent of the gift has never changed even if your perspective of the giver has.

Identifying and cultivating true friends is critical for a leader, but it’s something we rarely intentionalize. I find it very rare in the thousands of lives of leaders I’ve had the privilege of speaking into over the years. It doesn’t come naturally for leaders to stop and intentionally cultivate friendships, but one of the few things you do that you’ll never look back on and regret.

Setting Expectations

Jesus understood nature of people. The principle is this: Everything behaves according to its nature. Everything. So if you understand the nature of a thing, its behavior will never surprise you.

For instance, ladies, if you understand the nature of a man, they will not be so surprising. Men, If you understand the nature of a woman, they generally won’t surprise you. Same with teenagers, parents, bosses, and most people with whom you find yourself in relationship with. The key to understanding behavior is understanding a person’s nature, and this is a constant principle in both animate and inanimate objects. For instance, a Corvette will operate according to its nature. It will not get you great gas mileage; it cannot carry a family of six. However, you can go from 0 to 60 in four seconds, and you can enjoy a day driving in the mountains with the top down. It acts according to its nature. However, if you want 40 miles per gallon and need to carry your kids to their soccer game, you’re probably going to be disappointed with a Corvette. You probably need an SUV or a minivan, because it acts according to its nature.

Anytime you have disappointment, it’s from having false expectations for something to produce something it was not designed to produce. In fact, you will find that any time there is conflict in a relationship, you’ll discover that the conflict is simply the gap between expectations and reality. Here’s a visual that I hope will help and stick with you, the next time you find yourself in conflict:

EXPECTATION—————- > CONFLICT <————————–REALITY

Finding yourself in conflict in a personal relationship, or in a relationship with someone you lead, or who leads you? Step back from the minutia of the conflict, and write down the expectations you went into the current conflict with prior to the conflict arising. Now try to write down the expectations you think the person you’re in conflict with had. Compare them, then compare them to the current reality, and each other’s reality. You might gain a better understanding of their perspective, and of your emotions. Remember: “In all thy getting…get understanding.”

Fans vs. Friends

I heard Dr. Miles Monroe, a mentor who often speaks into my life concerning leadership issues, teach once about the difference between fans and friends, and touched on the nature of people. Since that day I’ve spent a significant amount of study time and, in turn, teaching time with leaders, expanding on that concept and how valuable an asset for a leader it can be to understand these two dynamics in the life of anyone who is in leadership positions.

It also applies to most of the relationships in your life.

Jesus was a people expert. In John chapter 2, they saw him doing signs and wonders, and the Bible says that many believed in him because of the miracles He was doing. However, you’ll notice it then goes on to tell us that Jesus did not commit himself to them because He knew what was in them.

That’s a very interesting statement. Think about it: All the way back in John chapter 2, at the very beginning of His earthly ministry, Jesus is already having people attracted to him like a magnet, but at the same time as they were giving themselves to Jesus, Jesus wasn’t giving himself back to everyone, in most instances. He reached millions, but only traveled closely with twelve for most of His ministry.

Why? Simply put, Jesus understood the nature of people. More people generally will be drawn to your gift, since it’s from God, than just drawn to you, if you’re in any leadership capacity. That’s why the more people you lead, the more difficult it is to maintain friendships because you constantly have to discern which one–your gift or you–people are in your life to get. Both are ok to have a desire to get, but you will be disappointed if you confuse the fans of your gift with the friends of the real you.

Picture a traffic cone with a big ring around the bottom, and a much smaller one at the top. The bigger your circle is at the bottom, the smaller your circle is at the top. The top is your friendships and personal relationships. The bottom is the people that you lead, and you will always lead many more people than the number of friends you’ll have.

So it is with you and me as believers. Jesus understood throughout His public ministry that the people he encountered were not attracted to him; they were attracted to his gift. He understood keenly that you don’t ever give yourself away to people that appreciate your gift. If you’re a ministry leader, and you have 200 people under your oversight, you don’t have 200 friends. You have 200 fans. A fan is someone who appreciates your gift. If you’re in a company and you lead or manage any group of people, they have an appreciation for your leadership gift or your management style. It is difficult to try to lead people and also try to transition those into personal relationships.

The higher you move up, the larger your impact can be for God, but often it means that simultaneously, the smaller your circle of friends will become.

It’s a proven, scientific fact that when any thought enters your mind, you have approximately 30 seconds to deal with it and make a decision before your feelings set in.

Your mind is given the job of deciding the battle between you and your thoughts. It’s up to your mind to control your ideas and imagination and make a decision as to where they’ll go next.

Here’s the danger: After your 30 seconds are up, your emotions kick in and develop a relationship with the thought. You become emotionally invested, and that’s when it starts getting complicated.

The Bible says to “take every thought captive.” Confine it in your mind, hold it hostage, and make a verdict before it goes anywhere else. Seize the thought and ask yourself, “Where did this come from?” If your answer is that it is not a Godly thought, then you have a decision to make: Get rid of it and move your mind to the next thing, or allow it to live.

If you dwell on the thought too long, you’ll no longer be battling the thought but you will be wrestling your feelings, and emotions are a lot stronger than we believe. They create a cycle, because those feelings hold you there and make you think more thoughts, and then those new thoughts bring more intense feelings. The danger is this: The more you become invested, the greater the desperation comes for you to find that answer. And the greater the anxiety, the greater you look to find a way to numb that feeling.

So now you’ve got these overwhelming, overpowering feelings and you’ve got to dispose of them but you can’t, and you become desperate to find a way to numb their effect and soon you find yourself doing things you know you never should do and saying things you don’t want to say.

So many people spend their entire life in this cycle, constantly trying to numb the pain of a feeling that, had they taken that first thought captive and said “You don’t belong here,” would never have had a chance to live.

You’ve got 30 seconds to deal with it. Your thoughts can put in you the worst mood or the best mood; can make yourself the happiest person no matter the condition of your surroundings or hell to live with.

Your feelings aren’t coming from your surroundings; they’re coming directly from your thoughts. Learn to control your thoughts before your emotions get in the way and begin leading you.

”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 tell us, essentially, the same thing ( 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.

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. 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 love God with your mind, but with the mind that looks to the future.

Ever been in a spot where common resources—the paycheck you’re used to, the commissions you’re expecting—aren’t enough to make ends meet, let alone fulfill the destiny and the dreams you feel beating in your heart for your life?

It’s very normal, especially for leaders when an economy squeezes us, to begin to shift prayers, expectations and eventually the way we lead and go through life, to language like, “if I can just get X, I can pay Y”. It’s a slow, slippery slope and erosion process of the faith we’ve built in ourselves over the years. Suddenly, we wake up and realize that over time we shifted from a mindset of abundance to a mentality of simply getting by.

Why? Simple: When we get hard pressed, we shift our sight from His promises and our faith to our natural conditions and sources.

Here’s the great thing about God’s economy that most of us forget: When you get in a place where a common resource isn’t enough, God’s got some resources in a rock, in an uncommon place. He’s got some water that I never saw, and because I sowed and obeyed somewhere in my life, He pours it out of that dry rock when I need it, just like Moses in the desert.

Water is supposed to come from a river, or a stream, or a faucet; not a rock. Definitely not what Moses expected.

From a rock! THAT’S uncommon resources from unlikely places, and we’re supposed to have eager, earnest anticipation of those. Are you believing for THOSE kinds of resources and overflowing results because of your seeds sown, or do you look to the same natural places to simply get by?

Start expecting water from rocks. He did it for Moses, He’s done it for others, He can do it for you. Common resources from an uncommon source

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.