LIFT THE LID
Some of us have put a lid on how much God can use us, and in this season, He wants to lift it off.
Growing up, I was never a leader. We were hard workers but nobody in my family was a leader. I thought some people were ‘born leaders’, but not me.
When I became a police officer I had no desire to go up the ranks, because I never saw myself as a leader. And you’ll always BE who you SEE you are.
I had a lid on.
Then I came to know Jesus and he called me to lead people to know him, so eventually I spent three years training studying theology. But they taught nothing about leadership, because the people teaching had never led a church, let alone grown one. You have to be one to grow one.
Then a few years into ministry, I read a book by a guy called John Maxwell entitled ‘The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”. It totally blew my mind. I got to meet him at the Albert Hall a few years ago and thanked him for doing so.
That book blew the lid off!
Reading it, I realised leadership could be taught. And leadership could be learned.
Later I got a box set of 30 teaching tapes from Dr Maxwell and played them over and over everywhere I went in the car. That’s how I learned to be a leader.
THE LAW OF THE LID
Law number 1 in the book is what Maxwell called The Law of The Lid. He said the amount of impact, influence or whatever you define as success in life would be determined by the LID I had placed on my leadership.
He said leaders follow leaders. On a scale of 1 to 10, if I’m a four, I’ll never lead a seven for very long. The way to grow my effectiveness is to lift the lid. To grow my leadership ability.
I never saw myself as a leader but who had put the lid on?ME! I’d decided I was about a four. That’s where I was. That’s who I was. Only I could take that lid off. The lid was in my thinking, and I lived accordingly.
Have you ever heard about a ‘flea circus’, where they put fleas in a jar – and then closed the lid.
Fleas can jump 150 times their own height and pull 160,000 times their own weight. Imagine that! But for three days the fleas keep hitting the lid when they jump. They learned a limitation so they’d only jump just below that height of the lid.
Watch the video and you’ll see that when the jar’s opened the fleas continue to jump at the adjusted height, even though the only limitation is in their head. They’ll never jump out of the jar. And by the way if they reproduce– neither will the next generation.
When I started learning about leadership, I saw myself as a leader, and became one.
God told me ‘There is no lid.”
My Bible says we have the mind of Christ. It says, ‘You have an anointing from the Holy One to know all things.’
That’s why the church should be the greatest leadership and solutions factory on the planet! You have the Spirit of wisdom and revelation! We should be raising up Daniels, Josephs and Esthers to lead and save the nations, and seeing miracles among our friends and neighbours!
But we’ve kept the miracle in the jars. We’ve confined God in the building with us. We’ve put the lids on the jars of clay, putting them away safe. Now in this time of global crisis, God is doing a new thing, so all of that, and all of us, will have to change.
This is an excerpt from a talk I gave last night at ivychurch.org called “Moving To Multiplication”, available right now to listen to here on our podcast and the video will be on the site itself soon: I outlined the way we are changing Ivy going forward. If you need to get connected for networking or to apply for coaching in leadership for the new thing, get in touch.