Pastors and Teachers - 3 truths you MUST believe before you speak!

If you want people to remember what you say, repeat what they heard and change their lives because of your presentation, there are three truths you must believe before you ever open your mouth.  Who you are, Why you are and Where you are going.

I specifically chose the word believe, because it is more than know.  We can know things that never make a difference in our lives, because they are simply head knowledge.  Beliefs are those convictions rooted in our hearts that must, by definition, impact who we are and what we do.  These three truths, that I am going to share, must be beliefs within you, if you desire to see change in the lives of others.  Without these beliefs, your words will simply be informational.  They will fail to engage, move and excite your audience.

There are a number of things that your audience sense long before you say anything.  Over the next few weeks, I will teach a number of these and they are all found in my course Speak To Impact.  If your audience senses a disconnect between who you say you are, who others say you are and what they sense you actually believe when you walk up front, your audience will filter everything you say and discard most of it. 

Since I am preaching to the choir, and there is a good chance that you will tell me that you already know these things, I would ask you to suspend your judgment long enough to ask yourself if these are things that you know, or these are things that have passed knowing, become beliefs and are actively impacting your actions and who you are.  I would also ask if you are regularly thinking through these truths, before you stand before your audiences so that you demeanor, thoughts, body language and attitude are all changed because of the power of these truths.

Our first truth is who you are and there are three keys to getting this truth right.

Key #1 - Whose you are

Most people start trying to figure out who they are by trying to figure out who they are.  But who you are matters much less than whose you are.  When you figure out whose you are, who you are falls in place.  Do you know whose you are?

We can tell ourselves, “I am a chosen child of the king”, but has the fact that we belong to an almighty God who created the universe, who spoke all things into being, a universe that is 19 billion light years from side to side, sunk into our own mind and in our own heart.  When we’ve gone through a bad week and we’re fighting with a board who doesn’t want to go with us, when we’ve had somebody criticize us or when we have trouble with our family - do we really sit down before we get up front and emphasize to ourselves “I belong to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. I belong to the one who spoke the universe into being and he loves me so much that he sent his Son to die on the cross for me.”  Do we so embed that in our thoughts that Revelation 4 - 5 rings true to us?  You remember the scene.   John has been transported to heaven in the Spirit and he’s in the throne room of God.  There he encounters the presence of almighty God and then encounters the presence of the Lamb.  Do we understand the majesty of the one to whom we belong?

To have that truth really impact us, we must stop and meditate on it.  I have spent time five, ten, fifteen minutes just envisioning the throne room of God in such a way that it changes my life, the feelings, everything about me because all of a sudden I am connected with whose I am, which is the foundation of who I am.

Key #2 - God’s declaration about us

We can know everything about God; we can know He is the great mighty creator of the universe.  We can know that he sent his son to die for us but that can be all head knowledge. God has declared in Romans chapter 8:17 that we’re heirs and joint heirs with Jesus his son.  Does that fill your heart before you ever step into the pulpit? The fact that you're a child, a brother, a sister of Jesus Christ who is God Almighty? Does that fill you with a sense of wonder?  Because that's God's declaration about who we are.

Key #3 - God’s calling

The third thing that's got to fill our hearts and lives before we ever get into a pulpit is his calling.  I'm not talking about the specifics of your own particular calling.  I'm talking about something a little bit more grand, a little bit more on a larger scale.  I'm talking about that Matthew 28:19-20 - you know the passage - Jesus Christ comes to his disciples and says this is my command to you. This is supposed to take precedence over everything that you do, everything that you are, every place that you go, all your hopes, all your dreams, all your desires. This is supposed to be primary in your life.

You are called to make disciples of all nations. Every time we step into the pulpit we must have a sense that people who don't know Christ we want to introduce to Christ, and those who do know Christ we want to draw them closer to him so that they can go out and be who God is called them to be.  If that is our calling if we continue to embed that in our minds, every time we go in front of people, it will fill you with that sense of destiny and when you walk in that sense, people know it.  They sense it, they smell it they taste it, it's there.  They don't know what it is, but subconsciously they know you're supposed to be there and you have a message for them.

Please scroll down.  Leave a comment.  In my next post I will deal with the second truth you must fully believe before you ever open your mouth if you want your words to be remembered, repeated and change lives.