Today was confirmation and baptism day at our church. Three youth ranging from age 13 to 19 were baptized and confirmed. Confirmation is an ongoing journey of faith. As church pastor and leader, I want to lead the church to instill the passion to be life-long learners as the norm for us.
Biblically speaking, once Nicodemus in the scriptures (John 3) understood what it meant to believe, he did not become an automatic follower of Jesus immediately. He was still resistant to God. For us it is hard to confess that we truly can’t do it by ourselves and that God’s love for us is far greater than anything we are able to offer him. To overcome resistance is to humble ourselves and recognize that we all depend on Jesus for our salvation.
We can be sure we are Christians because of resistance awareness. Resistance awareness is manifested in three ways:
1. Our resistance as part of our human nature
2. Our resistance to God
3. Our resistance to Sin
Allow me to illustrate as I did in today’s message. Every bicyclist has to overcome wind resistance. Plus, bicycle racers are aware of this problem of wind resistance and over the years have developed several techniques for reducing it.
One of these very important techniques is called “drafting.” You see, as the bicyclist moves through the air, he or she produces a turbulent wake behind themselves. It makes vortices. The vortices actually make a low pressure area behind the bicyclist and an area of wind that moves along with the bicyclist.
Now comes the leadership lesson in all this. If you’re following a bicyclist and move into the wind behind the front bicyclist, you can gain an advantage because the low pressure move you forward and the eddies push you forward.
Surprisingly, “drafting” not only helps the bicyclist following the leader, but the lead cyclist gains an advantage as well. In other words, when you are filling in their eddy you improve the front person’s performance as well. So two people who are drafting can put out less energy than two individuals (who are not drafting) would covering the same distance in the same time.
Further, bicyclists group together in a pack knows as the “peloton” or a pace line called an “echelon.” And to be effective drafting, a cyclist needs to be as close as possible to the bicycle in front of them. This is exactly the reason why many professional cyclists get within INCHES of the bicycle in front of them. The shorter the distance between them, the larger the decrease in wind resistance.
Do you see how this relates to your leadership? Do you see how important it is to understand how and why we never graduate from God?
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