Level Up Your Ministry

Speaker 1:
Hi, I'm Brian Mosley, our team here at RightNow Media loves serving the church. We believe the mission of the church matters and that your leadership matters. So whether you're watching this message by yourself or with your leadership team, we hope that it's an encouragement to you. This session from Jordan Rainer is incredibly practical and full of great insight. I know you're gonna wanna take notes about what he has to say.

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Speaker 2:

I was telling somebody this morning, I’ve been praying a lot lately for humility, and then they asked me to speak after Albert Tate and Tony Evans, and J.D. Greear are my all-time favorite Jen Wilkin lesson for you: be careful what you pray for.

Hey, raise your hand if you’ve been inspired and re-energized these last two days. Can we say thank you? Hey, hey. RightNow Media doesn’t have to do this. This is an incredible event. Can we say thank you to the RightNow Media team?

This has been one of those mountaintop experiences that my friend Joby Martin was talking about on Wednesday. But hey, you and I both know what’s coming next, right? We’re going from the mountaintop to the mess. Amen.

At some point in the next few days, maybe Monday morning, you’re gonna pull open your laptop. You’re gonna see those 500 unread emails that have been piling up over the last few days, and you’re gonna utter two words. They’re on the screen: I’m swamped, right?

The Bible tells us that 2,000 years ago, Jesus’ disciples were swamped, but in a different way. Check out Luke chapter 8. One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go to the other side of the lake.” So they got into a boat and set out, and as they sailed, Jesus fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger, right?

We know the rest of the story, right? Charlie Dates gave us the rest of the story better than anyone I’ve ever heard. Jesus just gets up and says— and the waves stand sentinel in respect to their Creator. That may have been my favorite moment in the last three days. Gosh, I love Charlie Dates.

This passage perfectly illustrates the core premise of this talk. Namely, that the solution to the disciples being swamped by the wind and the waves is the exact same solution to you and I being swamped by our hurried schedules and our never-ending to-do lists. The solution is Jesus Christ, right?

Hope does indeed have a name, my friends—and not just for our souls, not just for our communities, but for our day-to-day attempts to redeem the time, because the days are evil.

Now some of you’re looking at me like, “Jordan, how in the world does Jesus solve my time management problems? This sounds crazy,” right? Let me give you two ways.

First, Jesus offers you and I peace before we do a single thing to get unswamped. Amen. I’ve read more than 50 books on time management and productivity throughout my career, and all of these books have essentially the same message. They say, “Hey, pastor, you’re feeling swamped and overwhelmed. Buy my book. Do exercises X, Y, and Z, and then I promise you’re gonna feel peace at the end of this thing.”

I’m not buying it. Are you? Right? This is what we could call works-based productivity. But as Christians, we can start with the opposite premise. We have grace-based productivity, which says that through Jesus Christ, I have eternal peace with God. See Romans chapter 5, verse 1. I have peace that makes no sense, like we sang this morning.

I don’t do time management exercises in a wild goose chase to get peace. I do them as a worshipful response to the peace that is secure through Christ alone. Amen.

Here’s the second way Jesus solves our time management problems. He shows us how God would manage His time.

In a few weeks, we’re all gonna be celebrating Christmas—the incarnation—leading our congregations to remember that Jesus was 100% God and 100% man. Amen. Which means that Jesus had to steward the exact same 24-hour day that you and I steward right now. Amen.

I’m not gonna get nearly as many amens as Albert Tate, but I’ll take that one.

Guys, here’s the good news. We’re not in the dark as to how Jesus manages time, because I don’t know if you guys have noticed this at your local library—we have four biographies on the life of Jesus. They’re called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, right?

Now, the gospel biographies don’t show Jesus with a to-do list or an iPhone, but they do show Jesus dealing with distractions at work. One time a guy literally fell through the roof over Jesus as He was preaching. If that hasn’t happened to you, you’re not more distracted than Jesus.

The gospels show Jesus having to prioritize His time. They show Him fighting for solitude and seeking to be busy without being hurried. They show Him dealing with the exact same challenges you and I face today.

We do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses. Amen. And because He’s the author of time, we can assume He managed His time perfectly.

So the question is, how did He manage His time?

In my book Redeeming Your Time, I share seven answers to that question. And don’t worry, I’m not gonna hawk a book from the stage. Thanks to the generosity of RightNow Media, they’re giving you copies for free after this talk if you want.

There you go—that deserves a round of applause.

But in that book, I lay out seven timeless time management principles from the life of Christ as we see them in the gospel biographies, and then I’ve mapped those seven principles to more than 30 wicked practical practices to help you and I live out those principles in our modern context.

So this morning, I want to give a high-level overview of each of those seven principles and give you one practice for each that you could take home and implement on Monday.

Because listen, we’ve had some great inspiration, right? I want to leave you with some tools as you go back into the mess—to be more efficient and more effective at doing the good works God has prepared you to do in your local congregations.

You guys down for that? Here’s principle number one. Start with the Word.

When you look at the gospel biographies, it is clear that Jesus prioritized time with His Father above everything else. Let’s look at Mark 1.

That evening after sunset, the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases.

The next day, very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place where He prayed.

Jesus had a late night. Jesus was exhausted after healing all these people, and yet He prioritized getting up very early in the morning to be with His Father.

If we care about redeeming our time for eternal purposes, we have to do the same. But listen—you of all people know this. You make a living making your congregations feel guilty about not having a quiet time. Am I right? Is that too close to home?

The challenge—hopefully somebody’s willing to stand up with me and admit this—the challenge for those of us who make a living studying and teaching the Word is keeping this practice fresh, right?

Which is why we’d be wise to change up our Bible study habits from time to time to maintain our awe at the glory of God and the goodness of His Word.

Let me give you one practice that’s been working for me lately. Take it or leave it—but if you leave it, you’re dissing Martin Luther, so I’ll leave that between you and him.

This is how Luther studied the Bible. He would take a passage of Scripture and read it—but not just close the Bible. He would write out four things in prayer as a response to the text.

Number one: he would write out what the passage was instructing him to do.

Number two: he would write out a praise. What in the text is leading me to praise God for who He is and what it reveals about His character?

Number three: he would write out a confession—where he had fallen short of the command.

And finally, number four: he would write out a petition. Ask the Lord for grace to live out the command.

If the daily bread has grown stale for you, if you’re willing to admit that in the quiet of your heart, try this practice. Give it a shot.

Here’s principle number two, straight from Jesus’ mouth: Let your yes be yes.

We can assume, of course, that Jesus kept this command perfectly. Here’s the deal: you and I are always saying yes. We’re always making commitments all day long with the people in our lives—in the parking lot after church. We promise somebody we’ll text them to get coffee later that week.

Or maybe before you came to Dallas, you promised your kids you’d make the Minnie Mouse waffles on Saturday when you got back home. That’s a real one for this guy right now.

The problem is that many of these commitments—these yeses—are stored in your brain alone, which is a problem because neuroscience says that when commitments live only in your brain, it creates a phenomenal amount of anxiety and stress.

You’ve experienced this. You know why? Because your brain knows that at some point you’re going to drop some of the balls you’re mentally juggling, which is out of line with Jesus’ command.

Jesus says, “Let your yes be yes… for whatever is more than these is from the evil one.”

To say on your voicemail greeting that you’ll call people back and then not do it—that’s from the evil one.

We’ve got all sorts of terms for this. We say, “I’m just forgetful.” We say, “I dropped the ball.” Jesus calls it sin—plain and simple.

Here’s the good news: this is actually a fairly easy problem to solve. I’m going to show you how.

Here’s practice number two: we’ve got to get good at externalizing the open loops out of our head.

That’s what I mean by commitments and yeses. I call them open loops—anything personal or professional, big or small, urgent or distant, that you have any level of internal commitment to do.

Some of you are thinking, “Jordan, I’ve got 500 open loops in my head.”

Here’s the good news. The neuroscience says you don’t actually have to close the open loops for your brain to forget about them. You just have to get them out of your head and into a trusted system—a to-do list app, a piece of paper, whatever it is—and review that list regularly.

So sometime when you get back home—Monday, tomorrow, whenever—sit down with a sheet of paper or open the Notes app on your phone and just keep writing until your brain is emptied of all those open loops.

I promise that when you get to the end of that exercise, you’ll feel a sense of relief—even though you didn’t complete a single action on the list.

It’s not rational, but it’s how God designed our brains to work.

Here’s principle number three. Jesus spent a ton of time dissenting from the kingdom of noise, to cite the cliché of all clichés. We are living at an unprecedented time of noise, right? And of course, I’m referring to all the external noise in our lives—our buzzing devices, nonstop news, and social media.

But primarily what I’m concerned with is what all of that external noise creates, namely this internal noise that blocks my ability to think and to be creative, and most importantly, to listen to the voice of God.

Anyone have their best ideas in the shower? You want to know why? It’s the last place on earth not totally drenched in noise.

And this stands in stark contrast to the way of Jesus. Open your Bibles to any page in the Gospels, and you’re probably going to find Jesus withdrawing to a lonely or solitary place.

Let’s read the most famous account together from Matthew 3.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, He went up out of the water, and at that moment heaven was opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on Him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased.”

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.

Okay, so a voice from heaven shouts, “This is the one. This is my Son, with whom I am well pleased.” If there was ever a moment in which we would expect Jesus to start talking, to start preaching, this has to be it.

But instead, the Spirit led Him to the wilderness for forty days of silence.

If we want to redeem our time in the model of our Redeemer, we’ve got to get really, really good at dissenting from the kingdom of noise.

Let me give you one idea for how to do this: let your friends curate the news for you.

Let me explain what I mean. A little bit of context—up until six years ago, I was a news junkie. Like many of you, I was always on Twitter, watching cable news, and scrolling news websites.

Then one day I realized two things. Number one, 99% of the news is totally irrelevant to my life and work. And number two, the news was making me a bitter, angry, unloving person.

So I quit cold turkey. You know what happened after I quit cold turkey? Nothing happened. Literally nothing happened. That’s only half true.

Here’s what did happen: my friends started telling me about the news I actually cared about.

Any Tim Keller super fans in here? I’m a Tim Keller super fan. When Tim posted on Twitter two years ago that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, eight of my friends texted me the news within ten minutes of him posting.

I hear about pandemics. I hear about media trends. I hear about every rumor of a West Wing reunion—because I’m also a West Wing super fan. Amen. There we go. You’re my people. Let’s hang out later.

And I hear about all these things without having to spend a single second wading through the soul-sucking quicksand that is modern news and social media.

My friends bring it to me—and they will for you too. Oh my gosh, especially pastors. Your congregations are dying to send you everything they read on Fox News. Everything.

Principle number four: prioritize your yeses.

Contrary to our caricature of Jesus as a nice guy who always said yes, sometimes Jesus said no to requests for His time.

There’s a great example in Mark chapter one. This is the morning after Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law and all the people in the town. The next morning, Mark says that Simon Peter and his companions went to look for Jesus, and when they found Him, they exclaimed, “Jesus, everyone’s looking for you.”

The people wanted an encore of healing on day two. Listen to Jesus’ reply. Jesus said, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”

That’s Jesus for “no,” right?

Jesus knew what He was saying yes to, and that allowed Him to take the never-ending list of things He could do in His ministry and prioritize it down to the things He knew He should do in order to finish the work the Father had given Him to do.

You and I have got to do the same. How do we do it? Here’s one idea: set bigger goals.

One of the most frequent things I hear from pastors is, “Jordan, I’m so bad at saying no. I say yes to everything all week long, and then on Saturday night I’m scrambling to get my sermon done.”

My first question when somebody tells me that is, what are the big, hairy, audacious, inspiring goals you’ve set for your ministry and your family?

And nine times out of ten—maybe nineteen times out of twenty—they can’t answer the question. That’s why they’re saying yes to everything: because they haven’t taken the time to define the yes that’s going to make everything else look small in comparison.

And listen, I get that within a church context we should be setting goals differently from the rest of the world. If you want to explore that nuance, let’s hang out afterwards.

But if you don’t have big, inspiring goals for your ministry, your community, and what you want to see God doing there, you will always, always, always get sucked into the thick of thin things. Always.

Principle number five: accept your unipresence.

We’re just making up theological terms now.

We all believe that God is omnipresent. Amen. He’s everywhere all the time. So it’s worth considering this: for thirty-ish years, Jesus traded that godly omnipresence for the human unipresence you and I experience today.

He confined Himself to one physical place at a time. And all throughout the Gospel biographies, we see Him painfully aware of this human constraint.

Check out Mark chapter nine. They left that place and passed through Galilee. Listen to this: Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were, because He was teaching His disciples.

I hear people say all the time, “Jesus always had time for interruptions.” I’m sorry—no, He didn’t. Maybe most of the time. Many times. But in scenes like this, and a few others in the Gospels, we see Jesus intentionally dodging His celebrity.

He embraced His human unipresence so that He could fully focus on loving and serving one important person at a time—in this case, teaching the disciples.

If we want to do our most exceptional work—sermon prep, discipling our kids, leading worship, whatever your deep work is—we’ve got to do the same thing.

How do we do this? Here we go. This is the most practical thing I’m going to give you, and it’s also one of the most life-changing.

We have got to take control over when we check incoming messages—emails, texts, Instagram Messenger, Facebook Messenger, all the things.

Let me offer an analogy. Imagine the mailman showing up at your house two hundred times a day. He doesn’t stay at the curb. He gets out, comes to your front door, rings the doorbell.

You get up from whatever you’re doing, answer the door, take the mail. Maybe you open it, maybe you don’t—but at a minimum you steal a glance at who it’s from.

This is insane, folks. We’ve got to wrestle this problem to the ground if we want to be fully focused and serve our congregations and families well.

Here’s how you do it—five steps. You could do it this afternoon and change your life forever.

First, choose ahead of time when you want to check emails, texts, and messages every day. Maybe three times a day—10:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. Whatever works for you.

Second, build a list of VIPs who can reach you at any time. Probably your spouse, your kids, maybe your assistant or elder board.

Third, add those VIPs to your phone’s favorites list. When you turn on Do Not Disturb, only calls from those people will interrupt your work—not emails, not texts, not Instagram likes on your dog photo.

Fourth, set clear expectations. Send your VIPs a message that says, “I’m trying to be more focused at work and more present with my family. Here’s how you can help me.”

Tell them when you check messages, and let them know that if something is urgent, they should call you. If you’re available, you’ll answer every time.

And finally, step five: ignore your incoming messages.

If you’ve done the first four steps, you’ll be able to peacefully ignore messages for an hour, two hours, even three hours at a time, so you can do your most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others.

Over the last year, I’ve coached about a thousand people through this practice. Want to know how many urgent things they missed? Zero.

About a hundred of those people were pastors.

Second question: since implementing the practice, how much more productive have you been at work? On average—twice as productive. Some people say four times, but I don’t think they’re good at math. Twice? I buy that. One hundred percent.

Here’s principle number six. We, like Jesus, need to learn to embrace productive rest. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but Jesus knew that proper rest makes human beings more—not less—productive. Which is why we see Him observing the Sabbath, sleeping on boats, and offering rest to His disciples throughout their workday.

Check out Mark chapter six.

The apostles gathered around Jesus and reported to Him all that they had done and taught. Then, because so many people were coming and going that they did not even have a chance to eat, He said to them, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”

How good is Jesus?

Jesus knew that human beings aren’t designed to work like we’re in a marathon. We’re designed for sprints—to work hard and then rest well so that we could be more productive in the next sprint for His glory.

What does this look like practically for us today? Let me give you maybe the simplest practice in this whole talk. It’s been life-changing for me.

If you work with your mind, rest with your hands. And if you work with your hands, rest with your mind.

Winston Churchill explains why. He said, quote, “The tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened—not merely by rest, any kind of rest—but by using other parts of the mind.”

Churchill practiced what he preached. Of course, he famously worked with his mind as a statesman and a prolific writer. But Churchill rested a lot with his hands. He painted over 500 paintings in his lifetime and almost every day laid bricks outside of his home.

We’d be wise to do something similar.

Most of you, like me, work primarily with your minds. When I’m at the end of 90 minutes of focused sermon prep, it isn’t restful for me to read a book, right? I’m going to be far more rested if I wash the dishes—which has the extra benefit of delighting my wife.

Washing dishes, going for a run, playing the piano—the same will be true for you if you’re working with your mind. Rest with your hands.

Here’s the last principle: eliminate all hurry.

I’m of course stealing this phrase from my friend John Mark Comer, who stole it from John Ortberg, who stole it from Dallas Willard. Jen Wilkin was right when she wrote that we are all hacks and rip-off artists.

And listen—I’m all in on this eliminate-hurry mantra. But I think we need to put a finer point on the difference between hurry and busyness.

Because when you look at the Gospel biographies, Jesus was crazy busy.

Look at Mark chapter three. Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered so that He and His disciples were not even able to eat. When His family heard about this, they went to take charge of Him, for they said, “He is out of His mind.”

I love that we still use this phrase today.

Jesus was out-of-His-mind busy—but never in a way that made Him frantic or anxious or snapping at the other people in His life.

I know I’m busy when I’ve got a lot of meetings on my calendar in a day. But I know I’m hurried if I have no time in between meetings to look other image-bearers in the eye.

I know I’m busy tomorrow when I get back home to Tampa because I’ve got a lot of errands to run. But I’ll know I’m hurried if I get mad for choosing the wrong lane at the grocery store because I couldn’t afford to lose 30 seconds.

We’ve got to embrace productive busyness while ruthlessly eliminating hurry from our lives.

Here’s how. Here’s one practice to get you there.

We ought to get good at counting the cost of our time—of budgeting our time.

Every single friend of mine has a budget for their money. Before I published this book, none of my friends had a budget for their time. I’m sorry—this makes no sense to me.

By God’s grace, all of us can earn more money. None of us can earn more minutes. How much more intentional should we be about planning where those minutes go before God gives us a fresh supply every morning?

I don’t have time to show you exactly how to build this time-budget template in this talk, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you the section of my book that shows you step by step how to build a time-budget template.

If you take out your phone, scan the QR code that’s coming up, or just go to that URL—jordanrainer.com/rm—you can get that resource.

I’m also going to send you tips from pastors, specifically pastors, on how they’ve contextualized these practices to the local church. And then, of course, I’m going to send you a link to the Redeeming Your Time Bible study on RightNow Media.

And again, if you’d like a copy of the book, come see me afterward.

I want to close with this, because I know when we talk like this—when we’re talking about really practical stuff—it can be easy to view time management and productivity as secular ideas.

But Paul says this is part of our reasonable response to the gospel.

In the book of Ephesians, Paul spends the first five chapters expounding upon the gospel of grace. And as he always does, he anticipates his reader’s question. You can hear them asking, “Okay, Paul, I’m saved not by works. I’m saved by faith alone. Great. Now what?”

And Paul writes in Ephesians 5:15–16: “See then that you walk carefully, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”

Commenting on that passage, Tim Keller said, quote, “Time stewardship is a biblical command. Why? Because the days are evil.”

My friends, the world is in desperate need of the hope that only Jesus can provide. And God has appointed you and me to be the vessels through which that hope is delivered—that we redeem our time for that purpose today and every day that God breathes fresh air into our lungs.

Father God, we’re astounded that You would save us. Our salvation is a miracle. God, I pray that in response to our salvation, we wouldn’t coast—that we wouldn’t sit around waiting for Jesus’ return—but that we would wait with our hands busy, with the good works You prepared in advance for us to do.

Lord, help us to be present and purposeful and wildly productive for Your glory, in a Jesus-like, peace-filled way.

Amen.