Monday, 30 September 2019

The Power of Visionary Leadership

Monday Motivation: The Power of Visionary Leadership

A vision is the revelation of the picture of fulfilled purpose shown to guide through set pathways to the end where the purpose is fulfilled.

Visions can be personal or corporate. Each of us was born for a purpose. The purpose is what we are to pursue on the earth. It is what constitutes work for us as individuals. The purpose for which we live forms the vision we see and run towards to fulfil.

The other form of vision is the corporate vision. This is the kind of vision that is employed when more than one personal visions have to be fulfilled. It is such that when it is fulfilled, it provides a better platform for individuals to fulfil their personal visions more easily.

The corporate vision is what leaders engage to lead their people to their preferred world where they can maximize their potentials and make for themselves a life commensurate to their possibilities. With a corporate vision, a leader motivates his or her team to employ their resources to pursue their utmost possibilities.

This is what visionary leaders do. Leadership is essentially an influence backed with authority derived from the people. It is for the people and they empower the leader through their submissions and obedience to leadership authority towards their own freedom, prosperity and well-being.

Just as a personal vision instills definitive discipline in the person to get it fulfilled, a corporate vision also discovers what's good and bad for the fulfillment of the vision, and from that, necessary disciplines evolve to form the discipline required in both the leader and the people for the achievement of the vision.

Such corporate visions make responsible leadership and voluntary following the norm. One of the disciplines that corporate vision instils is focus. The focus is shifted from the pursuit of personal visions to that of the corporate vision from where personal visions are naturally fulfilled.

The irony however is that, we may have a corporate vision without a visionary leader, or a visionary leader without a proper corporate vision that captures the possibilities available for a people group. In which case the visionary leader must first discover a vision for his or her people to pursue before lifting a finger, otherwise, he or she ceases to be a leader but a manager.

There is a difference between a leader and a manager. A manager will maintain anything to produce to a good percentage of its capacity even if what it produces has no significant impact or effect.

But a leader seeks to break through frontiers via forceful momentum to conquer new grounds beyond maintaining conquered territories. There is maintenance with managers but there's forward movement with leaders.

The worst possibilities are in not having a visionary leader, not even having the ideologies that make them, and/or not having a corporate vision, but lots of personal visions by which those in positions manage the affairs of a corporate body to its detriments. They enslave the people and yoke them to produce for their own lusts.

With a personal vision or none at all, a leader manages corporate resources for personal fulfillment without discipline. He measures progress only by the amount of his or her desires that are satisfied and not by the possibilities achieved for the people through corporate resources.

If you are a leader, are you a visionary leader taking his or her people from where you met them to their preferred possibilities?

If you are a follower, are you sure you're following a visionary leader taking you to a place of potential realization and preferred preferences? You may need to ask your leader what the overall vision might be!

Good morning to you as we celebrate Nigeria's independence tomorrow!

Wednesday, 25 September 2019

Man of God, Man of Grace

Ministry Wednesday: Man of God, Man of Grace

2 Corinthians 4
7. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.

A veteran in ministry once said, 'Grace is God's contribution to man's success', I didn't need to write it down, it got stuck to my mind and it has helped me to live when the natural outcome should have been to die.

It's good to understand early that the man of God is only a man of grace.

2 Corinthians 3
5. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;
6. Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

It is good to know early that a minister is made and not born. It is also good to know that he isn't self made, but made by the power of God. It is good to know how it works in order to be able to key into it early.

If that's not the case, there will be unnecessary chase after vanity that don't count in the long run. Only outcomes of grace will escape the test of fire.

We know it isn't of him who wills or of him who runs but it of him who shows mercy...Romans 9

We also know that Paul can only plant, and Apollos can only water, only God gives the increase...1Corinthians 3

Even at that, the planting and the watering must be by grace, otherwise, the increase that comes won't be of God and would be a waste.

Since we also know from how Apostle Paul put it, that I am what I am by God's grace, and the grace which was bestowed was not in vain, but I laboured abundantly more than all the rest, yet not I but the grace that was with me...1Corinthians 15:10&11

We see grace in our gifts and  potentials, we see grace in our opportunities and platforms, we see grace in people responding to our labours, we see grace in the overall outcome of our ministries in people’s lives.

When grace is lacking, we may be tempted to run our own things for the result we expect. It's a temptation that should be resisted.

The opposite of grace is divine resistance. God resists the proud but gives more grace to the humble. When you sense divine resistance, know that you need to surrender in certain areas.

Humility is discovering that our strength and weaknesses are nothing in our quest for achieving God's demands and requirements, but knowing that He alone can make us who He wants us to be.

It is coming to terms with the fact that without Christ we can do nothing, while we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us. John 15 & Philippians 4. We can only perform and produce to any meaningful way in His judgment, if He is the one who strengthened us to do such.

We connect to grace through humility, dependence and obedience. Dependence is faith. Faith in God is the assurance we have in Him in perfecting His strength in our weaknesses 2Cor 12:9. It has to be of faith, that it might be of grace, if the promise must be sure to all of us. Romans 4:16. It takes faith to have an entrance and access to stand in grace...Romans 5:2, Ephesians 2:8. Faith here means total dependence on God...and not on self. It gives access to divine resources of power and wisdom.

Obedience is the final of the trio. Grace works in our obedience. God always prepares resources for whatever He has commanded. To build a tower, He makes sure He makes ready all that will be needed to complete the project before starting at all. The essence of His power is to do His will. His will comes to us by divine guidance and leading of the Holy Spirit. If we obey to do what He ordained, we would walk on water if the need be. This is grace. Whatever He asked for is already provided for, no matter how impossible it may look. If we obey to go, His vehicular convoy will be waiting! If we don't, we'll never know!

Omnipotence is available to the man of grace. The incredible can happen for him who humbles himself before God to know that he does not have what it takes, but who will depend on God's provisions through His word and obey every command to work with diligence within the gifts, the opportunities, and the platforms God has provided without compromise of God's project.

This is how the man of God becomes the man of grace. If He sends, know that He will be the one to also do. Faithful is He who has called us who also will do it 1Thessonians 5:24. If He calls, then we should not be afraid to step on water, His power will always sustain...

Shalom! Hope it makes sense to you. Have a great day!
Photo credit: StockSnap/Pixabay 

Monday, 23 September 2019

The Grace we'll Always Need

Monday Motivation: The Grace we'll always Need

The world seems to run on human capacities. We have potential and abilities with which we have developed the human race to where it is. We are well equipped to survive and thrive within the wonderful and the peculiar conditions of planet earth. The so called coincidences that made these happen, with nothing like it discovered yet anywhere in the universe, is a fundamental grace we received from the Creator, our God.

In personal success, we also depend so largely on our abilities to make things happen. Man was made to make things happen on the earth, equipped to recreate the world. In the process, he achieves personal success and greatness which he may attribute just to his personal prowess.

But man does not just have only strengths. He is also equipped with his limitations and weaknesses even if we often don't want to acknowledge the fact that we are grossly weak.

Our weaknesses are limiting factors to our successes. They either make the journey to accomplishments difficult and torturous or they wait till they destroy what we have achieved as success.

Most weaknesses are seen in little mistakes and misjudgement that have elastic effect on our efforts and achievements. We make choices that we feel are right, only for those choices to turn things around badly. Or we are presented with impossible situations beyond our capabilities, wisdom and sometimes contrary to our convictions and values.
Things that make us weak and helpless. These things are always there. None of us can claim all the strength we'll always need.

Meanwhile, sincerely speaking, not all successes are results of our strength, capacities and wisdom. In fact, some breakthroughs are results of mistakes and errors from our weaknesses, which instead of creating debilitating outcomes, produced wonderful things we didn't envisage.

This tells us that we may not always suffer the results of our weaknesses and inadequacies. This is what I call the grace factor. The God factor.

I believe those weaknesses are essentially positioned to make us see that we are not omnipotent. They aren't put there to limit our influence and ability to succeed really. They are the coded messages and footprints of our Creator, sent to us to know that He is there, that we didn't create ourselves and that we'll always need Him even in small, seemingly insignificant things.

God created us to thrive here. Our weaknesses aren't to stop that. He had equipped us to do just that, but He didn't make us omnipotent. We have serious weaknesses and limitations so that in our successes we won't forget that it isn't all about us, but the permissions given and granted by the One who put us all here.

Many times, we are simply not left to the outcomes of our weaknesses, if we consider how it is easier to stop things from working or to destroy them than to move them forward or to create things. A house built for years can be destroyed in a day, a reputation worked for throughout a lifetime can be destroyed in one day. A business conglomerate can get into trouble and be lost within a few hours. It is easier to destroy than to build.

Yet, we build with obvious weaknesses that can mess up years of work within a very short period... Why? Why didn't our weaknesses bring these successes down? We don't succeed because we don't have flaws and errors, we don't accomplish because we are omnipotent. We do because we have grace from the Omnipotent. His own strength is made perfect in our weaknesses by design, so the credit can't be ours but His.

We don't fail too because we are weak. Multi-talented people too suffer failure, many are never rich, many don't have the outcomes their strengths promised. These things should make us think and to seek God's grace more and more. It seems that factor is major in what makes us who we should essentially become according to original design.

When we remember our weaknesses, let's also remember that we were so created so that we can continuously depend on the Creator for the missing part in order to perfect our successes.

Let's seek His grace, it'll make a whole lot of difference.

Good morning and happy new week!

Photo Credit: Stevepb/Pixabay

Wednesday, 18 September 2019

The Vine and His Branches

Ministry Wednesday: The Vine and His Branches.


Jesus Christ said, without Him we can do nothing, John 15. Whatever we do without Him, no matter how gigantic and impressive, equals nothing, even if we won human accolades and awards by them.

We must remain in the vine, using the strength He gives. The support of the vine positions the branches to receive sunlight while the Vine supplies nutrients and water to help in fruit bearing.

We can't be the blessings and the benefits we are to be to God, the vineyard owner, without the supply of the Spirit of God upon us leading us. We must constantly be open to the inspiration and the power of God to flow through us to achieve whatever assignment God has sent us to accomplish. We must be dependent on Christ.

We need to understand that man was made to make things happen. He can make things happen here in earth independent of God even with the skills and gifts given of God.
God causes His rain and sun to fall and shine upon both the good and the bad.

We all receive all that God gives naturally and it depends on each one what he or she does with all the generosity and the magnanimity we have from God to become either good or bad.

Matthew  5
45. That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.


But what God wants is that we would use our gifts and positions according to His guidance, to become what's fruitful and beneficial to Him and to everyone around us. Not to use them to earn evil and unjust identities.

We aren't to just make things happen, we should know and understand what God would have us make happen, otherwise whatever we make happen becomes a sin, a work of the flesh instead of it being a fruit. In God's assessment whatever we make happen without Him are nothing, vain, empty and inconsequential as long as He's not the originator even if we had used His sun, rain, water, life, gifts, anointing, opportunity and positions to create them.

Our mandate is to go everywhere, as the wind of the Spirit of God blows us, doing good and bringing solutions to our world with the anointing of the Holy Spirit and the presence of God with us in accordance to His purpose. The purpose of God's power is to bring His will and purpose to pass.

Acts 10
38. How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.

What Acts 10:38 is to Christ is what it is to us too. We are the extensions of the vine to deliver what the vine has the capacity to deliver. The purpose of the vine is accomplished through the branches that gives the fruits, provides the shade and so on that benefit. We must own Acts 10:38

We depend on the husbandman to bring manure, we depend on the vine to uphold us and we submit to the husbandman to prune us to be able to bear more fruits for Him to use as benefits and blessings to others who He feeds with the fruits we bear.

Let's be careful not to do our own things, which would be useless to God's eternal program, but to stay connected and dependent on God in our works so as to produce fruits and not the works of the flesh that brings glory to man and not to God...there is always a difference between what we CAN do and what we OUGHT to do per time. We must always be acquainted with that difference to bear fruits and not to work in the flesh so as to ultimately bring glory to God!

Good morning to you and more grace to bear more fruits in Jesus name.

Photo Credit: Coleur/ Pixabay

Monday, 16 September 2019

Touching Lives

Monday Motivation: Touching Lives

Service delivery and customer service are areas the business world had perfected with quality expertise. When your service delivery is flawless, satisfactory and excellent, you're in business.

You can push customer joy to another level with impeccable customer service to accompany a wonderful service delivery, and with that, maintain patronage and referral for generations. Patrons naturally identify with the business and sort of buy into the project in so many ways.
To many business consultants, that's about the best that can happen but, there is more.

Customer service and satisfaction can go more than a good product, well packaged and delivered with a smile in an ambience of entertainment and comfort. It can go further to extend love and compassion to those who patronise the product.

Our world is made of our relations, our friends, our neighbours, our coworkers, clients and our suppliers. These people form a large surface area for interaction that can add more value to their lives than mere professionalism.

We would have done a good job being professionals who know the task and deliver the product. But in these days of artificial intelligence, a robot too can deliver, and that will only increase in our world, reducing human facial interactions outside the facades of social media veiled and often hypocritical relationships.

People are going to become more and more lonely even with millions of followers on the internet who cannot touch us where we are really hitching. The need to be able to really touch people beyond the skin will increase and that may be the next area for customer service innovations.

People are hurting in different ways. People need others to really talk to. They need someone to share their hurts and frustrations with, they need shoulders to lean on. They need people who can heal their broken hearts. The people they patronise, those who they can't avoid on their daily routines can be the best people to touch them at their most important areas of life.

We need to innovate and do business and commerce beyond quality service deliveries that don't change the lives of our patrons and customers and so move customer service further to actually touching lives and easing emotional and psychological burdens of those who come to us daily.

Nobody should leave your nice business environment having patronised you to go and commit suicide with the burdens of his or her life... That may look so distant a responsibility but that's a need and an area to innovate...to touch more lives positively...beyond mere commerce!

Good morning to you

Monday, 2 September 2019

Ministry at the Market Place

Monday Motivation: Ministry at The Market Place

Purpose puts value on what ever we do. The essence of our endeavors is defined by its purpose. Purpose must have eternal value to be worthy of life's pursuit. Life's pursuit which takes over 60 percent of your daily life all through your life must have impact on your eternity, if you dare to believe in Christ.

If there is eternity to prepare for, then you and I can't afford to spend 60% of our lives on what to eat, wear, drink, drive and live in which will perish with the use! It won't make any business sense not having impact on our life after now.

God knows that what to eat, wear, drink, drive, live in will become the ultimate preoccupation of the world, it'll be what the world seeks daily.

He knows that life will be programmed and wired around producing such and acquiring them and in so doing, make any other thing irrelevant even if of higher purposes.

And so He organized to meet them by sending people into those work places to show them what's possible beyond the cocoon of production, consumption and consummation of death in which they had locked themselves up.

Unfortunately, those sent too can't differentiate between themselves and those they are sent to, as they scramble to outdo those they were sent to in producing and acquiring these stuffs oblivious of the purpose of their being there.

Matthew 6
24. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

25. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

31. Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

32. (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

33. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.


When He commanded us to go into all the world to preach the gospel to everyone, He wasn't sending only one person to all the world, neither was He sending everyone to same places, He was sending each one to his or her own world equipped and to be further equipped by those sent to be at the forefront of preaching the Word.


Ephesians 4
11 And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers,
12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ...

So, the believer is to be equipped because he or she has been sent into his or her world, a world that comprises basically of neighbours, friends, work colleagues, relatives and acquaintances.

And out of those people and places, that particular place that engages you and your time the most will be the place of greater priority. That's your work place and engagements!

The believer is to be the light of the world and the salt of the earth serving God and not mammon, seeking the kingdom of God and not what the world seeks at the work place.

This may not always be possible by erecting a podium of preaching at your office even if the company is yours but we know that the lifestyle of Christ from the word of God in attitudes, in deed, in our choices and in words as we relate and interface with the world is as potent as the Word of the gospel that inspire them, if we are purposeful, while waiting for the opportunity and the open door to share the faith through preaching.

1 Peter 3
 1. Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives,
2. when they see your respectful and pure conduct conversation coupled with fear.

God didn't put us where we are just for the sake of it. He did so that we can represent Him and through us bring many into the light of salvation. Let's align with that purpose and pursue it till God's will is done and so give our lives the meaning it was meant to have.

More grace to you, have a purposeful and wonderful week!
Photo Credit: Geralt/pixabay