Joel Young Blog.com

I have been a father for three years now. In those three short years I have been blessed with two of the most incredible, intelligent, and beautiful boys a father could ever have. I know that the time I’ve spent mentoring and fathering them has impacted, and will continue to impact, their lives. However, it has also had a profound impact on my life and perspective. Here are ten lessons I have learned in the last three years of parenting (in no particular order).

• One-on-one time with children, and especially father to son, is more valuable and important than many realize.
• Learn to say, “I’m sorry,” and acknowledge your mistakes to your kids. If you can’t they won’t either.
• Before you ask a child what they think be sure you are prepared for the brutal, genuine, and honest truth.
• Children model what they see. Guard what you say and do as well as what you allow others to say and do around them.
• Parents, it’s your job to protect your children, from many different things, and it’s not inappropriate when you stand up for that.
• Cleaning a mess out of a pair of underwear every now and then is a welcome exchange for never having to buy diapers again!
• Teach your kids how to love and appreciate good movies and music. You’ll be watching and listening to what they like for years.
• Hug and kiss your kids every chance you get. There may come a day when they will be too cool for that. Especially boys.
• A little encouragement goes a long way, but a lot of encouragement goes even further.
• Boys learn how to treat women by watching their father and mother interact. Dads, make sure they are learning to love and respect women by watching you.
• BONUS: Tell your kids you love them until they think you’re lame. They really do need, and want, that continual affirmation of your love.

This weekend is a big weekend for me. On Saturday my oldest boy will turn three years old [insert big sigh of realization here]. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, on Sunday Horizon will celebrate her second birthday. Through the celebration of these two events I am reminded of the many lessons that I have learned. Though many of them were learned the hard way, none of them killed me and God is still using them to shape who I am today. So, over the next few days I will be sharing the top ten lessons I have learned from both fatherhood and church planting. Though they are incredibly different, they are also incredibly similar. I hope you’ll come back to learn from my mistakes.

This Sunday night Horizon is inviting the community to come and hear about the mission and vision of our new church. Not only will this be a great opportunity to hear the full details of our vision, but it will be a excellent opportunity to meet the excellent people who are already a part of our core group.

Get all the details on our website and come ready to hear how you can help us have an impact on Northern Kentucky.

This morning I preached on a theme that presents itself in the book of Deuteronomy. I know, I know…not the most exciting book in all of the Bible, but this lesson is a good one. You see, in Deuteronomy God is preparing his people to cross the Jordan River and enter the promise land. He tells them, through Moses, that they will take possession of the land by driving out the nations that currently reside there, but here’s the kicker. He doesn’t give them a pre-game pep talk about how capable they are to crush their foes. Instead, he tells them that the nations they will be dispossessing are “greater and mightier” than they are.

God doesn’t do this in an effort to scare them or even tear them down. He does it to help them realize this calling is something they cannot fulfill alone. They will be waging war with great nations in fortified cities, but it doesn’t matter that they aren’t able to conquer them by their own power…because it’s God power that matters. He had a plan to bless the nation, therefore his power was a part of that plan.

You see, no matter what we do there are going to be things in life that God calls us to that are “greater and mightier” than we are. These are thing we can’t do by ourselves, but rather require us to rely on God’s power for a victory. If we measure the attainable by our ability the bar will stay rather low. But, when we align with the perfect will of God and lean back as we step forward, relying on him as our source of capability, we will see success over things “greater and mightier” than ourselves.

DISCLAIMER: No, this post is not just about weather…sorry.

If you live in Cincinnati, or anywhere in the midwest for that matter, you know that the weather has been brutal the last couple weeks. It’s been in the nineties every day and even climbed above one hundred degrees a few times. The heat index has been dangerously high, but the worst part about it all was the humidity. It has been downright unbearable to even be outside lately. A local weather man hit the nail right on the head when he called this level of humidity “oppressive” a few weeks ago. It has not only effected what we do every day, but how we do it.

Then, this week happens. The temperatures are basically the same, but the atmosphere is much different. Suddenly being outside is enjoyable again, and we find ourselves ending each day listening to the crickets with the windows down and the breeze blowing through our house. So, what changed? It wasn’t a drastic shift in temperature that changed the atmosphere, it was a drastic change in humidity. When the “oppressive” humidity cleared out the temperature was actually quite enjoyable.

Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking that we need to change the “temperature” in our life to actually enjoy it. We think we need a new job, a new house, a new car, new friends, or a new family. We think that if these things changed then our world would be much more enjoyable, but what we don’t realize is that often times it’s not the current “temperature” that is making us miserable, it’s the “humidity” that fills the air of our life. You can view “humidity” in several different ways. It could be your attitude, your outlook, your demeanor, or your perspective, but no matter what it is we have to realize that there are things in our life that we can change that will make the current “temperature” of your life a lot more enjoyable.

Maybe we need to quit watching the thermometer and start watching the hygrometer.

This past Sunday I shared some thoughts on leadership with my church that I gleaned from the great speakers at this year’s Global Leadership Summit. It was a great privilege to be given the opportunity to learn from some of the world’s most gifted leaders. So, I wanted to share a few ideas that rose to the top during the fantastic sessions with Bill Hybels and Jim Collins. (These are a mixture of paraphrased thoughts and quotes)

Bill Hybels

• A leader’s job is to take people from “Here” to “There”. Casting vision and leading people in a specific direction is not simply making “There” sound great, but explaining why we cannot stay “Here”.
• Leaders need fantastic people with character, competency, and chemistry to help them.
• Everyone’s “vision bucket” has holes in the bottom of it. Leaders need to periodically refill the “vision buckets” of their people along the journey.
• There is a 40% differential between a passionate worker and an average worker. Seek to fill people with passion. Make it a priority.
• Celebrate ANY accomplishment you can!

Jim Collins

• “Greatness is largely derived from conscious choice, not circumstance.”
• Every organization has a certain amount of key seats on their bus, and growth cannot happen until all those key seats are filled with the right people.
• Leaders need to maintain the right a balance between preserving the core and stimulating progress in their organization if they want to grow.
• “Greatness is never a single event; it is a process.”

I hope you can get as much milage out of these thoughts as I have already.

Last week, as we have many times this summer, my wife and I looked out our front window and talked about landscaping plans for our neglected outdoor space. Just about a year ago we bought a “fixer-upper” and have done extensive work to get the interior of the house to where we want it. However, the outside of the house is a different story. You see, the previous owners never planted a shrub, bush, or flower in their fifty years of residence, and needless to say we need to do some landscaping.

Even though it’s a necessity here’s why I HATE landscaping projects. They are expensive, time consuming, grueling, and its back breaking work. Not to mention it’s been 90+ degrees and humid as the rain forest for the last couple months here in Cincinnati. This factor, and my hatred for such projects, aside we are still planning on getting some things done before fall. So, we have been brainstorming about everything we will need to do and the materials we will need to buy to complete the project succesfully.

We talked about getting plants from friends and family to cut down on costs, borrowing a rototiller to prepare the soil and, most importantly, how to make this new landscaping LOW MAINTENANCE. We don’t want to be pulling weeds every weekend from here to eternity. So, we decided that we needed to invest in a good weed barrier to put over the soil that would prevent weeds from growing up through our landscaping. Then my wife commented that her dad once told her old newspaper worked great as a weed barrier and had the same effect as the fancy covering you buy at Home Depot.

I’ll admit, I scoffed, and even laughed, at the idea when she first presented it. I mean, come on….newspaper couldn’t work as well as the stuff manufactured specifically for this purpose…could it? I mean it’s just newspaper…right?

We haven’t put this into action yet, but the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realized that my perception of something puts no limits on it’s usefullness. My preference to use something other than newspaper didn’t make it the right choice, it just made it my preference. I thought it was a downright foolish idea at first, but who made me the “knower of all things”?

I don’t have one specific point to make with this illustration, but the concept can take you a long way. My hope is not to give a green light to every foolish ideas that live inside your head, but rather to broaden your perspective on the possibilities that exist in this world. Realize that most innovate ideas start out as foolish ideas, which means our world progresses through the actions of fools. I know, pretty deep for a story about old newspaper, but you’ll never know if, or how, your perspective is holding you back until you step out of it. Something every leader in every context should contemplate.

I’ve spent an enormous amount of time studying spiritual gifts and the role they play in the church over the last month or so. Not only was this research for a series of sermons I was going to preach, but this is a subject that holds a great deal of interest for me. Growing up in a movement that didn’t focus on these gifts, miraculous or otherwise, with great regularity I have lived most of my life wondering what they were, who got them, and how they were meant to be used. I’ve always known what my theology was regarding spiritual gifts, but as my buddy Mike pointed out so well in this post, that doesn’t mean that I had it all figured out correctly.

Then, a couple days ago I read this post from Ed Stetzer that I believe addresses one of the many hang-ups that people have when it comes to their spiritual giftedness. If you have time, read Ed’s post first.

No Such Thing as “the Gift of Evangelism” by: Ed Stetzer

Here’s where I’m at. What most of us need to understand better is not our spiritual gifts, but our spiritual responsibilities. Many will use their lack of talent or ability to excuse themselves from an area of spiritual, and biblical, responsibility. We trick ourselves into thinking that if we’re not great at something, that God never intended for us to do it. As Ed points out evangelism is one of the areas that most frequently receives this response, but it’s not an optional area of involvement reserved for the talented and gifted. Evangelism is an area of responsibility for every believer that we cannot opt out of.

How ’bout some others? What about serving the poor, giving generously, loving others, praying fervently, constantly being in God’s Word? These things aren’t just for the spiritual elite or people who are really good at doing them. They’re biblically mandated responsibilities that should exist in the life of every believer.

Understanding and using our spiritual gifts is not only good, it’s also biblical. But, we should be leaning on our gifts to help us live out the responsibilities God has placed on our lives and not as an excuse to run away from them.

This morning as I continued to read through the book of Deuteronomy I noticed something in a way that I never had before. As God, through Moses, relays his promise to the Israelite people give them the promise land he continually uses one phrase to describe these nations that currently occupy the land. He says that they are, “nations greater and mightier than yourselves.” Over and over again God drives home the indisputable fact that these nations to be conquered and driven out by the Israelites are far greater and mightier than they are.

For some, this might seem like a negative reality, but I believe this is meant to bring great comfort to God’s people. It was meant to remind them that they are not going to be fighting with their power, but rather the power of their mighty God. It was meant to help them understand that they couldn’t do this on their own, and that their reliance on God in everything was paramount to their survival.

Many of you are facing things that are “greater and mightier than yourselves” today. Maybe you’re even discouraged by the fact that you can’t conquer these things on your own. Maybe it’s broken your will to continue and has you on the verge of giving up. Either way, you need to be reminded of the same thing that the Israelites needed reminded of. If you’re acting in the will of the Father, it doesn’t matter if you’re up against an enemy, situation, or circumstance that is greater and mightier than yourself. The God you serve is above all powers, and he’s got you covered.