I have a few talents…. sure, but the one I’ve been perfecting since birth is: Irritation! Just ask my brother, sister, parents, wife. They’ll tell you I can be irritating with the best of them. I’m guessing at times, you can too. Most of the time the motivation for our irritating behavior is purely self-centered. However, it’s possible to be irritating for a good reason. Jesus was an irritating person.
This weekend I was a part of one of Word of Life’s Checkpoint Conferences. The speaker for our event was John Bouquet, pastor of Bethel Baptist in Savannah, OH. He said something that really caught my ear. He said,
“Jesus went places and had huge impact on a few people’s lives, but He irritated everyone else.”
After thinking about it a few minutes I realized how true that was. Sometimes we have this expectation that if we are doing great things for God, everyone will be in love with us. We think, if we’re giving it all we’ve got for something that’s really important, that people will see and love us for it.
But that’s really not true.
In fact, if you think about Jesus’ life, he made a lot of people mad. If your goal this year is to impact your community for Christ, you’re going to make people mad. If you want to step it up in 2011 and hold your students to a higher level, you’re going to tick some people off. If you want to see more students coming and hearing the Word of God this year, people will get irritated. So just get ready, it’s going to happen.
3 Steps to Being and Irritating Person (Borrowing from Pastor Bouquet’s Outline)
1. Live Like Jesus
All you have to do to be irritating is live like Jesus. By that I mean, constantly be about your Father’s business. Drop the non-essentials, work tirelessly for the Lord and always give Him the glory. Forget your plans, forget your agenda, forget your rights and forget your glory.
2. Lead Like Jesus
You’ll also irritate people if you lead like Jesus. Jesus was a leader who loved the men he lead enough to call them out when they were wrong, to speak harshly to them when they needed it, and to hold them to a very high standard. Yet He was also a leader who spoke in love, was gentle and who was there for His men when they needed Him.
3. Love Like Jesus
Finally, you’ll find people are irritated with you when you love like Jesus. Jesus’ love was real, not self-serving and not lazy. Self-serving love is when you’re looking for what you can get out of it. I’ll love the people I think have the most potential for giving something back. Lazy love is when you just don’t want anybody to hate you so you say you love everyone and accept everything, but really you don’t care about anyone. But if you love like Jesus, you care enough about others to bring them the Truth with no regard to what it will every bring back to you.
