Core 300 - The Secret of Success

"Now all the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples joined forces and crossed over the Jordan and camped in the Valley of Jezreel. Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Gideon, and he blew a trumpet, summoning the Abiezrites to follow him. He sent messengers throughout Manasseh, calling them to arms, and also into Asher, Zebulun and Naphtali, so that they too went up to meet them." -- Judges 6:33-35;

When the Midianite enemy finally assembled their massive fighting force at Israel's borders (we learn in Judges 7 is 135,000 sword-bearers), the Lord moved sovereignly upon Gideon, filling him with the Spirit of God. He then stepped into leadership role by blowing the trumpet, summoning men of Israel to gather to him for war.

God had a confidence that Gideon shared not only His agenda (winning the war ahead) but that he would act according to the values that they shared in common.

I risk two things with you by going for a few paragraphs into a short journey into behavioral science. One is that I could be accused as posing as a psychologist, (which I am definitely not). The other is the risk of losing your interest as a Christina man. Bear with me, though because this is essential truth about God and how he slowly shapes us in such a way that our values begin to align with His.

Leadership development and formation has always been a subject of deep interest to me for over thirty years. For much of the last decade, it has been my occupation to coach and train corporate and military leaders. When we arrive at the third book in this Core 300 series, "The Shepherd-King" I will relate that journey in depth, but this is our only chapter in this book that focuses on how Gideon stepped into his leadership role, and how God trusted him to lead and ultimately become the "Judge" (literally Deliverer) of God's people.

God desires that you and I as servant leaders should be ever-expanding our influence with others. But as with Gideon, God can only release your predestined leadership if He trusts that your core values are in alignment with His.

Values are the root "operating system" from which we lead our lives. Like deeply embedded and custom coded software, they are the source of our attitudes, feelings, and ultimately our behaviors. Values can be defined as those ideals that guide or qualify personal conduct and interaction with others. They are that inner voice that operates in our human conscience that help us distinguish what is right from what is wrong. Walking a Spirit-filled life is much about allowing the values and heart of God to flow through you and to the degree that your values are reshaped into His values, then you and I can progressively take on God's nature.

This deep place is where the code has been written into your soul as a man...much of which happened in your earliest of years. This is where the sharp, two-edged sword of Hebrews 4 surgically operates to sensitize us to our motives, intentions and help us to identify the source of our emotions.

Even more important, your and my core values are the main arena in which the Holy Spirit operates. It is where He does His best work in a man's heart...to grow us as Catholic men, Evangelical men or Charismatic men, into Christ's image.

For as he (a man) thinks in his heart, so is he. -- Proverbs 23:7 NKJV (parenthesis mine)

Robert S. Hartman was professor at Yale, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Mexico. He is known as a pioneer in what is called Axiology or Values Science. Although he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, his contribution to behavioral science has only recently gained wider appreciation, but I believe he will be recognized one day as one of the leading behavioral psychologists and philosophers of the 20^th century. His theory that vales create attitudes and emotions and that these then create our behaviors is widely accepted today.

Figure 1: Values Science asserts that all behaviors come from how you think blended with your emotions. Thinking and emotions, which creates our behavior, flows from your preset, core values[i]

In addition, Hartman's work established and even measured these valuations through an assessment instrument[iii] he developed over three decades of research. Each of these valuations has an attached ?bias.? Your bias towards God, for example may be pessimistic/untrusting due to a low self esteem (?I am not valuable enough for Him to really care for me like He does for others?) or poor theological view (?God is an angry, vitriolic God?) of who He is and His nature. So our beliefs and internal positive or negative biases determine how we relate to work, stewardship (versus ownership), time, our future role into the world, and many other important factors.

You can begin to see, then, how vital our internal values are to shaping our destiny, and how they impact those around us.

One of my biggest "values challenge" is that of performance. The passion to win, or the drive towards finishing an important task, has often wormed their way to the top of my values hierarchy. When that happens, anything or anyone who interrupts my forward motion is a potential threat to my success, even if it is my young son who wants to sit on my lap and tell me he loves me or if my wife wants to talk tome about her Bible study group that met that morning. Too often I will listen halfheartedly, or even brush them off for "later" (which rarely ever comes) so I can stay on task and achieve my goals.

But Hartman's Value Index captured the essence of the values that Jesus operated by:

In Figure 2, we see the simple hierarchy of another central part of Hartman's Value Theory. He proposes that "good" is the degree in which your comparative valuation occurs in this hierarchy; God, Others and self are always more valuable than things and tasks, and these are always more valuable that ideas and concepts and dogma.

"Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations." --Peter Drucker

"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd." -- Max Lucado

Therefore, if, through his intensive interaction with God, Gideon's values (see Judges 6-8) had not come into alignment with God's values, God would not have been able to release His glorious power on the Midianite army, nor could He have even caused Gideon to lift the horn to gather Israel's army together.

The same is true of us as men. We are "destined for the throne" to lead others in Jesus Name, but we must endure the lifestyle of a road-hardened disciple who has learned Christ's values

Figure 3: B=Behavior; V=Values. They both can change over time and are both connected by your thinking and attitudes to your values. Values change very slowly and but they are the root of all human behavior.

Jesus exemplified this when he violated the mores of his time and Jewish legal prohibition of touching a leper. The leper, who might be compared to someone with a deadly contagious disease today, like HIV, was a person that Jesus loved...how could He not show that love without touching him? Another case was where Peter was confronted by the Paul for hypocrisy (due to prioritizing religious ideology and dogma over loving and accepting his fellow Gentile brothers) because, out of fear of being ostracized by a group of legalists, he had shunned the Gentile Christians and segregated himself with those Jewish converts who viewed themselves as superior to those who were not Jews by birth.

^"When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray." -- Galatians 2:11-13 (bold is mine)

While working as Janitor-Supervisor at the Church on the Way in the early 80's, a lesson God wanted to teach me was how to be a servant leader who valued the person in front of performance. Thomas was different from the other guys in my crew. He was twenty five...older than the others, and had just recently given his heart to Christ and was looking for direction. At the time he was saved, he was a pretty hard living, hard drinking, Hollywood stunt man. He was masculine, imposing, and muscular with an aggressive and intimidating presence about him.

During the winter months, he had worked twenty hour shifts for 6 to 8 weeks, non stop, on an Alaskan crab boat in the freezing waters of the Bering Sea. This guy was tough! And the stories he would tell were not always edifying.

Scott, a twenty one year old newlywed, and Thomas, would get into petty arguments from time-to-time. But they also seemed to be growing a good friendship. I thought that the match was a good one, so they were often linked up to work together as a team for their shifts.

Now it was two thirty during one of our graveyard shifts, and I had noticed that Thomas had been particularly agitated earlier in the week. This night he seemed to have an attitude that was even more surly than usual. I left my crew to go and check on him and Scott and found him angrily shoving Scott against the outside stucco wall of the Prayer Chapel. The words that came out of his mouth were as inappropriate as his behavior. I felt a wave of panic, but I knew I had to intercede.

Stepping between the two of them, I was eye-to-eye with Thomas and forced him away from Scott. Now committed, I firmly told him to "stand down." He made himself larger for a moment, glaring hatefully into my eyes. Then, he faltered, and strode away. Relieved, I yelled after him to stop, which he did. Turning around in the shadows, he looked back at me. I asked him to meet me in the office in twenty minutes to talk this over after he had cooled down a bit.

Scott was unsettled, but he calmed down and we discussed what had just transpired between the two of them. After a few minutes, he went back to his shift. I went to find Thomas. When I found him sitting at the maintenance office, we had a heart to heart together. I was tempted to get him back to work and to reprimand his unacceptable behavior. But this young, abrasive, man was in great deal of pain, and Jesus ministered to him that night...mostly because I just listened. Finally, he fell into my arms and wept. He wept about his loneliness...and he wept about his failings as a disciple Christ. I felt a bit like a Priest, hearing a confession and then I remembered that Jesus had commanded is to forgive sins, so I lifted his head and looked into his eyes, "I forgive you in the Name of Jesus." I could see him opening his heart to receive the absolution from Father-God... but there was no penance required or Thomas, just a heartfelt hope and peace that can only come when you see how truly loving and accepting God is. It's just that oftentimes we can only see that aspect of God when it comes through someone else.

I was learning more too. Learning about how to be a leader of men. There was no book on this stuff back then, and it was new to me, but I stumbled into learning a few things that have helped me greatly over the years.

Leadership is an acquired skill and an art form for which I will always feel ill equipped. But God makes us into better leaders when he shapes our values through the "crucibles of experience" and then aligning our inner man with his DNA.

There are so many things I have done, or have not done, as a man of influence, that did not have good endings as this one did. Leadership failures often result when we put tasks and things in front of people. Even worse is when we allow our own unique "flavor" of doctrine to divide us as Charismatic men, Catholic men and Evangelical men. Looking down our noses at someone from a different tradition causes divisiveness between denominations. How are we to flourish in isolation from one another? If Paul was so grieved at Peter's self-segregation from Gentile believers, how much more is the Holy Spirit grieved today when Roman Catholics men look down upon Presbyterian men who then condescended to Baptist men...who then and seen as inferior by and Charismatic men? Much of what separates us is fear of the unknown and a difference in style. Maybe we should consider the places where real doctrinal differences truly reside are simply tests from the Holy Spirit to see if we will overcome dogma with love? What if God made some doctrinal issues subject to differing interpretations on purpose so we would rise above it all in loving unity?

"In necessariis unitas, (In essentials unity, )
In dubiis libertas, (In doubtful things liberty)
In omnibus autem caritas, (But in all things love)" -- St. Augustine

As father, husband, and a Christian men at work, it is far too easy to recall our failures when it came to getting values backwards. The child who gets slapped for spilling milk...the teenager who is yelled at for the messy room...the wife who burns the toast and then braces for that look that says, "How could you be so stupid," from her husband. In contrast to authentic manhood, these all spring from whacked values and Jesus must teach us, and train us, in a more excellent way.

This night, 25 years ago, I pressed on to do better. I still do, but find that with every passing year I become more amazed at how little I really know of leadership, and how much God is more interested in my willingness to allow the cut of the sword of truth into my soul so that we might share common values. On this journey, He is then able to make up the chasm between what I am able to bring and what He is able to do.

"After fifteen years of diligent digging into the world around me, I have reached several conclusions about the future of the Christian church in America. The central conclusion is that the American church is dying due to a lack of strong leadership. In this time of unprecedented opportunity and plentiful resources, the church is actually losing influence. The primary reason is the lack of leadership. Nothing is more important than leadership.? --George Barna

Gideon was also thrust rather suddenly into the role of subversive servant-leader. I am amazed at the scope of his willingness to obey God. His amazing trust in God was reciprocated by God placing his trust in him. Their values were in alignment.

Obedience, and a fearless faith in God, were the main qualifications on his resume. Each "stepping stone" for him called him out into ever increasing danger and the corresponding requirement of increased trust in God's power and protection. Not only was his career on the line, but his life and the lives of everyone he cared for was as well.

Although the story starts with Gideon as a young father and husband at work, I am inclined to believe that he had walked in alignment with many of God's values for some time. When the opportunity presented itself, and when God felt he was ready, he was willing to courageously respond to God's plan to raise him up as a Deliverer-Judge for his people.

Leadership development then, at its core is God's working first in you, His values matrix. He will then work through us in mighty ways as we seek to continue to grow as men of God joined by brothers in Christ, into the likeness of His Son.

Art Hobba, Founder Core 300 which is a modern day calling of men to dynamic engagement in the Kingdom of God.

[i] For research and more information, see www.hartmaninstitute.org

[ii] The Emergence of Positive Psychology: The Building of a Field of Dreams, Shane J. Lopez, PhD, American Psychological Association, Summer 2000, Vol. 12(2)

[iii] The Hartman Value Profile-for more information, go to www.transcende.net/PBLprofile.html

[iv] John 20:23

[v] Leaders on Leadership, George Barna, Regal books, 1997