Audience of One (Part 2)

Robert S. McGee proposed in his book— The Search for Significance— that if Satan had a formula for self-worth it would look like this:

MY PERFORMANCE
+ THE OPINION OF OTHERS
= MY SELF-WORTH

When we lead with people as our primary audience we typically try to impress them with our work, abilities, and efforts. Our self-worth often becomes dependent on their opinions of how well we perform. If we succeed our self-worth goes up and if we fail it goes down.

Self-worth defined by this formula is on shifting sand. It leans on pride to prop itself up and it resorts to fear when performance or opinions are down. Pride and fear in our leadership create the following problems:
(1) Broken relationships with those around us since there is a lack of trust as we self-protect and blame others when things go wrong,
(2) Unhealthy comparison and competition between us and others as we self-promote at the expense of others, and
(3) A temporal focus on reality as we focus on the here and now, attempting to keep our self-worth intact.

When we lead to please God, however, we gain true humility since we see ourselves in light of Who He is. Our self-worth is based on who He says we are in Christ. Therefore we can lead with courage and confidence as we have the assurance that he has called us and equipped us for the task.

When God is our audience we must make him the only object of our worship, our only source of security and self-worth, and the audience, authority, and judge of our lives. Otherwise, we exchange each of these for something or someone other than God and our self-worth is on a crumbling foundation.

[Next week I will wrap up the BEING part of our serving leadership framework by discussing several disciplines Jesus modeled for us that keep us anchored in who and whose we are.]