Are you Qualified? How to Level Up your Leadership Skills—Part 2

“Being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.”
Colossians 1:11-14

Earlier this week, we looked at a few foundational tools on how to be a qualified leader. A leader not only needs to understand where they come from, but where they’re going.

Let’s unpack the rest of this verse and look at how a qualified Christian actively lives out these qualifications. 

A Qualified Christian Endures

Often it takes a long time for us to figure out what God wants for us or what we should do with our lives. Sometimes we find ourselves in certain situations that are no where near where we would like to be.

But when the Christian walk gets hard, that’s where endurance steps in. And I’m not talking about Monster-drink-induced-endurance that helps you stay up for that all-nighter study sesh. I’m talking about a life-giving, Christ-empowered endurance to keep your head in the game when things get really tough. 

I was never was the same after my first parachute jump. 

Before, jumping out of the plane, I remember thinking that this would be so cool and such a good story to tell my friends. 

Then, the doors opened. I looked down, and I was scared out of my mind. 

When that door opened and reality hit me hard, I had to dig deep into my internal identity and reality. I knew that I was called to do this. While adrenaline was high, I was reassured by the big picture of my life. 

When the Christian life gets tough, we need to dig in deeper and understand that Christ gives the us the endurance to push through the difficult times by helping us know and understand the big picture. 

Paul puts it like this way in Romans 5:3-5“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.” 

Did you hear that?

We can be 100% confident that our emotional struggles and mental suffering produces the strength to endure! That’s the type endurance even plane-jumping adrenaline could never produce. 

A Qualified Christian Cultivates Patience & Joy 

Sometimes when we find ourselves in situations where we feel like we’re swimming against the current and straining to endure, we grit our teeth and try to remind ourselves that we just have to get through this. 

The thing about God is that He doesn’t just give us endurance but also provides patience and joy.

Growing up in a Christian community, when people talked about joy, and I remember I envisioned people with a permanent smile plastered on their face no matter the situation. Joy isn’t a fake, inauthentic, strained smile plastered on a tired face or a bubbly attitude no matter what interactions are being thrown your way. That’s not the joy Paul is talking about. 

The joy being described here is not the external joy depicted through our emotions but an internal joy that reminds us of who we are.

I recall one time I was put in a scenario in which I was truly a fish out of water.

We enrolled my son in a Christian private school that we could hardly afford. So, I worked from time to time as a substitute teacher to help cut down on tuition.

I figured since I am an educator and train people in the military and my undergraduate degree is in education, how hard could it be?

I assumed I would substitute for subjects in which I was good, i.e. history, social sciences, or physical education.

Well, I got a call from the school asking if I would substitute for the music teacher!!

I assumed I would just sit there and allow them to do their homework. But no, the teacher left me two songs that she wanted ME TO TEACH THEM HOW TO SING.

I am no singer, but I decided that if I can jump out of planes, I can teach 8th graders how to sing. So, I got up behind the lectern and looked at the song (that I didn’t recognize at all) and confidently began trying to teach them this song.

As I was up there making a fool out of myself, I thought, what would my buddies be thinking if they saw me attempting to direct and orchestrate 8th graders in singing a song?

I saw this step out into something extremely uncomfortable as a way to learn and to grow.

I would like to say the class was a success and everyone learned from me….sadly. that was not the case. I made it through each four classes I had to teach with the students leaving as confused as I was. But I attempted something and tried my best with whatever I could.

The way I was able to endure through this stretching and somewhat embarrassing experience is because I knew God had a purpose for me. At this point in time there is no going back, so I must find my internal joy of my identity in Christ and block out my emotions and internalize the inner joy I have with Christ.

This was why I was able to jump out of planes and teach 8th graders how to sing.

At the edge of the plane, I knew God had a purpose for me, and at this point in time, there was no going back. I had to find my internal joy of my identity in Christ and block out my emotions and internalize the inner joy I have with Christ.

This solid joy-giving identity in Christ was also the reason Paul carried the gospel across continents despite facing hunger, pain, sickness, and storms all the way to the Colossians who were strategically placed during the Hellenistic period. 

The church’s town was a trade route where many religions—Jewish, gnostic, and other pagan influences—converged. But while these influencing factors could have posed as distractions, Paul reminds the Colossians of the trajectory toward hope and of how they had been delivered (or rescued) from their former lifestyle.

A qualified Christian understands where the source of their qualifications come from: Christ.

Identity in Christ sources our patience and joy. 

A Qualified Christian Knows Their Purpose

Often, we run in circles trying to find our purpose. We take a bajillion personality type tests to discover what our strengths and weaknesses are, hoping the results can give us clear indicators as to where the direction of our lives should go. 

We get so lost trying to figure out our life purpose we miss that God created us for one thing: to glorify Him for what He has done for us. 

Each life looks vastly different because God is shaping each life story differently, but ultimately, our life message conveys one main message: the good news. 

Salvation shows that we were once lost to our sins and desperately needed to be rescued. 

Shortly into my career with SERE in the USAF, I was chosen to work at the water survival school.

In this school, I taught alongside with ten other instructors how to survive in open water, helicopter crashes, and ditching environments. One course called “Underwater Egress” is where we take aircrew and place them inside a “dunker” mockup of a helicopter and strap them into seats and then fully submerge the apparatus and flip it upside down.

The purpose of this training is to instill muscle memory and to familiarize the trainee with the reference points in the helicopter they would be performing a majority of their duties in. If their helicopter were to crash in the middle of the ocean or a dirty lake, their ability to see would be little to non-existent, so we taught them how to use what they know about their aircraft—seats, levers, ceiling pipes etc.—to use those as reference points to find the door or window and safely get out of a sinking aircraft.

From time to time, our students would panic, and we would have to get them out of the dunker. They were told if they lost their breath to place their hands on their helmet, and I would get them out ASAP.

During one training after the helicopter flipped upside down, one student undid his seat belt and went ballistic. He was flailing his arms and legs doing everything he could to get through the metal floor of the dunker to get air.

As two other instructors and I went to grab him, he punched and kicked all of us and wouldn’t let us near him all while we were holding our breaths! We tried and tried to help him, but since he was my student, he was my responsibility.

I swam right up to him, ducked underneath his panicked punches and slid my arm around his shoulder and neck, and yanked him backwards to distract him from the panic. As soon as I did this, the safety diver opened the window reached in, and I shoved the student out of the window to the diver and to the surface.

The student was going to die if I hadn’t rescued him. Spiritually speaking, before Christ, we were all dead to our sins and ungodly habits—punching in a panic underwater—and were destined to inherit death and the wrath of Christ.

But Christ rescued us from the murky darkness of our sins.

With Christ, we walk in the “light.” We inherit salvation and the promise of heaven. We went from being in a domain of darkness, a dungeon, a pit of despair, and now we have full access to a kingdom of light!

This is our big picture. This is the Christians end game, the big picture for how we ought to be functioning in our lives. 

The Greek word for redemption means “to deliver payment of a ransom.” Not only have been rescued; we have been given freedom from our bonds!

Life prior to Christ is darkness; with Christ, now, there’s light, the type of light that illuminates moral truth and divine purity is as described in Ephesians 5:7-10. Life prior to Christ was bondage; now, there’s freedom.

We make it complicated, but walking worthy for Christ, to Christ, and in Christ involves living out this life of freedom our Savior has given us through His saving work on the cross.

And that’s not all! As if freedom from our sinful bonds wasn’t enough, Christ elevated us to a status in which we have our sins forgiven. This is the essence of atonement. 

Atonement is a term often mentioned in Sunday-morning sermons and Christian circles, but don’t let this theological term scare you off. It means that the payment of Christ on the cross allows us Christians to be reconciled with God.

Atonement is where we shift our focus from the nature of Christ to his active work on our behalf. 

Hebrews 10:14 says, “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” Christ’s ultimate life-giving sacrifice demonstrates the extent of God’s love. It depicts the severity of God’s righteousness and the seriousness of sin. It shows the power of His victory over sin and death and the satisfaction for our sins. Christ’s atonement is a living example of how we are to lead our lives—in complete adoration to the one who paid it all for our rescue and our freedom.

Level up your life by living out the qualifications that Christ has given you—Christ-empowered endurance, joy sustained by salvation, and the sobering reality of Christ’s atonement.