Ready for Leadership

Hey, good morning, Cross Church. How's everybody doing? >> Good. My name is Timothy O' Conor. I know everybody knows me pretty much by TJ that's in this room, but uh since we're in church, it's a biblical name. We're going to go by Timothy today. So, I did want to tell you a little bit about myself, but instead of getting into, you know, the personal stuff specifically, I kind of wanted to talk to you about how I got on this stage. And it starts about three and a half years ago when I started dating my currently now wife. and she was about 2,000 miles away from me in South Carolina. And we had our first very first date in North Carolina in a small city called Bryson City. And that very first date when we actually left and went out into the world, we went to church. Yeah. It's crazy, right? We went to a small Southern Baptist church. We walked in the door. There was about 16 17 people in the room and they kind of looked at like us like we were a little crazy, you know, like who are these people that come on top of our uh or in our church in the top of this mountain just randomly walking in. But everybody was extremely nice and welcoming. And we hadn't been in church, I know it was about 15 years for me, maybe 16, 17 years for Emily. And the pastor there was speaking on joy. And if anybody knows about joy in the Bible, he's talking about the joy that Jesus Christ brings to our life. And instead of worrying about happiness, he was speaking on joy. And that touched Emily and I really, really hard. We felt like he was talking directly to us in that moment. And on our knees in that church on in Bryson City, we both accepted Jesus into our hearts that day and started our seeking together for the Lord. Now, about a year later, I proposed to Emily. And amazingly enough, she actually accepted and I got here to move to Arizona. And during that time, we had a we were seeking for a new church. We were trying to find a place to call home. We went to a lot of different places. And we found Cross Church Elm Mirage. And since we've been here, we got married on this stage by Pastor Tyler. on that very morning, we were baptized by Pastor Tyler that morning on our wedding day. And exactly one year from today that Pastor Tyler actually just spoke to me about, which is an amazing thing, is he was speaking on leadership and accepting what God's calling is for you that day. And that same day that he was preaching on that, I messaged him. I directly messaged him. I wish I had it to put up on the on the screen back here, but I said, "I think God is calling me to to be on stage. I think God is calling me to to preach the word." And that was exactly one year ago and he was speaking on leadership and I will be speaking on leadership today. So Jesus doesn't let anything go pretty much. He's always there and he never lets us down. It's just going to be in his time. So, we're going to be in a a series. We've been in a series for the last five weeks called Rooted and Ready. We're going to speak on being ready for leadership. And I want you to go and pull out your Bibles because we're going to be in them. So, flip there, click there, just get them out so we can get this thing started. We're going to be in Romans 10 verses 14- 15. And listen, don't be jealous of my cool glasses, but I need them. All right, guys. So, verse 14. How then can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news. Let's pray as we dive into this scripture today. Dear heavenly father, I second, if we're going to bring value to people, we need to become more valuable ourselves. We just got to simply get better. We can't be stagnant. Pastor spoke, Pastor Tyler spoke on learning last week in disciplehip. Everybody in here should focus on learning to get better if you're going to want to be a good leader. Three, we want to relate to people. We want to get to their level. We want to make sure that we're seeing where somebody's coming from. We need to relate to them. And finally, we need to be more like Jesus. Jesus was the best leader of all time. And the number one thing that he did as a leader is he served others first. Even as the son of man, the God in the flesh, he did not come to rule, but he came to serve. So we'll get into our key thought today and that's going to be how can we be leaders that bring the good news. So a little background of this uh scripture of Romans 10:14-15 is is Paul's actually writing to the church of Rome from Corenth and he has never been there. He's never been to Rome. So he's starting a doctrine to the church of Rome that's full of different believers and non-believers that have different viewpoints and he's explaining the gospel of Jesus Christ and all that we're responsible for as Christians. It pretty much boils down to this scripture Romans 10 verse 8-10. But what does it say? The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith that we proclaim. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with your heart one believes and is justified, and with your mouth one confesses and is saved. Paul is establishing the bedrock of the Christian faith here. And as a leader in our community almost 2,000 years later since this was written, it's just as important it is now as it was then. So let's dive right into the three ways that we can grow as leaders in our community. The first one is to be intentional in our spiritual development. Be intentional in our spiritual development. So what does that mean? Well, we can develop as Christians by reading the Bible. We can get in the word by reading it. But how are we intentional about doing those things? Well, we have about a million things distracting us out there in 2026. The evil one wants us to get on TikTok and scroll all day. He wants us he wants to look at things that have nothing to do with Christianity so that he can distract us from what our main goal is, and that's spreading the word. So, one thing that I like to talk about as a let's just call it as somebody that is in fitness and uh coaches people for a living is I've had the benefit and I don't know, I guess you'd call it the hard times of watching people work out if they don't know what they're doing. And a lot of times I'll see them like, you know, they're doing like a curl or something like that, you know, and I just want to grab them and shake them and be like, "Listen, I know you're trying hard, but you got to be intentional about these things, right? You got to pull your shoulders back. We got to squeeze the muscle and we got to work in an intentional way, just like when we read the Bible or we study scripture." Bryce Crawford is a young man of God. He's an evangelist. He's a street preacher. And he spoke about this not that many weeks ago and I just remembered it hit me really hard and I've actually been doing it ever since. He says reading the Bible without calling on the Holy Spirit for guidance is like going to war without with the best gun you could get without any bullets in it. We don't have the ability to deep down absorb scripture as well without the power of the Holy Spirit. So, one of the things that I actually do is I like to be by myself in my car my it's most my my most peaceful time I guess and I listen to the Bible and I absorb scripture that way and I go over what we're going over and I do it again and I do it again. My goal is to absorb scripture the best I possibly can. And with all the distractions out there in the world, we as leaders in our community, we want to use those things in our households. So, one of the big things that we did over the course of this summer is we joined a Bible group here at Cross Church. And it was a marriage Bible group. And that was really good for our spiritual development because we were able to get in a in a room with 10 to 12 people that are all going through the same things we are. And we're trying to learn scripture in order to help our marriage, in order to help guide us in the word of the Lord in our everyday life. But that gave us a lot of things to look at. It gave us to look at different ideas on how to manage our day. It gave us the aspect of looking at prayer for your spouse on a daily basis. I mean, it I'd like you to try and be involved in this, but show your hands if you pray with your spouse every day. Yeah. Not that many. So, when it comes to prayer with your spouse, it can be very intimidating. It you don't want to say the wrong thing, right? You don't want to sound stupid like your spouse is the person that's around you all the time and you know that they're going to look for the best for you but they're also going to look they feel like you're going to look at you like what are you even doing? You're not even put you're not saying the right things. Thing is that the Lord doesn't care if we say the right things. But it does bring us closer together as spouses. And it also gives us confidence to do that for our family. To pray at the dinner table, to pray for a friend that might need it in that moment. You are part of this leadership, Christian leadership group. You're going to want to use those small things that can become big things. Second is walk in the word. We want to walk in the word of the Lord. So tell me this. If you've heard this, if you've heard this saying before, go ahead and finish it for me. If you're going to talk the talk, >> the walk the walk. Let's go. Come on. Let's get it right. We got to wake up. You guys had plenty of time to sleep this morning. It's the 10:30 service. So listen, we got to walk the walk in our lives. We got to walk the walk for the Lord. We got to walk the walk for our family. And the ways that we can walk the walk is we can be the ones that lead from the front. Lead by example. We as Christians are called to be like we're called to be slow to anger. We're called to be quick to forgive. We're called to deny our flesh from things like gossiping. I work in fitness around a lot of women. Gossiping is a really common thing over there. It's pretty consistent. I'm not saying men don't gossip, but women gossip more. And so, as as Christians, we are here to try and be the light. We're trying to be the ones that don't fall guilty of those things. And sometimes it can be difficult. I know. I did have an uh an opportunity with my daughter driving home from school and we're talking about leading from the front. there was an opportunity where giving to a homeless lady was something that came about. We were driving from uh her school. A lady was coming up that was clearly having a hard time and we didn't have time to stop and help her figure out her life. Um so we were able to give her $5. I gave Eva $5. I said hand this to her. Eva probably doesn't even remember this, but I hope she does. And when she gave her $5, the lady just was like, "Right, no thank you, no appreciation of any kind." And guess what? Three and a half years ago before I was saved, that would have made me mad. I would have been upset that I gave somebody money and they didn't appreciate it. But I felt only joy. And the fact that I was able to do that, I was able to give for the Lord and feel joy. I was able to do that in front of my daughter so she could see that we don't as Christians need to give and expect something back immediately, expect some kind of reimbursement. Yeah. And then so in that same vein, I did get to see a sermon by a pastor that's evangelized and planted churches all over in London, New York City, Washington DC, Sacramento, San Francisco, and planting churches out in San Francisco, I'm guessing, is pretty tough. But this guy spoke about some amazing things. And one of the things he spoke about was some of the as a collective as Christians that we make mistakes doing and we kind of fall into two groups. One is isolators and you probably know who you are if you're an isolator. We're going to talk about it. Isolators, they don't like being around people, but not just people. They don't like being around people that don't have their beliefs, that don't believe the same things they do. They don't fall in the groups that they fall into there. They might have differences in political, social, economical, or even spiritual. But if you look at the world right now, there couldn't be any more divide. Spoke about social media. If you're on that, you're seeing the most divided groups of people you've ever seen in in the world. And it's not on it's it's not on accident that that's happening. And the fact of the matter is is we're not called to isolate. Now, I get the idea of wanting to be on your own. My my uh wife is probably guilty of this a little bit. Uh she's the one that wants to be on a farm, right? She wants to be on a plot of land on her own with her own farm animals, right? Maybe making her own jam, >> getting her own community, right? And guess what? If you're those kind of people, I'll be over to grab some chicken eggs. But the Lord did call us not to isolate. Instead, we're actually called to to love our enemies, to pray for our enemies. And not only that, we're called to be amongst them, all different people in all walks of life. And we're called to lead them to Christ. Now the second mistake that we make as Christians is we could be assimilators. Assimilators are unlike isolators. Assimilators are okay with being in the world, associating with people of different [clears throat] backgrounds and different beliefs. They might even have many friends that are secular or don't believe in God at all or maybe have a real harsh view of Christianity in general. I fall I have fallen into this before and the problem with this is instead of speaking the truth around these people for the the the [snorts] sake that they might get judged or they might ruffle feathers or they might even lose a friend they just don't say anything. So simulators, well the the sad part about it is the most unloving thing we can do is not tell the truth repeatedly over and over, especially to our closest ones, even though we know it. So assimilation to the world is losing our influence on the world. And as leaders and Christians, we don't ever assimilate. Instead, we are called to be the light among darkness. Now, walking in the world isn't always about what we do. Sometimes it's about what we don't do. Romans 14:20 speaks about this perfectly. Do not for the sake of food destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it's wrong for every anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. That might be slightly confusing, but it's not when I tell you that Paul is writing to the church of Rome again, and he's speaking to Jews and Gentile believers. And back then, they would slaughter an animal animal or sacrifice an animal, and the pagans would eat that animal. And that was against Christianity at the time. But after Jesus was crucified and rose in three days from the dead and saved us from our sin, he changed all of that and everything that we eat has become clean. But what he's describing there is if you are going to make another stumble by eating the food, don't do it. Don't waver somebody from their walk in the Lord just because you know it's okay and they don't or they might fall out of grace with the Lord. So a real world example of something like this is you might know someone that has an addiction of some sort. You might know somebody that has trouble with alcohol. You wouldn't want to invite them to a bar, right? You wouldn't want to invite them over and see you having drinks or h everyone partying, drinking because that might get them to change their path and stumble. And that's important because as leaders, we try and sacrifice for the greater good for our brothers and sisters. This also just comes to relating to others, seeing where they're coming from, seeing what their struggles are, seeing where they've been. So there's a lot of reasons why someone might stumble, but there's also a lot of reasons why someone might have become separated from God. A lot of people have their own reasons for this. Sometimes it's church hurt. I'm sure you've heard that they've had a bad experience in church with somebody at the church or Pastor Tyler spoke about this a couple weeks ago, which was Christian hypocrisy, right? Or hypocrisy. So they saw some Christian say one thing and do another. Guess what? We're all hypocrites. We're all fallen. We all need a savior. Don't paint a brush over everybody. But seeing that that might be their issue is what our calling is. We're want We're called to relate to where they are and help them go to where they need to be. And Paul did this in an amazing ways in Athens. He spoke on the Aropagus. And the Aropagus in that day was where all the smartest people got on top of this mountain and they basically debated and they spoke about truth. And when he preached on the Aropagus, he was preaching to some of the most knowledgeable, some of the most educated philosophers of all time, especially in that day. But he had to start at the beginning. He couldn't start where Jesus had just been crucified and resurrected. They have no idea what that is. He had to start from the beginning of time, the beginning of our faith. And he was able to build this bridge to introduce the God of the Bible to these philosophers of all time. And because of that, we are called to do the exact same thing. We are called to see our friends, our family members, somebody at the grocery store, whoever it might be to see where they are and go to there with our proclaiming of the gospel. And finally, our third point, your testimony is transformational. Your testimony is transformational. Everybody in this room that is saved has a story, has something that got them to seek the Lord and change and transform their life and pull the Holy Spirit into their heart and be guided by it. You heard Emily and I's story earlier. We are away from God for 15 to 20 years. And even though we found the Lord on the top of this mountain kind of out of nowhere, it's an imag. It's a It's a transformational, it's a wonderful story. We've told it to a lot of people. She's told her friends and family members. I've told mine. And some have changed. Some have accepted Jesus. Some are seeking the Lord. Some have been baptized. And that's an amazing thing. That's what we're called to do. But not everybody will accept Jesus in that moment. We're called to do it anyway. And some of my own personal experience with this type of situation is I do have a daughter. She's 15. I have a son. He's 10. And my son's been through it. He's been through it. He's had a rough time, rough go at it. Ever since he was first born. He had surgery on his brain when he's only a month old. He got a shunt put in for hydrophilis and ever since that time he's had multiple bouts in the hospital. He's been on life support three different times. He has been brought back to life multiple times. Matter of fact, one time he was only two years old and they pulled out the the tube that was giving him breathing to make sure he was able to breathe on his own and his lungs collapsed and he could no he could no longer breathe. And you had nurse after nurse compressing his heart to pump blood through his body while other nurses gave him epinephrine shots, which is adrenaline. Seven of them to be exact, to try and keep his heart going. My daughter has seen most of this. Matter of fact, my daughter could probably be a nurse right now at 15 years old for all the things that she's helped with with my son. He has seizures. consistently and we have to bag him. At least we did. God willing, we don't have to do that anymore, but we had to bag him to just keep his oxygen up. We had to give him rescue meds to get him to stop seizing so he would start breathing again. And my [clears throat] daughter's been part part of all of this. She's been able to help out and see this. But the crazy thing about that is my son, she's seen this nice line of life and death. and she's been able to see that it's a really fine line at a really young age. And the thing is is she hasn't accepted Jesus Christ into her life just yet. And I know I know that she's going to end up having a testimony that's fantastic and people will want to hear her testimony when she accepts Jesus. And bunches I was going to say millions. That'd be amazing. But so many people's lives could be changed by her testimony. And I'm guessing some people in here have had the same story. They know a loved one. They have a friend that hasn't accept Jesus in their life yet. And they just want them to hear it. The Holy Spirit will get to them. You just got to not give up. So that brings us to our key question of the day. As a leader, how can you make Jesus known? Crossurch is all about making Jesus known. If you've been here for longer than a couple weeks, we talk about it all the time. We need to make Jesus known. The first way we can do that is use our gifts. God has given us all specific gifts. Whether it's in your job or in your hobbies, we want to use our gifts. Peter talks about this in chapter uh Peter 4 10- 11. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God's varied grace. We are called to use our gifts. Whether it's making clothing for somebody, being a good giver, being a good steward of of the word, joining a group and speaking to people and being the leader or coming up on stage and doing it. We are called to use our gifts. Second, share your story. Your story is truth and with truth comes trust. If you have a strong story, you want to share it, especially to the people closer to you. They're going to believe it. They're going to accept it more likely than just some random thing that you pull out of the Bible. Don't just yell scripture at people. Tell them the truth. Third, surrender to the spirit. The Holy Spirit, it gives you joy. The Holy Spirit, it builds you from the inside. that it brings love and peace into your heart, but the Holy Spirit speaks through you. The Holy Spirit will give you guidance. And I hope that you are able to hear it when it matters the most. When you're at the barber shop and the Holy Spirit tugs on your heart and says, "Pray for this shop." When the Holy Spirit tugs on you and says, "Pay for this person's meal." Or, "Ask this person if they know Jesus." The Holy Spirit will speak through you. Surrender to him. Number four, leverage the power of prayer. Prayer is the best chance we got to improve our relationship with Jesus. It's like a direct aiming right into the heavens, speaking directly to our Lord will help build your leverage and the power of prayer around the people you know. So that when you're doing this consistently and your confidence builds and you're praying at the table and you're praying with your spouse and you're praying with your friends, they can feel that from you. They can feel the Holy Spirit speaking through you. So leverage the power of prayer. And finally, number five, lead like Jesus. Jesus valued all. He valued every one of his sons and daughters. And he walked around with sinners and the broken. He didn't find the best in the world. He found the broken and the sinners. And he even spoke at their language. He used a standard language, the low-level language of the time, so that he could speak to so many people and they could all hear it and accept the word. Jesus never ran away from people. He never assimilated and he always challenge the status quo to proclaim the gospel. And we're called to do the same. So just to encompass this entire sermon, I'm going to close with Matthew 5 verse 13- 16. So this scripture on salt and light basically encompasses the entire sermon. And verse 13, you are the salt of the earth. But if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet. Verse 14, how are the how are the light of the world or you are the light of the world? A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put under put it under a basket but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven. See, we are called to preserve goodness. We're called to add value and influence society positively. So just like salt that preserves decay or and preserves flavor, we can never allow ourselves to become stagnant in our journey with Jesus Christ. We are called to openly live out our truth, live out the truth of the gospel and never hide away from it. We're always striving to glorify God. And as Pastor Joby Martin once said, "Those with little faith usually need more clarity of outcome than those that are fully trusted in God's word." So if someone says, "We're going in this direction," and someone questions, "Well, what if it goes bad?" I say, "What if it goes good?" Because in what you do is you pray, you guess, and then you just go. And it's on the go that God will direct your steps. And I challenge everybody in here to lead from the front, to take it upon yourself to proclaim the gospel to anyone that you can because if we don't do it, who will? Let's pray. Dear heavenly father, I'm just so grateful to be on stage. They able to preach your word. I just pray that for all of us, we're able to step forward in the word of the Lord. And we're leading. We're able to lead from the front. We're able to lead in your word, the gospel of Jesus Christ, lead in our families, lead around our friends. we're able to proclaim your name and the truth to everyone that we can. I pray this in Jesus's mighty name. Amen. If everyone could stand to continue and work