Do You Want to Have Influence?
What do you think when you hear the word “influence”? What do you think of people who want to have it? Do you want it yourself?
My sense is that the word makes us recoil a little, at least in these last several years where we’ve seen the positive influence of churches and leaders rise and fall. The crashes have left many jaded, and if we’d admit it, a bit cynical about anything to do with making an impact and leaving a legacy. Such a desire, we think, as well-intentioned as it may start, seems too vulnerable to corruption, and the cynic in us, which always fronts as our wiser selves, keeps back with an incredulous eye. “I won’t be snookered into anything,” the cynic’s mantra goes.
Okay, but set aside that walled-off posture and exhausting way to live for a minute.
We should think more carefully about influence.
When Conviction Meets Love
Several years ago I heard a trusted mentor say that if you resist influence it’s either because A) you don’t really believe what you say you believe or B) it’s because you don’t love people.
In other words, do you really believe that Jesus is Lord? That he is God become man to save his people from their sins? That he is the Risen and Ascended King-Priest who is coming again to judge everyone and make all things new? That he will forgive whoever comes to him in faith?
Do you believe that or not? And if you do, why would you not want this conviction to have an effect on others? Do you love people? How can you call it love if you don’t want them to know the best news ever?
See how this works?
In broad terms, if we don’t want influence it must be that we don’t really love people or we don’t think the good news is all that good.
Let’s establish that first. Influence is basically a non-negotiable for the Christian. It’s central to our calling to be Jesus’s witnesses (see Acts 1:8).
Mistaking the Who and How
But now, yes, the desire for influence can go crooked. It has to do, not with influence itself, but with the Who and the How.
The mistake on Who is abstraction. The mistake on How is any manner that is contrary to the character of Jesus.
Make Your Influence Particular
I recently heard it said that too many people want to change the world in generalities, transcending the limitations of their lives to do something big “out there.” Of course, social media only fuels this all the more. So much activism today — real difference-making, we assume — is being part of this or that movement. It’s subscribing and posting and echoing all the respectable hostilities. It’s trying to have an influence in abstraction, which eventually, because of the abstraction and generality, becomes about influence in itself.
That is a problem. To have a true Christian influence, we must get particular, or personal, or small, you could say. … in the way of Jesus.
We should remember that Jesus didn’t merely become human to save an amorphous blob of believers. He became a man, and a Jewish man at that, from Nazareth, the son of a carpenter, and who, if he was like most Jewish Nazarenes in his day, probably stood around 5’5”. He didn’t just walk the earth, he walked the dusty roads of Galilee. And he didn’t just save, but he saved a people full of faces and names and stories, like each of ours, and he knows them all.
So have your influence, please, but focus it on the eyes and ears around you. Don’t bypass the needy you encounter on the Jericho Road, and don’t overlook the souls at your dinner table in an effort to go do something special for people you’ve never met.
I’m reminded of a friend whose teen was raising money for a short-term missions trip years ago. It was a service-oriented trip, one chocked full of mercy ministries of various kinds. The teen needed a couple grand to go halfway around the world to serve, and my friend, a godly mom, supported the trip but was also like: “Hey, let’s start by washing your dishes in the sink.”
We all have a proverbial “wash your dishes” calling in front of us, a particular opportunity of impact that is not a stair step, but is significant all its own. For me, personally, I love preaching the word of God to our church, but if I neglect reading the Bible to my family, something is askew. Because they’re there, right before my eyes, everyday. Our church has (or can find) several pastors to preach the Word, but I’m the only man on the planet called to be my family’s head. That is the influence I care about the most. And absolutely, no apologies, I do want to influence them. And then there’s our church. The street I live on. The metro we call home.
It’s the Who of our influence that makes all the difference.
And also the How.
Make Your Influence Christlike
The ends do not justify the means. Don’t ever think that you can get results that will please Jesus if you didn’t get them in a way that pleased Jesus. It doesn’t work like that.
Unlike so many of us sinners in our world, Jesus is never starving to win at all costs. He won at cost to himself, in sacrificial love for others that looked like defeat. Jesus didn’t grab for power, he laid it down. He trusted the Father entirely, to the extreme, even into death. Which is one thing (among several) that makes the Resurrection so glorious. It was the great vindication of Jesus. His inside-out, upside-down, backwards-forward way of doing things had the last laugh after all — and Jesus wasn’t even the one to say so, the Father was, by raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus didn’t answer the mockers who hurled insults at him from the foot of the cross, the Father did … with an empty tomb.
I once read a theologian who said that we tend to care a lot about Jesus as the truth and life, but skip right over the Jesus way. Do we really think we can short-circuit his character to mass-market his gospel? You can’t. Abstract influence in the wrong way is no influence at all, or at least it’s not Christian influence.
Hold this in mind. Remember the cautions. And then, yes, desire influence. Ask God for it! I want each of you to have world-changing influence, just keep the world particular. Think faces and names. And do it from the heart of Jesus, in a way that pleases him. What else is the point?
