Keith Battle - A House of Pain - Part 5

This is «A House of Pain,» Part Five. Now, I don’t know how this is going to go. I started this series several weeks ago, and for the first three weeks of this series, we looked at a man in First Chronicles, chapter 4, verses 9 and 10, by the name of Jabez. From that small pericope of biblical text, we tried to glean what we could from his life and apply it to our lives. The reason why I call this series «A House of Pain» and not «The House of Pain» is that, although Jabez’s name means pain, pain is not exclusive to him. Indeed, in the passage today that we’re looking at in Mark, chapter 9, this family had pain in their house. We don’t even have to peruse through Scripture to find houses with pain other than Jabez’s; all we have to do is look around at our houses. There’s not a person listening to me right now who doesn’t have some kind of pain in their house and in their life. So, as I’ve been exploring this series, today I want to pick it up here in Mark chapter 9, and I want to give you five things as quickly as I can. The first one relates to verse 14, where it says, «When Jesus and his disciples came down,» referring to His disciples—Peter, James, and John—who came down from this mountaintop experience. In verse 14, they return off the mountain and walk into a messy situation. There’s an argument occurring, with tension and conflict between Jesus’s other nine disciples and the teachers of the law. Although we’re not informed exactly what they were arguing about, there was an argument happening. The reason I want to point this out is that I talked about last week how there’s a significant difference between the first 13 verses of Mark 9 and verses 14 to 29. Verses 2 to 13 specifically describe a mountaintop experience; they are on the Mount of Transfiguration. While there, Jesus is affirmed by His Father, and He is also having a conversation with Moses and Elijah. Those were the forerunners of the ministry of Jesus; they were trailblazers in His domain, if you will. So, He’s having conversations and gaining insight from Moses and Elijah, and He’s experiencing a transformation from God the Father that illuminates Him. In that moment, He comes out of that experience and into a challenging situation, but I believe what He gained on the Mount of Transfiguration prepared Him for what He would face in the valley. The first thing I want to share with leaders today is that life is not just about mountaintops and valleys; it’s how we perceive them. It is very important as a leader to understand that every mountaintop experience actually prepares you and me for the service we provide to others and how to address problems. I’ll say that again: our mountaintop experiences are there to prepare us for our service and for the problems we are called to solve. We have some technical difficulties, so these points won’t come on the screen. So, here’s the point: If you have ever been in an environment—at a retreat, a conference, or some context that was both informational and transformational—maybe leaders in your industry were speaking, your Moses and Elijahs in your industry were there, and it was such an empowering environment, what I want you to understand is what you gained in that moment was the resource you need to go back into the context where you’re called to serve more effectively and solve problems more efficiently. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Jesus had something when He came down off that mountain that the other nine didn’t have; they couldn’t pull it off. He had something that prepared Him and helped Him serve more effectively and solve problems more efficiently. In fact, at the end of the day, leadership, by definition, is really a job of solving problems. That’s what leadership really is: solving problems. The more effective you are at solving problems, the more valuable you are to the organization and the people you lead because problems are natural, but solutions are precious. It takes a level of skill to even identify a problem, but if you can go a step further and solve a problem, you’re elite. You’re elite when you can solve problems. You need to have regular visits to your Mount of Transfiguration. In fact, I want you to do me a favor; go in the chat and tell me what the environments are that inspire you, inform you, and where you go to sharpen your skills. If you were chopping down a tree, you never want your axe to become dull; it should always be sharp. So, tell me, where do you go? What is it called? What’s the environment? Who is the person? Where do you go to sharpen your skills?