I finished reading Mohler’s “Conviction to lead” yesterday. It is a great read jam packed with lots of substance. I immensely enjoyed the chapter on the “passion to lead”, and “the leader understands worldview.” But I was more impressed with chapter 23 – Leadership that Endures. The following paragraphs are from chapter 23. The title above each paragraph is not in the book.

Here are three things I want you to consider over this weekend:

Consider Patience
Patience is a virtue that is highly honored by Christians.The Bible reveals patience to be one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The apostle Paul prayed that the church would be “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy” (Colossians 1:11). Evidently, patience and endurance and joy belong together. Paul also told Timothy to preach “with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2).

Consider long-term not short-term.
We often think of patience as a short-term issue. We are impatient in a checkout line, impatient in traffic, and horribly impatient as we sit on the tarmac at airports watching our time wasted by circumstances outside our control. More significantly, we are impatient with other people, often sinfully so. This is a major struggle in my own life, as I am often guilty of the sin of impatience about short-term things. Bible reveals that the concern for patience is more often about the long-term endurance of a servant leader, willing and ready to bear the burdens of leadership and influence over a long time.

Consider Dr. W. A. Criswell.
Criswell had become pastor at First Baptist Church in 1944, following the death of the legendary George W. Truett. When I sat in the sanctuary on that day, Criswell had already been pastor there for over forty years. At the conclusion of the service, Dr. Criswell stood before the congregation and welcomed new members who had recently been baptized. One of them was a boy who was about twelve or thirteen years old. Criswell warmly embraced him and then faced the congregation and asked the boy’s parents and paternal grandparents to come forward and stand with the boy. Then Criswell said something amazing. He introduced the boy’s father, saying, “I baptized him many years ago.” Then he introduced the grandfather and said, “And I baptized him even years before that.”

This pastor had remained at his post long enough to have baptized three generations of men in a pastorate that spanned decades, and he wasn’t done yet.

R. Albert Mohler Jr, The Conviction to Lead (Bethany House Publishers, 2012), pages 154-156

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