Ruling and Reigning
Ruling and Reigning
A picture of how that might look
I’ve been thinking through how leadership is supposed to work and woke up the other day with the following picture in my mind. It’s helping me understand a number of things about what it means to reign with Christ, so I thought I’d share the picture with you.
If reigning with Christ means we’re doing what God meant us to do, and if God made us to love him and others, then to reign with Christ means to love him and others. This is God’s way. We do this with all our minds, hearts, strength, and souls. Yes, I know I put that in a funny order. The order follows the picture below. We discern God’s ways, we will God’s ways, we do God’s ways, and through faith in Christ through this process, we become God’s way.
Let me break it down more clearly:
To discern God’s ways includes understanding who God is, discerning how he’s leading us in a specific situation, sensing the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and using reason and feelings as clues in accordance with God’s word. This is using our minds.
To will God’s way is to make the decision, to choose, to be a free-acting agent, to set our face in the direction that we think we ought to go. I suppose we could call this our soul. Not sure about that though. We also do this through the power of the Holy Spirit because without faith it is impossible to will God’s ways.
To do God’s ways means we do the thing or we delegate. We take action. This is using our strength. Again, it’s done through faith.
To be God’s ways is what I tried to illustrate with the yellow arrow weaving through the picture. To be God’s ways means that we do all the above with the power of the Holy Spirit, in faith that Christ is doing it through us. This is how we do anything not according to the flesh but according to the spirit. We follow God wholeheartedly because Christ has changed our desires. This is how we use our hearts.
Thus, to follow God’s ways means we allow God’s spirit to discern, will, and act through our faith that it is Christ doing it in us. This is what I think it means to reign and rule with Christ.
Let’s think about this model a step further. Because of our upbringing and developed coping methods, we are weak in one or more of these areas.
If we’ve allowed our emotions to guide us, we might have trouble discerning God’s ways. If we’ve been taught to ignore our emotions, we might have trouble discerning how God’s ways interact and transform us. If we had controlling parents and bosses, we might not have had opportunities to exercise our willpower, so our moral muscles might be weak. If we’ve been the boss in most situations and gotten used to exercising our willpower over others, we might not know how to use self-control to respect other’s willpower. If we’ve gotten used to someone else doing everything for us, our strength might be weak. If we’ve gotten into the habit of doing everything ourselves, our strength may be over-taxed.
If we have been relying on our own discernment, willpower, and strength to follow God’s ways, we won’t be acting like children of God but children of the flesh. Our faith will be weak. If we have had great faith in our hearts but haven’t used this faith in our thinking, free will, and action, then our faith is dead.
For me personally, I have an over-developed capacity for understanding and discerning and an under-developed willpower. This is probably true of many Enneagram 5’s. Maybe I’ve developed this way because my older siblings and parents’ willpower took precedence over mine, but who knows? The point is not how did I become lopsided in these areas, but rather, how is God using my weaknesses for his glory.
I have had people come up and tell me that I have described what was going on in their heads but they couldn’t express it themselves. And my eyes well up with tears because God is bringing about his glory through my weakness.
Each of us is responsible for following God’s ways with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. But because we began this life without faith in Christ, we have some under-developed and over-developed capacities. The neat thing is that God is working to transform us into fully functional humans right now. Every day, God provides us with opportunities to use our faith in exercising discernment, willpower, and strength.
We don’t have to go looking for exercises to grow our heart, mind, soul, and strength. God’s got the schedule for our development already planned out. The next exercise is coming very soon. Ready . . . set . . . go!