Trick Question

It was once asked of me by a good friend, "how competent spiritually do you have to be to adequately lead others?"

Ah, a trick question, I could tell from the start. I knew that human adequacy had little to do with the answer, yet still, I wasn't quite sure how to answer. You see, the problem is that despite our deepest understandings of the Scriptures and our highest aspirations to godliness, we'll never actually attain adequacy, spiritually speaking.

I was reading today in 2 Corinthians, 3:5-6 to be exact, which says, "Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

Each summer I look forward to a time of refreshment, of perspective on life and what lies ahead. I expect a word from the Lord that will focus my heart and strengthen me to serve and lead the other nine months of the year, something that will rebuild my confidence in myself and my abilities to provide sound wisdom and guidance and direct someone to jump off a cliff. And oddly, I came to an understanding recently that the time of refreshment is nearing an end, and if anything, I feel less adequate to lead young men into another season.

I suppose somewhere in my thought process I had an idea that getting married and being responsible for the spiritual, as well as physical, well-being of my wife would pave the way to greater things on the road to discipling my guys. But the truth is that marriage just confirms that each day is a battle to be won or lost, and the next day you start all over again, making mistakes and learning from them.

What I'm finding out is that human competency is probably more of an enemy that a helper in the pursuit of adequacy, because the more competent or adequate I feel to lead, the less likely I am to keep up my guard and depend on the Spirit's working. In our attempts to attain adequacy through our own means we fail to recognize that we're taking the dead end path of the Law.

And that's easy to see from 2 Corinthians 3:5-6, but what's difficult to understand and keep focus on daily is what it means to live by the Spirit. Until we understand what that means and live it out consistently, our feelings of adequacy are nothing more than paper houses.