Leadership Summit 4 John Ortberg

John Ortberg who i consider to be the most consistently great preacher gave the the 3rd talk today. As usual he was awesome. The only bummer was that i had already heard him give this message and I used a lot of it in one of my sermons and even blogged on it. With that being the case still in my opinion the best talk so far.
UPDATE: Here is the page you can find the Ortberg sermon. It is the heroes of the old testament, Esther.

Shadow Mission

On Sunday I wanted to people to leave thinking about their life mission. I believe that God has a mission for each and every one of us and this mission could be a multitude of things. Competing against our God mission is what i call a shadow mission. A shadow mission could be, television, Internet, a sport, a child, a spouse, popularity, wealth, and even blogging! Your shadow mission has the potential to keep you form realizing your God given mission. Many people go through their whole life only knowing their shadow mission. Many believers go through their life and spend more time, energy, and resources focusing on their shadow mission than they don on their God given mission. I wanted people to leave thinking about both their shadow mission and their God mission and be able to identify them, (one of the many flaws in the sermon was that i should follow this up with some kind of guidance on how to go about finding your God mission.)

My shadow mission is what i would call spiritual procrastination. I spend a lot of time reading, studding, and doing God's work. But when it comes to spending time in God's presence I believe i have much room for improvement. Say i sit down at my desk tomorrow and there is no urgent matter. I could easily take a moment like that to pray and be in God's word. What i usually do it that situation is find some kind of administrative work, make a phone call, or read something that's not of the devotional sort. This has been my shadow mission since i entered the ministry. My best defence against this has been mutual accountability. My former accounability partner Chris, (he moved several weeks ago) and I would hold each other accountable to this. We had to spend a minimum of an hour a day in prayer, Bible study, and jounaling. If not, we had to pay the other a 1$ for each day we failed to do this, (for the record no money ever excanged hands). This worked really well. Its amazing what accountability can do.

My God mission at this time is discipleship. I want people to realize that their is much more to Christianity than getting to heaven. We can experience God's Kingdom here and now but so many people don't know this. I believe my mission is to share and show this to others.

So, what is your shadow mission and what is your God mission?