A spiritually healthy leader not only abides in Christ but also learns to love others with dignity, build unity, and lead with humility. In Part 2 of this conversation, Dr. Ron Jenson—renowned leadership coach, seminary leader, and author of 24 books including Achieving Authentic Success—unpacks lessons from John 17, exploring how Jesus modeled radical love, trust, and belief in people even when they failed Him. Ron shares how these principles apply in today’s boardrooms and families, why self-leadership is the key to good leadership, and how embracing both our worth and our flaws shapes authentic influence. This continuation challenges leaders to ground their success in character, unity, and love.
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The Spiritually Healthy Leader, Pt. 2 Feat. Dr. Ron Jenson
Unlocking Authentic Success: Dr. Ron Jenson On Spiritually Healthy Leadership
We’re welcoming back again, Dr. Ron Jenson. We couldn’t stop talking the first time. Those of you who were there the first time know that Ron spent seven months in a 20-foot motorhome, logging 20,000 miles and talking to 350 leaders. The question he asked each one was, “At the end of your life, how will you know you’ve been successful?” That’s a question we all want the answer to, so we asked Ron to come back. He’s a coach to leaders around the world. He has led a seminary. He chairs a leadership training organization. He has been my friend for over twenty years. He wrote the book Achieving Authentic Success, which is endorsed by Zig Ziglar, Elizabeth Dole, and Dr. Ken Blanchard. See you in the studio.
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We’re back at the Convene Studios in Southern California. Ron Jenson and I couldn’t stop talking, so I asked him to stick around and spend some more time talking about spiritually healthy leaders. We want to talk to you a little bit about how spiritually healthy leaders love people. Ron, thanks for sticking around on this rainy Southern California day.
My joy.
We were talking about John 17 the last time we were together, and this notion of Jesus being transparent with the disciples. It was a pretty difficult moment, maybe one of the most difficult moments of His life. He knew He was about to be killed. He knew that He wanted to pray. The disciples fell asleep. Nobody prayed with Him. He said, “Can’t you even pray with me?” Let’s push pause on that scene, and then flash forward to the next scene, which you wanted to talk about, where Jesus came back. He had an opportunity, if He’s like many CEOs, to give the lecture about what’s not going well, what you’re not doing right, who you are not becoming, and what you could be if you worked harder.
The Bible is very clear. We’re supposed to love people. I spent twenty years with ServiceMaster, where we were masters of service, serving the master. You knew our president, Bill Pollard. He would say, “To help people develop was one of the objectives of the firm.” We had 90,000 workers that we loved to death because we thought they had dignity, value, and worth. What does Jesus have to say about spiritually healthy leaders loving people?
A whole lot, as you understand, but in the John 17 model, back to where He says, He had a threefold priority. He said, “First, Father, I pray. I don’t pray for the world.” His last prayer is interesting. “Father, I don’t pray for the lost world. I pray for those who’ve given Me out of the world and those who will believe in Me through their word,” which is us. He said, “First, I pray you will sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth.”
The whole point is, He said, “Lord, make them not only holy, but use for their intended purpose because I sanctify my cup of coffee when I drink from it.” When we’re used for God’s intended purpose, discovering that and living that out is a big thing. That’s his first priority. Secondly, He says, “Father, I pray that, as you’ve loved me and I’ve loved you, they will love one another, that they will be perfected in unity.” The second radical thing is that there would be a unity among believers for sure in the body.
When we're used for God's intended purpose, discovering that and living that out is a big thing. Share on XThirdly, He said, “So that with the result that the world would know you’ve sent Me.” As Francis Schaeffer said, the greatest evangelistic tool we have, the greatest apologetic in the world, is radical love that believers have for one another. He’s addressing believers in this case. Scripture is quite clear throughout that God wants us to be loving Him first and then loving others the way we love ourselves. That’s a great commandment.
This idea of loving people to the extent that we can create a unity of spirit is what makes teams work. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of events with corporations and leadership training with the C-level folks, and then all the way down, up, and through. A lot of it is around what it means to have this unity in even a very secular environment. There are certain skills and abilities that people need to have to do that. As believers and as leaders in businesses, the key is that we live that out and we love the way God wants us to love. This could all be personified.
I begin with the end in mind. By Jesus, in the story, it was at the end of His life. He had died. He had been crucified. He had been resurrected. Before He ascended, He showed up to groups or individuals, maybe 10 to 15 different ones. One of the groups was the followers. Here you are, a CEO or a director in a company, a leader in a company, and your people dealt with you or responded to you the way the disciples responded to Jesus. Think about it. Peter denied Him. Thomas was always doubting. They ran because they thought He was going to usher in the kingdom. Instead, He died. People were chasing them.
Empowering The “Losers”: Jesus’ Great Commission For All
Imagine if you’re that CEO who could come back to life for a minute and have one last moment with all the people that you used to work with, then you’re going to go again.
Jesus shows up to them. I ask people this all around the world, “What would you have wanted to say?” I know what I would want to say.
This idea of loving people to the extent that we can create a unity of spirit is what makes teams work. Share on XYou and I would want to say the same.
I would want to walk in and say, “Yes, it’s Jesus. I’m here for one reason and one reason only. That’s to tell you, you are all out. You’re out of the program. You’re off the team. I’m sick and tired of you. Peter, for goodness’ sake. You denied me three times in front of a little girl. What a chicken. You’re a coward. Thomas, stop laughing. You’ve been doubting from day one. You’re a negative guy, Thomas. You’re a pessimist. You always brought the team down. I’m tired of you, Thomas. I’m done with you, Peter. You’re all out.”
That’s what I would have wanted to say. On the same occasion, it’s recorded in Matthew 28:18-20 what Jesus said. That was what’s called the Great Commission. He said to the same group, same occasion, “All authority in heaven and earth is given to Me. I give it to you. Go on to the world and make disciples of all nations.” Jesus said the history of the world is in your hands to a group of losers, fishermen, doctors, tax collectors, backbiters, cowards, and traitors.” He had this incredible ability. I believe in them. He knew the Holy Spirit would come and give them power. They were distraught, broken people. Everything in my flesh would have wanted to ream them out. He didn’t do that. He built them up.
The job, as you aptly pointed out, that He gave them is the biggest in the entire world. Nothing could be bigger than, “Take this stuff that I told you and tell the whole world.” It’s not, “Would you let everybody in your neighborhood know?” It’s “tell the whole world.” On their side, they knew that they were regular people. Hypothetically, I don’t really know. They might have slipped back into this, “I’m just a regular guy.” Jesus came and said, “You are not.”
It reminds me. My dad had an opportunity to be with Dr. Bill Bright, Campus Crusade for Chris, now Cru. There was this outdoor amphitheater at Arrowhead Springs. My dad is at the back of the amphitheater. There’s a training event. For all I know, you could have been in the amphitheater at the time. You could have been leading the training. My dad said, “This is an amazing group of leaders. What a powerful group of leaders at your training.” Bill looked at my dad and said, “They’re just regular people empowered by the Holy Spirit.”
I had three great mentors in my life. I had a number of people who poured into it, but three great mentors. One was Art DeMoss. You might know the DeMoss Foundation name. I was in Philadelphia working in a church, and Art embraced me. Another one was Ted Engstrom, a great leader, and then Bill Bright. They were mentors and very close friends. They were in different seasons of my life. The commonality among all three of them was that they believed in me.
I can’t underscore enough the power of the leader. This is why the spiritual health of a leader is so critical, because there’s a capacity, a function, a position, prestige, and power that God has given a leader that’s unique. The power they have is the way they see people, communicate with people, and act toward people. I like to say what you see is what they’ll be because people will look through the eyes of a leader. If they see someone who believes in them the way Jesus did, the failures, those people can go on and do great things.
People will look through the eyes of a leader. If they see someone who believes in them the way Jesus did, those people can go and do great things. Share on XOne of our biggest problems our people have is this. All of us have this. Leaders have this all the time. We shoot too low. We don’t have a heavy, strong enough view of who we are, particularly as Christians in Christ. I love Ephesians 2. It says in one translation, “We’re God’s masterpieces created in Christ Jesus for good works that would walk in.” I love that.
Our lives ought to be a work of art, a symphony. It ought to be so winsome, so attractive, so compelling, so abundant, and so fruitful that people go, “Whatever you have, I want.” That’s what a leader can do in the business if he doesn’t or she doesn’t get too off target on heads down, crunching the numbers, meeting the deadlines, or getting ready for the board in all of that. It’s how they relate to their people that has an incredibly profound impact and incredible return on investment.
Lessons From Jesus: Cultivating Unity And Trust In Leadership
What would you say would be some other lessons we could glean from Jesus as it relates to spiritually healthy leaders and their view of people? Other things that He modeled, that He taught, any thoughts?
I’ve thought about this particular one a whole lot. As a result, Paul, Peter, James, and others fleshed all this out in the epistles. In my study, in the Bible, there are 120-some “one another.” It says we’re to build up one another, pray for one another, encourage one another, support one another, admonish one another, and sometimes kick one another out of the church if people get off target. We have this broad range of things we’re supposed to do that are part of loving people and building them up. I spoke one time at a church. I wanted to show people how important this was. I actually preached all 100-plus.
How long did that take?
I don’t know, but they didn’t have me back. I figured that probably wasn’t a good idea. I narrowed it down to five. Jesus modeled these really well.
It is the summation of the 120 “one another” in the Bible.
I’d better start building categories because people can only chew on so much before they choke. I call it unity. I’m dyslexic and ADD. I have to have memory tools, but it’s unity. How do we build unity in relationships? We uplift one another. Jesus did that. We need one another. We intimately relate to one another. We trust one another, and then we yield to one another. It’s the model. I’ll hit one, and then we can see if we want to talk about them.
We uplift. We need. We intimately relate.
We trust, and then we yield to one another.
Take that into the C-suite for us, for the people tuning in who are leaders. Some of those words, they say, “That’s great for my family. That’s great for my marriage. That’s great for my friends. That’s not great for work because work is where you get things done.”
You do. I have taught this again in multiple companies all over the world. It really does work in companies because every company wants a strong team. Team building is a big thing in a company. How do we build a strong team? We basically follow this process. These are universal principles in my book that work pretty much everywhere. In the C-suite, if I’m not building people and building team unity, you can’t get anywhere. I love what George Bernard Shaw said.
He said, “In the right key, you can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing. The only delicate part of life is establishing the key.” Whether it’s my wife, my kids, my friends, my co-workers, or my employees, if we’re out of key or if they’re out of key in relationships, people do all sorts of imaginations. They’ll jump all around. They’ll do all sorts of things. There’ll never be a level of intimacy or trust without being in the right key. Covey made the point well in The Speed of Trust.
How do we get things done more quickly, more effectively, and more efficiently? We trust. You and I can say, “I’ll do this then. I can because I know you and trust you.” You don’t need all this imagination around it. You don’t need all these structures to control it because your word is your bond. Trust becomes a very powerful way. You don’t get trust, as Covey said in his first book, The 7 Habits, without investing in people’s emotional bank account. I can’t withdraw from the bank account. I was communicating with my virtual assistant, who is full-time and in the Philippines.
I was trying to get her to do some things and to try to move pretty quickly. This was all online. I could be pretty demanding pretty quickly because I tend to apply these principles routinely with her. I’m constantly investing in her emotional bank account by uplifting her, by interdependence, and so on. I could be demanding. My point is, this is how you actually get traction. You want to get a lot done? We’ve heard, “Attract more bees with honey than with vinegar and so on.” There’s real truth in that. It’s not a soft, gooey thing.
Back to a discussion you and I had a little earlier about Paul again. Think about him where he said, “We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.” There’s power in that relationship so long as it’s not just that. As a leader, my contention is to always be a critical thinker. That’s what we’re by and large good at. We have to be, but also always have a positive, uplifting attitude. What happens is that critical thinkers can let that turn into a critical attitude, or it can come across as a critical attitude. People’s spirits are crushed. They lose confidence. They don’t see themselves as valuable. They’re not going to be productive.
On the other hand, with a positive attitude, people can become sloppy thinkers. That’s no good. The worst scenario is to be a sloppy thinker with a crummy attitude. What we want to be is always a critical thinker, but with a positive attitude. My experience with wisdom, generally, but biblically, is that wisdom is often like two rails of a train track. If that train stays on the train track, it will get traction. If one of the tracks decides to go in an opposite direction from the other, the train is going to crash.
What we want to be is always a critical thinker, but with a positive attitude. Share on XIf the train says, “I like to go out there and run around the meadow,” it’s not going to work. It needs to be on the train tracks. A lot of wisdom is constantly counterbalancing being tough and being tender. Speaking the truth, scripture says, do it in love and with respect. That’s how we deal with conflict, always truthful, always respectful. This is how we deal with this relationship. We build up people, but we also hold them accountable and deal with them assertively, like a nursing mother and a tough father.
Beyond The Sunday Service: Embracing Full-Time Ministry In Everyday Life
I was going to ask you to speak to that leader who says, “The way it works around here is I hear from God. I tell people what He said, and they go do stuff for me.” Maybe that’s a little wrong because it seems like God speaks to everybody. Any thoughts for that person?
One of the bigger problems we have in the Christian community is that we say our pastor speaks to God. He tells us what to do, and then we do that. What has been created is a monumental sense of lack of empowerment and inability to move forward because, in the Reformation, Luther talks about the priesthood of all believers. There is this dualism he was fighting. Here is a secular. Here is a sacred. The view is like, “We do Sunday, and then we do Monday through Friday.” They’re totally separated.
These people are in ministry. I’ll earn money. I’ll give it to ministries, people who come who need support, or mission groups. I’ll volunteer perhaps for some things. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to get involved once I retire and be involved in work and ministry. That is not biblical. It’s not. The biblical process is that all of us are in full-time ministry. Scripture makes no distinction. It says the body is knit together by that which every joint and ligament supplies. We all have different gifts and abilities. Scripture even says the mouth is less significant in a sense than the spleen or the heart.
If I had to put my hand here or look at a hand or a heart, I would say I’d rather have a hand than a heart as far as bare looks, because it’s gross. I could get by without my hand. I can’t get by without my heart. Scripture says we’re all needed, but oftentimes, those who are not noticed are more critical to the process than others. These principles that are biblical for believers have great applicability, though, to team building in relationships. It is communicating to everybody. You’re critical.
Self-Leadership: The Foundation Of A Spiritually Healthy Leader
Could it be summarized then, spiritually healthy leaders clearly love people and understand that people are created in the image of God, but spiritually healthy leaders also understand who they are in Christ? They understand their place. I was talking to Lord Brian Griffiths one time. He said I could call him Brian. He helped privatize the UK for Maggie Thatcher. How is that for your resume?
I was at a time with him and about 30 other people who were pretty important. I wondered what the heck I was doing in the room. There was an opportunity for questions. I thought I would ask him a really tough question. I said, “Lord Griffiths, what do you think the most important thing for a Christian CEO to understand might be?” He said, “It’s very simple. Once you understand the theology of work, everything else falls into place.”
I’m not sure that I agree that it’s the theology of work, but maybe the theology of who I am in Christ. Once I know who I am in Christ, priest, etc., then I know that God most likely did not create earth and humans to say that the only thing that matters is when you go to church on Sunday for an hour. The other 40, 50, or 60 hours a week that you work are completely meaningless. The only thing they are good for is to accumulate money to write checks to missions. Maybe speak to that.
We’ve got our mindset all messed up on that. We segment what it means to live the life. Part of being spiritually healthy is realizing that every moment of my life is intended to be spiritually healthy. That means I’m abiding in the vine in Christ. I’m walking in His spirit. His word is abiding in me. Colossians 3 says that the word of Christ dwells in you richly. I’m letting the word be transformative in my life. That means I live with instant obedience to the initial promptings of the Holy Spirit.
Part of being spiritually healthy is realizing that every moment of our life is intended to be spiritually healthy. Share on XI’m living on the edge of my seat, saying, “Lord, my day-to-day is to be an adventure. I’m here to live for you, to glorify you. I want you to guide me. I’m going to be talking to you throughout the day. I’m going to be interacting with you. Whatever I do, I’m going to do it out of the love of God.” It’s like Brother Lawrence said, and one of our favorite little books, The Practice of the Presence of God, that had a deep impact on my life early.
Here is a dude who was at a monastery, but he couldn’t reach the level of being one of the brothers there. He used to work on shoes, and then he got an advancement to work pots and pans sixteen hours a day. He talks in his little book, “My three hours of prayer in the morning with the brothers is no more worshipful or meaningful or joyful to me than my sixteen hours of washing pots and pans.” He was doing business work. He’s doing a trade.
He said, “Whatever I do, I do it for the love of God. Everything I do, I’m constantly thankful and loving.” I pick up a piece of paper. I do this and say, “God, thank you for the honor of picking up that paper.” It’s that consciousness that makes every moment of every day a process of being rightly connected to God. It results in the capacity to rightly love people and build them up.
Your Work Matters: Bridging Faith And The Marketplace
Many Christian leaders can’t bridge the gap between hearing what you say, which is that their work matters to God, to steal Hendrick’s book title from the ’80s. They are comparing it to a missionary’s work for God. They say China, Bible translation, Africa, digging water wells, South America, or helping sex trafficked women is more spiritual than creating a spreadsheet, creating a marketing plan, making a table, or anything a business person does.
How can we get through to them that your work actually does matter to God, and what you do on Sunday is not more important? Convene, in its early days, said as a tagline, “Turning the Sunday stuff into Monday stuff for better lives and better businesses.” Maybe speak to the people who still are saying, “When I sell my business, I’ll finally be a missionary.”
My word is, if you’re a leader, God has given you an incredible position, stature, influence, and probably affluence. You’ve got an unbelievable opportunity to leverage that position, a stewardship for the kingdom. As scripture says, “To whom much is given, much is required.” When God blesses us with that, it’s not always the smartest thing or the wisest thing to say, “I’m going to go into full-time ministry because you’ve got to realize you’re in full-time ministry.
All of life is full-time ministry. It’s that we get our paychecks from different places for profit and nonprofit. All life is spiritual. It’s not secular and spiritual. It’s not good or bad. Is my motive right? Is my heart right? Am I rightly related to God? Think about it. There are three mandates in scripture, so I can live out the three mandates. One is a great commandment. Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Your neighbor is yourself. I can do that anywhere, anytime. I should, and I need to. I must. The great commandment is to make disciples of all nations, go into the world, preach the gospel, and make disciples of all nations.
All of life is full-time ministry. It's just that we get our paychecks from different places for profit and nonprofit. Share on XWe have opportunities to touch people in our workforce by bringing in the right kind of relationship, the right kind of model, even training and development that helps people around biblically consistent stuff, and even get pre-discipled in their faith without crossing the line religiously. Thirdly, it’s a cultural mandate that says we’re to subdue the earth. We’re to control the earth. We’re to manage what God’s given us in the earth. That includes the workplace and everything else. When you’re a leader in the marketplace, business, and corporate world, you’ve got all opportunities to do all three of those in one form or another every day.
You need to see that that’s your primary mission field, but your second ring of mission field is your workplace, where you have great influence. Be very prayerful, faith-oriented, dependent upon God, wise, and intentional about how you can live out those three mandates right where you are. That’ll include making a bunch of money, giving it away, and investing in kingdom work where other people don’t have funds. They need funds. God wants you to be a steward of your time, your talent, and your treasure.
All three of those are critical. We were talking about this a little bit earlier. We’re all going to stand before the Lord one day at the Bema Seat, the reward seat. If we’re believers, we’re going to be eternally with the Lord. Paul said in 2 Corinthians that he was looking at his life. His motivations were twofold. He said, “Having the love of Christ within me, I admonish men. I build into men and women. I impact people because of the love of Christ, the love He felt.”
A little bit later, in chapter five, he said, “Having the fear of God within me, I admonish men because we shall all appear at the judgment seat of Christ that we give account for what we’ve done in the body, whether good or bad motive-wise.” The point is, God places us where He places us. When He’s given us the honor to be in a position of influence and impact, we shouldn’t take that lightly. He may call us all other directions. While we’re there, we ought to maximize that opportunity and say, “God, use me to love You and to love the people here. To do that, I’ve got to be spiritually centered. I’ve got to be sure I’m rightly related to God. Otherwise, I don’t have the power, the wisdom, and the insight to do what I need to do.”
Spiritually healthy leaders see people as created in the image of God. They abide in Christ. They pursue godly character. As we’ve talked about, they love people. Any other thoughts about spiritually healthy leaders and some of their practices or disciplines?
I would say they are also rightly related to themselves. There are a lot of elements about that. I’ve talked about it before. When the forefathers of America started the country, they kept using this phrase in literature. They said, “Good government is based on self-government.” They hated the idea of a bloated bureaucracy, of all these external controls you have to bring in to government or Sarbanes-Oxley into the business world because people couldn’t be trusted. They said, “We want to minimize external government. We want people to self-govern.”
Back then, self-government was natural because the people who first settled in America came over from Europe. They’re running away from religious persecution. They were, by and large, godly people. They had a Judeo-Christian ethic at the very least. They knew they needed to be honest. They needed to treat people with dignity. They needed to have humility, but also a healthy sense of who they were. They had a sense of vocation. Their life was calling. They understood their theology of work was one of calling and had a high view of it. They understood having a great attitude, not quitting, and perseverance. A lot of things we’ve lost.
We don’t say we’re called to be a cobbler anymore, as the saying was back then.
No. We’re called into “ministry.”
We’re not called to own an XYZ franchise.
That’s right. Their whole thing was self-government. Good government is based on self-government. My contention is that good leadership is based on self-leadership. Part of this is for people to learn how to self-lead, which means being sure they have all the right straight lines. C.S. Lewis once said, “You’ll never know lines crooked unless you have a straight line to put next to it.” One of my deep concerns about the culture is that a lot of the Millennials are coming into the culture without a sense of straight lines, those absolute non-negotiable lines that allow them to self-govern around that. I mean this in the best possible framework, but we need, in a sense, to reparent a culture because these kids are growing up in broken homes and educational systems that didn’t work.
They’re looking for that. That’s why I’m so keen on the Millennials and impacting them. The core of self-government almost starts with this whole idea of a right view of myself. As a leader, I need to balance two things. One is that I need to realize how significant my life is. That may sound funny because if we’re a leader, we go, “I’m an important person.” I don’t think we think high enough. The Bible says our life is a masterpiece. God created us to be holistically a masterpiece. We’re created in the image of God. As a gospel singer said, “God didn’t create any junk.” We’re of an unbelievable worth.
We’re a lot better than we think we are, even if we’re arrogant. We’re a lot better than we think we are in the holistic sense. We have much more potential than we think we have, on the one hand. On the other hand, leaders can often have trouble with the other side of that. That is, we’re loaded with soft spots. As Christians, we’d say all of sin that comes short of the glory of God. That means two things. One, it means that I realize I can’t do it by myself, so it gets me back to my spiritual roots. I have to depend upon God. That’s hard for a leader to admit because we’re used to doing stuff by ourselves. We make things happen.
Humility & Dependence: Balancing Strength And Soft Spots In Leadership
You actually did a talk one time in a church that I was at. I was taking notes. I can’t remember the passage, but it was a right view towards God by something.
It was dealing with stress, right view toward God, and right view of stress.
Was it Philippians?
Yes, Philippians 4. I built a whole course around that. In this case, this right view towards self is the balance. The two train tracks are, “I am special, I am unique, and I am significant.” In a healthy sense, we ought to buy that and believe it because we are.
It is who we are in Christ.
It is with our gifts, abilities, and passions that God has given us, and which we can use for good or not. The second side, though, is that we’re loaded with soft spots. Part of that is that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. That’s a biblical verse for this. I can do all things. I am special. The world has to reckon with me.
It is with our gifts, abilities, and passions that God has given us, and which we can use for good or not. Share on XIt doesn’t say I can do all things myself.
Yes, but it’s through Christ who strengthens me. The implication there is that I’m dependent upon God, know how to walk with Him intimately, and live abiding in the vine as we’ve talked about. The other implication is that I live with humility. I like to ask people a humility test. I said, “Think of the last time you were criticized by someone. How did you respond?” I remember some years ago when I was running the seminary graduate school of theology back in the ’80s. I started young, so I was a young leader, but I had a great platform.
One day, one of the students who was actually older than me asked if first-year students could go out for lunch. We did. Over lunch, he said, “I want you to know. You are a great man. You are a fabulous leader and communicator. You’re a real role model to me.” I said, “Thank you.” I picked up the tab. He said, “There are two more things that are personal. Can I tell you?” I said, “Sure,” because I knew what he was going to say. “Of all the great leaders who’ve ever lived, Billy Graham, Bill Bryant, Martin Luther, Paul, Ron Jenson.”
You’re in there.
I thought I’d be right in there. He didn’t say that. He said, “There are two things in your life. I don’t think you’re aware of that. I believe they impede your walk with God in your leadership.” My first thought was, “Who do you think you are? You punk.” That was what I thought.
Your first thought was, “Your part of lunch was $10.”
I was angrier than that. My second thought was that I was leaning forward to give him the benefit of my insight. It was as though the hand of God grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, shook me a couple of times, and said, “Jenson, why are you so surprised someone should see something in your life with which you need to deal? Imagine if he saw everything.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. I said, “How arrogant it is to be offended by someone pointing out something in my life with which I need to deal.” God said, “Ron, you are so much worse than this. No one knows how bad you are. Not even you. I do.” Your righteousness is like filthy rags to me, brother. That’s what the scripture says.
I thought, “What an arrogant guy.” I leaned forward, and I said two things to him. First, I said, “Thank you for telling me that and for being willing to risk what I could do to you to point that out.” Number two, I said, “I’m going to take that under advisement and get some feedback on it, because those both are new things to me.” One had to do with how I was training my children, which was a lot of fun. The other one had to do with something at school. I also said, “I’m going to process that and try to get some feedback. What I want you to know is I’m a whole lot worse than that.” I’ve learned over the years that when people criticize me for things, and as leaders, we get criticized all the time, my response typically these days is, “That’s nothing.”
If you knew me the way I know me, it would really be embarrassing. If we had every thought, every motive, every word, or every action put up on a screen in here, we’d all be out of here. We’re all flawed people. If I’m going to be a spiritually healthy leader, I’ve got to properly view myself with that healthy pride, healthy humility, strengths, significance, and soft spots. There are two rails of a train track. I can’t bounce back and forth. I need to keep those intentions all the time. Every day, I need to not let Satan kick me or get me down and say, “You’re a loser. You’re failing. Look what you did,” nor can I go around like I’m arrogant, haughty, or self-absorbed because it’s easy to do that as a leader.
Thanks for being with us. We’ve been with Dr. Ron Jenson talking about spiritually healthy leaders. Spiritually healthy leaders have the right view towards God. They have the right view towards self. They have the right view of others. Thanks for joining us at the Convene Studios in Southern California. We’ll look forward to seeing you next time.
