Leader Lead Yourself 01: Deal with Blind Spots!

If you cannot lead yourself, everything in your life is going to be hard. It amazes me how many people want to go into ministry to effectively lead others in how to live their lives and their own lives are far from being orderly. This is a new series on how to lead yourself to more effectively lead others.

Of course, no one has to be perfect to be in ministry, but you should be able to lead yourself. Many of the challenges you face in your life are not due to others but the way you lead yourself.

Even when someone has been a leader for a long time, it is hard to lead yourself because you are so comfortable with yourself; you make excuses for yourself; you are blind to your problems because they are so close to home. Also, we often give ourselves the benefit of the doubt that we do not give to others. We certainly judge others by their actions and judge ourselves by our “heart” unless we are very careful indeed.

The most important thing you can do to lead yourself well is deal with your blind spots!

We all have blind spots, but as leaders, because we influence people, we have to be very careful indeed as yours will become the blind spots of others. One of things that brings us into leadership is our ability to focus well, and a skill at solving a particular type of problem. But if all we then talk about is that problem, we preach the same one sermon over and over, we solve every problem with the same tool then we have blind spots.

If you think you are always right, you definitely have blind spots! Jesus Himself said we can actually be trying to take the speck out of someone else’s eye while we have an entire plank in our own eye. Seems Jesus was very aware that as leaders we could have blind spots. We trust our insight without spending enough time with Jesus and with older, wiser, mentors that we get our eyes sorted.

David sinned in a way that would cost any 21st century pastor their entire career. He slept with a woman who was not his wife, then murdered her husband when he impregnated her! He couldn’t see it was a problem. Then Nathan, very wisely, told David a story about a man who stole another man’s lamb, and David was furious at how badly this hypothetical man behaved – then David realized it was him. Nathan was exceptionally wise in this approach, and later David named one of his sons after him.

How do we end up with blind spots? Several ways, but a main way is we hear the Word and then don’t do it (James 1.23). It says that if we do this, we deceive ourselves. That’s the Bible phrase for a blind spot – self-deception. We need to spend time with Jesus and the Word, the mirror of the Word is what helps restore our sight, and the Spirit convinces us of sin, righteousness and judgment.

You will not get out of blind spots by trying hard, you need to be humble and let others correct your vision. You cannot operate on your own eyes! God will bring the right people into your life, and also do operations Himself – God can be trusted to keep your vision clear but you need to learn how to listen to others, admit you can be wrong, and let our blind spots become open doors to growing in Christ,

Selah.

Leadership and Prayer 05 Prayer and Revelation

One of the things that happens when we spend time in prayer is revelation. Kenneth Hagin said that the Lord has prepared treasures of wisdom for the church that they do not know because they do not pray.

1 Cor 2.9 says:

9 But as it is written:

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

Many people quote this verse to make God’s will, and God’s wisdom a mystery, something we will finally find out about when we get to Heaven. But those people need to keep reading and find out the Spirit is there to reveal God’s will to us:

10 But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. 11 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.

Paul is not talking about God keeping His treasures secret, but rather that we cannot know them in the natural, but need to be in the spirit. When we are in the spirit, praying in the Spirit, living in a place of prayer and humility, the Holy Spirit will give us a revelation. The same Holy Spirit who explained the plan of redemption to Paul will explain the Scripture to us, explain God’s will and plan to us, give us ideas to solve problems, and much much more. But we need to pray in tongues to get into that place of receiving.

Suddenly information comes. Sometimes it comes when you are praying in tongues, other times it comes in the next worship time you are in, or through the next sermon you hear. Sometimes it comes just as you are falling asleep or waking up. But trust me – when you pray in tongues, revelation comes.

At the beginning of this year, I was praying in tongues for a few hours. I suddenly had a desire to plant a church in Liverpool. I had no natural reason, desire or plans for that. The only person I know in Liverpool was a pastor, and that was it. Yet, I took steps, we are now having introductory meetings in Liverpool and they are going exceptionally well. Glory to God – He revealed the treasures not by eyes, not by ears, but by the Spirit.

What is God keen to reveal to you, but you are dipping in and out of prayer, and not remaining in place to get those treasures?

Leadership and Prayer 04

Hear the note of victory! When you are praying for something, it is good to learn to pray until you hear the note of victory. Maybe you are suddenly aware someone is in danger, pray until you feel a breakthrough. It’s often that when you are praying for someone it is intense, it is a wrestling, you feel opposition and pressure as you pray, then suddenly after a season of prayer, you feel a lightness, a happiness, a lack of pressure against you – that’s the note of victory. Your prayer has worked and something has changed.

Kenneth Hagin was once in his house with a group of students from Oral Roberts University. He suddenly felt an urge to pray, and he asked the students if any of them were in danger or knew someone in danger. One of the students shared that her father had that morning been at work at an oil refinery and there was an explosion, and all the men were trapped inside a burning building and were facing a near certain death. Kenneth Hagin led all the students to pray, and they prayed for a couple of hours until they hit the note of victory. Later that day, all the men in the refinery were rescued.

I believe many of us pray about things, we are talking about supplication and intercession here, and when we pray that way, we need to keep pushing until we get the note of victory. There is wisdom, life and victory we are not entering into yet because we do not know how to pray and persist until we get the victory.

Leadership and Prayer 03 The Second Hour

One of the things that helps me a lot listening to Kenneth Hagin is he talks a lot about when he was a pastor. As a pastor, that’s really helpful. He was a pastor in the 1940s and he used to regularly pray for hours in tongues. Once he had prayed in tongues one hour, and he had so much work to do, but he was in the church praying. The devil told him it would be better to do the work of ministry than pray in tongues so he prayed another hour in tongues. During that second hour of praying in tongues, the Lord spoke to him and said “At the end of the second world war, there will be a healing revival” – and the Lord told him a lot of information about this healing revival.

So Brother Hagin went to a minister’s conference shortly after that, and read the prophetic word he got in that second hour. All the pastors in the room fell to their knees and started to pray for a healing revival. Those of you who know church history know that with three years of the end of WWII, in America was the largest, most powerful healing revival the world has seen. That did not just fall out the sky, it came because someone prayed the second hour, and then many others praying in tongues for hours on end.

Probably the number one question I have been asked in all my years of ministry is “why can I not hear God” – the answer is normally because your prayer time is ten-fifteen minutes of you talking at God, and not having a relationship with Him, not spending the time necessary to hear His voice. We, as leaders, have to be willing to pray long enough in prayer until they hear the Lord to hear things that will change their life.

It is not right to leave the place of prayer, then go on your business, without hearing from God first. Kenneth Hagin said that the Lord is looking for people to speak to about what He is doing on the earth, and for them to pray about it, and if you are praying extra time, then God will choose you. I agree.

Selah.

Leadership and Prayer 02 Kenneth Hagin and Tongues

I said in the last post that Oral Roberts prayed in tongues a lot. So did Kenneth Hagin. People would pull up next to him at traffic lights and he would be in his car praying in tongues. He would be heard at restaurants praying in tongues. He said “most victories come from praying in tongues”.

You see one thing I am discovering more and more is that the baptism in the Holy Spirit, when we start speaking in tongues, is just a beginning, what the early Pentecostals used to call “the initial experience”. We need more than an initial experience, we need all the experiences. We as leaders need to pray in tongues. We need to pray in tongues until we are deeper in the things of God than we were. Kenneth Hagin said if we keep praying in tongues right, we will never be nostalgic for the first day we were fillled with the Spirit, because we will have advanced far beyond that. Yet, today in 2025, I still meet Christians who are indeed nostalgic for the first time they spoke in tongues and haven’t gone any deeper since then. I have heard Christians who are pastors, travelling ministers, worship leaders, who are stunned when you tell them you pray for hours. There is a stunted growth in the flow of the Spirit in our churches because we have so limited time and intimacy with the Holy Spirit, and so little honour to do what He wants us to do.

We should be aware of the Greater One and His power and love inside us all the time, and if we are not, then we need to develop our intimacy with Him. The Holy Spirit and the spiritual realm should be more real in our thoughts and souls than the world. That can only be done by time – time in the Word, and time praying in the Spirit.

You see miracles happen – or do not happen – depending on our awareness of the spiritual above the natural. Many miracles are lost due to our hardness of hearts caused by a lack of time in the spiritual, a lack of time praying in tongues. Let the Holy Spirit lead you into the prayer closet, and spend time with Him becoming aware of His goodness, grace and glory. Amen!

Leadership and Prayer 01 Praying with Information

About two years ago, I found out that Kenneth Hagin was once asked when he encountered the strongest presence of the Lord, and his answer was when he was praying with Oral Roberts. When I heard that I wanted to find out more about Oral Roberts and his prayer life, and started researching.

Oral Roberts felt that the majority of prayer should be spent praying in tongues, and that praying in tongues was “the single most formidable force for obtaining divine guidance”. That quote is life changing if we consider it and put it into practise in our life. The more we pray in tongues, the more we know what God is doing and what God wants us to do.

Most Christians, even born-again, Spirit-filled, tongue-talking Christians waver – they go back and forth – on whether God can speak to them and reveal the future to them. But the Word of God is clear – God can and will and does direct our paths. Oral Roberts taught that the best way to understand and encounter this divine leading is to regularly and consistently pray in tongues.

1 Cor. 14.13 says that when we speak in unknown tongues, we need to pray that we interpret. Most of us read that and apply it almost without thinking to messages in tongues in church services as we all know that a message in tongues in a church service should be interpreted to the people. However, Oral Roberts read this as praying in tongues, and used this verse to pray that he could interpret what was going on when he was praying in tongues.

He wrote:

“My personal experience is that when I finish praying in tongues, whether I am praying for a few seconds or a few minutes, I then pray for the interpretation.” In other words, he would pray in tongues, then pray to find out what he was praying about! He then got an understanding of the tongues he was praying. He would be doing what Paul said – I pray with my spirit and pray with my understanding. For Oral Roberts, that was not two different prayers – oh, I have prayed in the spirit, I will now pray in the understanding, but actually he would pray in the spirit, then flow into knowing what he had prayed, and then pray that in a language he understood.

He would be praying for the season, then know what the season was, he wasn’t praying problems and difficulties – he was praying the spiritual words that he was praying when he was praying in tongues. All his prayers were praying the mind of God for the hours he was praying.

That’s some great wisdom right there. I am now putting this into practice in my life and have been for the last few months, maybe for just over a year, and it is very powerful. These prayers have been what helped our summer conference be so powerful, have opened up the gifts of the Spirit in our churches, and are part of the healings and miracles we are seeing!

Guidelines for Church 01: Whose the Boss?

Have you noticed the Bible is often non-specific about certain things? It tells us clearly that by His stripes we were healed (1 Peter 2.24) but doesn’t tell us what to do about it! Some people are healed through anointing of oil, others through laying on of hands, others through a word of knowledge, others by standing on the Word. But the truth is that our healing is accomplished and we have to receive it somehow. But we need to pray and find out the somehow.

Why am I telling leaders this? Because the Bible is explicit that we need leaders. The local church should have leaders, and a structure, but we will need to pray to find out what kind of structure our local church should have.

Now one principle we must look at is – who is the boss of a local church? Now you could be superspiritual and say “it’s Jesus”, but what would that look like? Ephesians 4.11 says that Jesus Christ Himself gives five ministries to a local church – apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers. So Jesus Himself calls these five. That is confirmed by Paul who told the Galatian church that as an apostle he was not chosen by men (a committee) or man (another apostle) but through Jesus Christ (this is Galatians 1.1).

Jesus appoints the fivefold ministry. Now read Ephesians 4.11 and you will not find an elder or deacon in there. Elders are chosen by pastors in a local church and so are deacons.

Now, here is the principle – the one who appoints is the boss. So the pastor of a church, his boss is Jesus. He has to answer to Jesus. If he is part of a family of churches, he answers to his senior pastor then to Jesus. But an elder has the pastor as their boss. A deacon has the pastor as their boss. They must answer to the pastor.

This seems to be in reverse in many churches where a board of deacons appoint a pastor then they are the boss of the pastor! I pastored like that, and I didn’t last long!

A pastor is tied by Jesus to a church, a local congregation, and he is the boss and the shepherd of that local congregation. He is responsible to Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ gave Him that position and tied him to that church. An apostle needs to come out of a local church and travel and establish and build up churches. Prophets travel too, to encourage the churches. Evangelists travel to preach the gospel and equip the saints to share the gospel. Teachers travel too and teach doctrines and give soundness to the church.

But it is the pastor who is wed by the Lord to a local congregation. It is a sacred and special calling and needs special honour. I currently function as an apostle and a pastor. I knew that would happen and I knew how to steward it years before it happened.

Now, in Acts 14.23, Paul appointed elders in every church. Paul appointed the elders, not Jesus. Elders are appointed by apostles or pastors in the local churches, so therefore the pastor has authority over the elder. That is the way around it should be. The elders should be teaching what the pastor says to teach, the elders should be supporting the pastor. Paul sent Titus to Crete as a pastor, and told him to “appoint elders in every city” (Titus 1.5). I am not writing this blog to outline what an elder is called to do, just to show you that a pastor should lead the elders not the other way around.

This pattern is the Biblical pattern, who appoints you is the boss. It’s the same with deacons, we can see this with Acts 6.5-6, where the apostles appoint the deacons. It says they chose! If they chose, then they are the boss.

This is a simple principle but if everyone adhered to it, it would eliminate so much confusion in the local church. Selah.

Just For Pastors 40: Do It All!

The evening before He was nailed to a cross, Jesus said to His Father “I have finished the work which you gave me to do” (John 17.4). I love that – that’s a prayer I want to pray the evening before I go to Heaven. I did it all Jesus – everything you gave me to do, I have done it.

Paul wanted to die early and not finish his race – and said he was torn between going to Heaven and staying on Earth, but what swayed him to stand up and believe he wouldn’t be martyred at this time is that he had not finished his course. Paul never lived the life he wanted personally – he lived for Christ, He wasn’t working for a pension and early retirement, he wasn’t living for the applause of men, he was living for his divine assignment. I had a season as a travelling evangelist, then a season as a pastor, now I am still pastoring but my primarly function is apostolic. It’s finding out each step, doing each step and completing each step, then we will complete the entire thing.

Finally, Paul finished his assignment, he told Timothy “I fought the good fight, I ran my race, I kept the faith”. When he went, he was ready to go because he had done all that God had called him to.

This is how we need to live our lives. We need to finish our course and run our race. We must complete our calling. Keep doing what you are called to do until it is done!

I see people in the wrong assignment all the time. I see pastors who should be travelling, I see evangelists who should be planting a church, often they change season quickly and repeatedly – and if you ask why – hey you were travelling, then you started a church, then you closed the church, then you were travelling again, now you are trying to start a media ministry, now you are planting a church again – and they will always say “I just feel the Lord leading me brother” – no, if God leads you to do something, you do it until it is done. You win, you beat the devil, you extend the kingdom, then you move on when the Lord leads you to the next phase, you go from faith to faith, strength to strength, and glory to glory!

Don’t quit when it is tough, fight. Do what God has told you to do and do what it takes to get it done. It will get hard, you will grow weary, you keep going. Take some rest if you need to, but don’t quit. Let’s finish our course, let’s run our race, let’s do it all.

AMEN!

Just For Pastors 39: Don’t Stand in the Way of Tongues

In our last post, I said that pastors must pray in tongues. Not only that, you must not stand against tongues in your congregation. 1 Cor. 14.39 says Do not forbid to speak in tongues. So many pastors, even whole denominations today, forbid speaking in tongues. When I was in a Christian group at my university, when I was studying computing, we were told to never speak in tongues.

I have heard of pastors telling people who speak in tongues in private to leave their churches and never come back, that contradicts Scripture. You should be encouraging everyone in your church to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues.

Just For Pastors 38: Pastors Should Pray in Tongues

When you are speaking in tongues you are speaking to God about things you don’t know about. Trust me – if your church is more than four people there are things happening in people’s lives and relationships and situations that you don’t know about. If you all your prayer for your flock is in English, you are very limited in your prayer. I pray for all of the Tree of Life Family in tongues every single day. I pray in tongues to ask the Lord what to preach on Sunday, I pray in tongues to ask the Lord to get the message into people’s hearts after I have preached it. I pray in tongues and I am speaking mysteries to God and declaring life over marriages I didn’t even know were in trouble, the Holy Spirit is dealing with doubts and offenses I didn’t even know people had! All pastors need to be able to pray in tongues, and need to pray in tongues for their churches!

Sometimes people try and diminish tongues and its vital importance for the church and for every Christian and they will say something like “well, we know there are no tongues in heaven”. No, and I won’t need to pray for the churches I am leading in Heaven, I won’t need to pray for sicknesses I didn’t know were coming on people, I won’t need to pray for someone who out of “kindness” (actually more likely, a need to know the gossip) takes a leader I stood down out for dinner, and all the offense on the one was being put on the other. I won’t need to pray for people who are lying and cheating secretly. I won’t need to pray for increase for people, or for people to just step out and give financially. I won’t need to pray for any situation I don’t know about or understand in Heaven.

I am a very busy man, and I am just a man, I do get tired. Especially when I travel, that is physically demanding as well as mentally. I often need to pray in tongues to revitalize myself and give me the energy to do what I do. Sometimes I pray in tongues for me for an hour or so to give me the energy and ability to pray in the tongues for a few hours. That’s how it works.