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(This is an excerpt from a forth-coming book from
Jack Eason called The Essential Ships Every Christian Radio Station
Needs In Its Fleet)
Lord-SHIP
It goes without saying that this should be first priority. If we are
Christians and we are “doing” Christian radio, it’s obvious, right?
Maybe not.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was standing in the
auditorium on the campus of Anderson University (actually, it was a
college back then) and I heard the speaker say, “He is either Lord
of ALL or not at ALL. Lord implies he is in charge of all of you.”
It was at that point that I realized I never had fully understood
the concept of Lordship. I was 14 at the time and was attending a
conference there with my youth pastor. It was also at that point
that I realized I really had never really fully surrendered my life
to Christ.
In North American Christianity, we fall into several practices that
I have realized over time are not correct, let alone the fact that
they aren’t even biblical.
Bad Practice # 1-
Our understanding of Lordship. In early church days like those we
read about in Acts 4, I don’t think Peter and John and the followers
of Christ in that time compartmentalized their faith like we do in
North America, especially in the Bible belt. In those days, when you
said you were a follower of Jesus, by nature it impacted every area
of your life. Your commitment to following after Jesus affected your
family; Jesus even said it may turn families against one another.
Your commitment to Jesus may affect your job; obviously, many of the
disciples walked away from their jobs to follow after Jesus and
because of that it also affected their finances. In short, being a
follower impacted every area of your life.
In our culture, we say things like we are “making Jesus first on our
list” as if to put him at the # 1 Position and everything else under
Him. That may sound good, but I don’t think it allows us to have the
correct mindset.
Yes, Christ is first. But when we list other things under Him, it is
almost like we are pursuing those things outside of Christ. Steven
Furtick puts it this way:
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We start by putting Jesus at the top. Then family. Then maybe
career. And so on. So our priorities look something like this:
1. Jesus/God 2. Family 3. Career
Looks good. However, I’ve found that this
isn’t very effective when you get down to the grind of everyday
life. For example, what does it even mean to put Jesus before my
family? Do I ignore my family to spend more time with Jesus? Or with
your career, do you stop working to put Jesus first? The
essential problem with this approach is that it segregates the
different priorities of life. You end up removing Jesus from
where you spend the majority of your time and putting Him on an
island by Himself. The biggest island maybe, but an island
nonetheless.
This year, instead of worrying about putting Jesus first in your
life, what if you concentrated on making Him the center of every
area of your life? Not just the top priority in front of every other
priority, but the top priority in every priority?
Not Jesus, then my family. But Jesus in
my family.
Not Jesus, then my career. But Jesus in my
career.
We’d probably be a lot more
successful in actually keeping Jesus at the top spot on our list.
And we’d be much more likely to do an exponentially greater job at
accomplishing our other goals and maintaining our priorities.
Mark records it in his gospel like this:
4 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples
and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and
take up their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to
save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life
for me and for the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it
for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37
Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If
anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful
generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in
his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”
So, let’s look at our own lives. And let’s look at our radio
stations? Have we compartmentalized our radio stations and only
allowed God reign over certain “rooms” or areas of our station? Do
we pray to God when we have tower problems and not when we are
thinking about the songs we play? Do we treat our staff worse than
we would treat our #1 donor? Have we segregated certain parts of our
work in Christian radio or do we allow Christ to be IN every
aspect? Is He completely in charge? Of every area?
(Lord-SHIP is the first SHIP Jack talks about in The Essential
Ships.)
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Jack Eason is
a partner and consultant with The Heart Share Group. He and Tom
Lewis (co-founders of Heart Share) are dedicated to equipping
ministries to be all that God has called them to be. They work with
Christian radio in the areas of fundraising, non-traditional
revenue, programming, underwriting, and more.
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