Today’s Scripture Reading (March 9, 2018): Colossians 1
Sue Monk Kidd in “The Secret Life of
Bees” comments “If you need something from somebody always give that person a
way to hand it to you.” It is maybe the greatest secret of a good
leader, but maybe one of the hardest to deliver on. In a world where resources are stretched, some of the most obvious ways to
empower someone, by giving them the resources to achieve, simply are not
available. So we have to find other ways to empower them and to teach them how to succeed
and deliver the things that we expect from them. And, sometimes, that is just
by making sure that they know we believe in them, and setting an example of
what it means to think outside the box.
Several years ago I served
with a leader who seemed to lack any leadership imagination in the tasks
that he performed. One day, I brought him into my office to work on a promo I
had been developing. I still remember his face as he walked into my office and
saw my laptop set up with a green towel placed over the keyboard, a picture of
the swamp of Dagobah on the screen, and a Yoda bobblehead
sitting in front of the screen. I had heard him voicing Yoda as a joke with
some other members of the team, and so I handed him a script for the promo and
asked him to voice Yoda while I filmed the bobblehead.
It was not something that he had ever done before, or even dreamed that he
could do. But after that day, he presented me with a number of great outside the box suggestions, and he delivered exactly what we needed from him in his position
in the church.
We know very little about Epaphras. It appears that
his hometown was Colossae. It has been suggested that Paul converted him, and then that it was actually Epaphras who planted the Colossian church. He had become
the main teacher of the faith in Colossae. So as Paul reaches out to the
Colossian Church, he makes sure to mention Epaphras. Paul does two positive things
with this brief mention of Epaphras in his letter. First, he raises the status
of Epaphras in the church. He calls him a fellow servant, or co-worker, in the
task to which Paul had committed himself. Epaphras was not a follower of Paul; he was an equal. Both followed the same
master, and both had been selected by God to serve the church. At this point in
his ministry, this idea of a co-worker with Paul was rare. But Paul trusted
Epaphras enough to say that the teaching that they heard from him was equal to
the words that Paul would have spoken in their midst. Epaphras may have been a
local boy, but he spoke with the authority of the Apostle Paul because he was
Paul’s equal. And second, he makes this endorsement with strength. Paul knew
that the future of the Colossian Church most likely laid in the hands of Epaphras. He expected Epaphras to lead the
church well, and so he endorsed him in the presence of the church. Paul gave
Epaphras the empowerment that he needed to do the task and deliver exactly what Paul had expected of him.
Sometimes, we seem a little too concerned with our personal empowerment, and we forget that each of us has someone we need to empower. There
is someone right now who needs to hear you publically say that you have faith
in them. And until those words are delivered,
they will never be able to give you what it is that you need from them. It
doesn’t matter the arena or the age of
the person. They need to know that you trust them
and that you expect great things from them. And once they know that, the sky is
the limit as far as their potential to succeed is concerned. But the first step
in that success is always knowing that someone believes that they can do it.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Colossians 2
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