Please enjoy this transcript of this episode with John Guest. It was transcribed and therefore might contain a few typos.
John Guest: 00:01 CT Studd said this if Christ be God and died for me, no sacrifice that I can ever make for him will be too great. There is a price to be paid. Nothing of any consequence is achieved without sacrifice.
Doug Smith: 00:25 This is the all L3 Leadership podcast, episode number 161.
Doug Smith: 00:33 What’s up everyone and welcome to another episode of the L3
Doug Smith: 00:35 Leadership podcast. My name is Doug Smith and I’m the founder of L3 Leadership. We are a leadership development company devoted to helping you become the best leader that you can be. If you’re new to the podcast, I just want you to know that we’re committed to bringing you three or four episodes every single month to help you grow and develop as a leader. One episode will always be from what leadership event that we hosted in our city. One will be an interview I do with the high-level leader and then once a month you’ll get a personal leadership lesson by me. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, it would mean the world to me. If you would subscribe and leave a rating and review on whatever service you listen to podcasts through. It really does help us grow our audience, so thank you for that in advance.
Doug Smith: 01:11 And of course you could obviously share this on social media as well. Thank you so much in advance for that. In this specific episode, you’re going to get to hear John Guest give a talk on the price of leadership. John is an absolute legend. He’s 81 years old. He’s originally from the UK, which is why he has such an amazing accent. I could listen to him talk all day and he’s been in ministry since he was 17 years old. He gave his life to Christ at that time at a Billy Graham meeting that a pastor invited him to. And he’s been in ministry now for over 40 years, specifically just in Pittsburgh. And he’s made a huge impact, huge, huge, huge impact in our city. And it was just such an honor to have him speak. But why I think this is so important for us to listen to is John has paid a huge price to obey the call of God on his life.
Doug Smith: 01:54 This isn’t just someone who’s giving a talk that’s talked a good game. This is someone who has lived a good game. You know, my pastor often says that he believes about 2% of Christian leaders make it to their finish line. And John certainly not at his finish line yet, but he’s certainly made it a lot farther than a lot of other Christian leaders I know. And I would be absolutely thrilled if I knew my life would look anything like John’s does when I’m 81 years old. And I kind of mentioned this already, but the best part is he’s not slowing down at all. You’ll hear him talk about his newest Kingdom of initiative in the talk. But I really believe that you’re going to come away from this talk fired up to go the distance and your leadership journey. But before we jump into John’s talk, I just have a few announcements.
Doug Smith: 02:33 The first thing I want to let you know about is a new leadership conference for church leaders and their staff. It’s called the Future Forward Conference. It’s put on by my friends at Amplify Church here in Pittsburgh and it’s going to be October 24th through the 26th listen, if you are a church leader, you need to be at this conference and you need to bring your entire team. If you’re not familiar with Amplify Church or look them up, they’re doing unbelievable things and making a huge impact in the next generation and that’s in large part because their senior pastor’s leadership, Lee Kreicher and his number two guy Jason Howard, they are phenomenal leaders. I’ve interviewed Lee and had Jason and Lee speak at one of our events. They are incredible and you want to soak up everything that they’re going to be sharing at this conference. So listen to me, church leaders get to this conference.
Doug Smith: 03:15 You can go to Futureforwardconference.com for more info. I also want to thank our sponsor, Henne Jewelers. They are jewelry owned by my friend and mentor, John Henne, my wife and I got our engagement and wedding rings through Henne Jewelers and we just loved our experience with them. Not only do they have great jewelry but they also love and care and invest in people. John gave Laura and I and actually they give every engaged couple of book to help them prepare for their marriage and John’s personally been investing in me as a leader, a father and a husband now for years. So listen to me if you’re in need of a good jeweler, check out Hennejewelers.com I also want to thank our other sponsor, Alex Tulandin real estate resources. Alex, as a full-time realtor and Keller with Keller Williams Realty, whose team’s committed to providing clients with highly effective premier real estate experiences throughout the Greater Pittsburgh region. He’s a member and a supporter of L3 Leadership. He would love the opportunity to meet with you and connect with you. You can find out more at pittsburgpropertyshowcase.com with that being said, enjoy John’s talk and I’ll be back at the end with a few announcements.
John Guest: 04:13 I’ve got two verses that are really the anchors, for my life when they came along the way as I got involved in ministry. The first is this, Joshua chapter one verse nine, which says, be strong and of good courage. Be not afraid. This is the old King James version. Be Not afraid and be not dismayed for the Lord thy God is with the, with a Soever thou goest. Joshua chapter one verse nine and the issue of exercising leadership, which I’m going to speak to, all too briefly, the issue of leadership is often a matter of courage.
John Guest: 05:07 It takes courage to lead. Leaders lead. And mostly when you take any kind of leadership step, you automatically factor in because you know it’s there. The opposition you’re going to have to deal with. So along the way, just to preach the word, which sounds like a simple thing for a preacher to do since that’s what he’s called a preacher takes an awful lot of courage and more so today where people keep putting fences around what you’re allowed to say. And so I know too many preachers because I listen to them who aren’t bold about what they have to say concerning God’s teaching from his word.
John Guest: 06:06 But to lead, whether you’re leading a congregation or a ministry or you’re part of a leadership team with whatever the factor is in which you operate. Well, leaders lead, bottom line, leaders lead and it takes courage to lead. My second verse is Ecclesiastes nine verse 10 whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your mites. In other words like Nike used to say, just do it and give it all you’ve got. So those two verses of being like anchors for whatever I get involved in, even to speak to you this morning, to speak courageously about leadership. Leadership is a rare gift. If God has given you the gift of leadership, then lead. I know that he will give you the courage and be with you in that leadership
John Guest: 07:26 and just go for it. Life is speeding by. You don’t have next year or 10 years down the road, go for it. It may surprise you to know. I hope it, it surprises you to know that I’m 81 years old, just had my 81st birthday and I’ve just started out on a new venture. I’m not going to pass these around, fancy, maybe you will do that for me. Ask you to pray for me and my wife. We’ve gotten ourselves over the last decade or so connected to the Urban Impact Foundation with pastor Ed Glover. Have you had him here speaking? Well, he is an inspiration so Kathy and I in the last six months have just committed ourselves and this may be our last Hurrah of ministry in Pittsburgh to the Urban Impact Foundation and to work with them and to speed that ministry right here on the north side further ahead. Right now it’s growing exponentially. The Lord’s anointing is on it. And maybe I just refer to pastor Ed and his wife Tammy along the way here because they are exhibit A of what it means to give yourself to a ministry or to leadership.
John Guest: 08:50 I want to take you to John chapter 10 and talk about the leadership image of Jesus. I’m speaking as a Christian and a Christian pasta and a Christian leader. I was exercising leadership before I was formally ordained. In fact, the day I gave my life to Jesus, he made me a leader in the sense that I had a heart for those who didn’t know him, who were as I was. I wasn’t raised religious. I wasn’t raised to go to church. My father took his own life when I was seven years old, left my mother with me, seven years old and two other children who were younger than I was. And we grew up poor. Oxford sounds nice and it’s a beautiful place. But we were living at the poverty level in the middle of you add up the years, the Second World War.
John Guest: 09:55 And, but the day I gave my life to Jesus, I was age, nearly 18. It became my desire that my family and others that I knew and hung out with in London, which is where I lived at the time, would get to know Jesus. And I used everything I had by way of influence and knowledge and which was very little at that time to influence people toward Christ. I wanted them to get to know him. I’ve asked God never to let me forget what it was like not to know him, what I was like the day before I got to know Jesus, And that transforming invasion of my life by the Lord Jesus because I surrendered my life, my will, my future to him turned me into an influencer wanting others to come to know him.
John Guest: 11:06 So that is a leadership mode to reach out to others and influence them however ever you might toward Christ. I had very little information. I didn’t own a Bible at the time. I’d only just go, began going to church, chasing a girl who’d broken my heart. That’s how I got there. And it was the pastor who one evening asked me to go and hear Billy Graham. I said I would. He bought me my first Bible getting the word that I had made a commitment to Christ, that the Graham Crusade, but leadership takes all kinds of forms. But that I became a leader for Jesus to lead people to Jesus. And that was my initial instinct as a follower, a new born again follower of Jesus. But as we went along and grew and grew in knowledge and grew about the kind of promise like Joshua chapter one and verse nine, which I took to heart very early in my life, it gave me a kind of boldness, sometimes very in my younger days, very rude and aggressive boldness. I would just about take anybody on with, I was like, did you see the movie Cool Hand Luke?
John Guest: 12:39 Well, he had like a handful of nothing but he, he laid it all down. I had a handful of nothing. I mean, I had Jesus, I had some information, but I would take people on without any knowledge. And whenever they said I quickly thought and gave them an answer, which wasn’t always very good. I was fairly ignorant of all the information on all the angles, but I just gave it my best shot. And I thank God for those days and I still think about the people that I witnessed to and occasionally pray for them, though their old men and women are days probably not even living. Anyway, that was a stepping stone and a very important one. So when I speak about leadership, it is a kind of ingrained instinct that says I have something that somebody else needs and I’m willing to risk passing it onto them that they may get in on it.
John Guest: 13:56 And that’s always been the name of my game. So that’s a gift from God. I take it, and I don’t know if you resonate to what I’ve just said, but I do want to cheer you on and encourage you. So when you come to John Chapter 10 and you’ve got Jesus using the image of the shepherd as a leader, a shepherd in the Middle East today, as in Jesus’ Day, was a leader. We tend to think of a pastor as woolying around with the sheep, sort of cozying up to them, loving them, a woolying alongside their wooly selves and somehow ooching them in the right direction. Listen to what Jesus said in John Chapter 10 I tell you the truth. This is verse one, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but claims in some other way is a thief and a robber. The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of his sheep.
John Guest: 15:16 The watchman opens the gate for him and listen to these words. The sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and next word leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them
John Guest: 15:47 and the sheep follow him
John Guest: 15:52 because they know his voice.
John Guest: 15:59 And today if you get the privilege of going to Israel and you see the shepherds out on the pretty barren looking hills, they go ahead of the sheep and they call them. They do know them by name and they know his voice as distinct from other shepherds. And other sheep and even phony shepherds, which Jesus goes on to speak about. The shepherd is a leadership image,
John Guest: 16:38 the shepherd goes ahead, i.e., he leads and he leads his sheep and he calls them by name and they follow him. He is leading, they are following. Later in that same chapter, verse 11 who said, I am the Good Shepherd,
John Guest: 17:06 The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, the hired hand King James version, the heiling, very degrading kind of word is not the shepherd who owns the sheep.
John Guest: 17:23 So he sees the wolf coming. He abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks and the flock scatters. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep. Well, let me just mention three or four things out of what I’ve read to you.
John Guest: 17:58 Without leadership, nothing goes in the right direction.
John Guest: 18:08 Without leadership, it invariably goes in the wrong direction. Things, it’s like a miracle. If things go in the right direction without leadership. They normally disintegrate whatever the enterprises and goes nowhere.
John Guest: 18:38 Leaders lead. Without leadership, things are going to go awry.
John Guest: 18:51 And you can see that in a family,
John Guest: 18:55 you can see it in industry, you can see it in government sad to say you see it in the Christian community in the church. Without leadership, things disintegrate, head in the wrong direction, fall apart without leadership
John Guest: 19:21 the sheep start squabbling with each other.
John Guest: 19:26 Fussing with each other. It’s not a very good scene.
John Guest: 19:38 To lead,
John Guest: 19:41 you have to have some idea here about where you’re going.
John Guest: 19:47 Let me give you three powerful words, vision, passion, and persistence.
John Guest: 19:57 Do you have a vision for your life? Has God given you a vision for your life?
John Guest: 20:05 We’re all exercising influence one way or another. I ran into a young man here who listened to me speak up, ManUp Pittsburgh, came to the breakout session that I was leading on being the spiritual leader of the family. All of us in our families have leadership influence with our children, with our husbands, with our wives. I have to tell you, my wife who I realized could have been here this morning and we were up and had our cup of tea and quiet time together before I came into Pittsburgh.
John Guest: 20:55 But she is an amazing influence in my life and the life of our children. We have four daughters, my five grandchildren. My wife has those instinctive pastoral leadership,
John Guest: 21:17 gifts and is very powerfully influential in my life. She is a spiritual leader.
John Guest: 21:32 She is so far ahead of me. I see that genuinely not to sort of fluff the ladies up here or whatever that means to the women in the group. I remember soon after we were married, I was sort of full of myself. We got my, I was 30 I got married, she’s seven years younger, so she was 24 I was sort of boasting and saying how great I thought I was. I’d done something great. I don’t know what it was. I’ve forgotten it. It was not that significant at age 30 I can tell you that, but I was going on about it. Then my wife sweet, some of you know her. She is amazing. She said, I love me. I love me. Oh, how I love myself. I love me. I love me. See my pictures on the shelf. Shirley have a said that once. Did she put me in my place? Absolutely. I’ve never forgotten what she said before I ever who put my mouth in front of my mouth. My wife, I think I love me. I love me. Oh, how I love myself.
John Guest: 23:11 Has leadership influence in the name of Jesus and in her sweet, cute to demule. She made me feel about that big and that may be too big. I mean she really put me in place. We all exercise influence.
John Guest: 23:40 Some of us have a real gift of leadership if you on that influence to gather people and lead a ministry of movement.
John Guest: 23:52 I honor Doug for working and leading this movement. I understand you to be the guy who does the gathering. I know you called me two or three or four times to be sure I was going to turn up. Plus you sent me emails and came to visit me and talked with me about what I might say.
John Guest: 24:14 First thing is to have a vision and ask God to give you a vision
John Guest: 24:25 and it may be just a temporary vision, I’ve been through all kinds of moods and directions along the way. It’ll astound you to know that I was at the front end of rock and roll Christianity.
John Guest: 24:44 I had a band, I had hair. I had phenomenal musicians around me. In fact, out of that ministry, some of you may know the Coalition for Christian Outreach. That’s how Christian, CCO was born. Something like we’d spend three days on a college campus and close to 400 students on nearly every campus we went to signed a card saying that they wanted to know more about the message we were issuing, proclaiming, First half of what we did with secular. We were not doing praise concerts. We had a few praise songs up our sleeve. So you played top 40 music, so we were doing Beatles. The Doors, The Stones. The second half sounded like the first of the concert. Second half was us telling our story back in those days, you could talk about what you were singing and saying. Most of the Christian conservative Evangelical Christians in those days regarded me as a worship music heretic. I was disinvited to places.
John Guest: 26:17 But I knew the undercover of a rock and roll band, I could influence other students with the Gospel and I had a vision for that.
John Guest: 26:36 The vision that brought me to Pittsburgh has already been stated.
John Guest: 26:42 I’d been married not a year when I ran into Reed Carpenter and I was looking for and I was traveling with guitar voice and speak about Jesus as I played, sang and I ran into Reed Carpenter at a conference up in New England, Rhode Island, where we were the two primary speakers, but I came with an English accent on the heels of the Beatles and with our style of music that was not conservative Christian, just as I am without one plea music, Reed and I spent time together talking about what we were doing with our lives. I was looking for something to commit myself to. I mean like a vision. I had a vision to share the gospel. That vision turned out to be Pittsburgh. Reed told me about a vision to make Pittsburghers famous for God as it was for steel. That became my vision. Within the year, my wife and I moved here. We’ve been here ever since. Our grave plots are already purchased. We have a son buried here. My mother is buried here.
John Guest: 28:13 We live in Pittsburgh. We belong here. God called us here and we’ve allied ourselves to whatever ministry there is in this city that is moving people towards faith in Jesus Christ. That became the big vision and were allied to all kinds of other strands, influences on what God has done in Pittsburgh since 1968 when we moved here is extraordinary. Not because of us, but all those strands of influence have had a powerful influence in this city. I can tell you this when we came here, Northway Christian Community, Cornerstone out the other end of the town, Orchard Hill, Bible Chapel in the South Hills, I could run you around the city. None of that was here, none of it. And God has raised up all those leaders over the years and it’s great to see what has been happening. So a vision. Secondly, a passion to bring energy to the vision. I know I hear people say nowadays, it’s the language of our culture. Present culture to say, I have a passion for youth ministry or whatever. What passion has to be exercised to bring energy, focus. I mean the Ecclesiastes, nine verse 10 is whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. Give it your best shot. Go for it. Go for it. In fact, it’s one of my catchphrases. I picked that up over here. Go for it. That’s not an English phrase. Go for it. Get it done.
John Guest: 30:29 So whatever it is, bring passion to it, energy to it. Focus in such a way with whatever influence you have to move that vision forward. I have not given up on Pittsburgh, I have not retired. And I know you probably hear a pastor maybe here and there say that there is no such thing as retirement. None of you even thinking about retirement, I would imagine right now. God never puts you out to pasture, does not discharge you. He’s got a plan for your life. On my 40th birthday, I was having my devotions and I came across Jeremiah Chapter 29 of verse 11 I know the plans I have for you. Plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. God has plans. Getting in on that plan, seeking his mind for your vision and then bringing passion to it, living your life as though you really believe that that is a calling that God has given you and to go for it. And then persistence, vision, passion, and persistence. The scripture says very plainly to those who are weary, getting weary and well-doing not to be weary in well doing because in due time you will reap. If you continue to sow, you will reap. So to keep on keeping on.
John Guest: 32:21 That’s a good word to a maybe this generation of young leaders. How’s the large leadership conference? Years ago down in Miami, I was on the speaker. I was sitting in an arena. Pat, was the coach for the Miami Heat. He was one of the speakers, so it was George Herbert Walker Bush, so was Maggie Thatcher, so they had these magnificent leaders. One after another. Speaking about leadership, one chap who put the conference together said, I’m going to give you a Freebie over lunch. Get your lunch Gaman and sit in the arena. I’ll give you the Freebie. I was there. He said the one common denominator of all these leaders is that when the going got tough, they didn’t quit. He said, there are those who will never know what they might have become or gotten done, what kind of success they might have had had. They not quit, but things got tough and so they quit. Persistence, perseverance, keeping on keeping on.
John Guest: 33:48 One person who has written a book about a faithful walk in the same direction to keep on keeping on. I don’t know that I’ve ever quit. Whatever I set my hand to, I’ve kept going.
John Guest: 34:19 no, I’ve been betrayed. Let down failed myself along the way. Across the span of this life that I’ve lived, it hasn’t been all peaches and cream. People look at what you may have accomplished and think, wow, and have no idea the price that was paid along the way. Jesus kept going until a time,
John Guest: 35:06 he had a vision for his life that led to the cross. You read in the Gospels, John’s Gospel in particular, where it kept saying whether they wanted to move kingdom, a king or a leader or whatever. His time had not yet come. Then you get to John Chapter 17 and he’s praying to the father and he says, father, the time has come. Glorify your son
John Guest: 35:38 with the glory had with you before the world began.
John Guest: 35:44 His time, he knew that was it.
John Guest: 35:56 Apparently God’s still got stuff for me to do. People to influence, Gospel to preach, other leaders to encourage, encouraging you guys. Have you got your vision? Are you bringing that passion? Will you keep on keeping on? Don’t quit.
John Guest: 36:23 Keep on keeping on. Three other things I want to mention all too briefly. I’m just about done here, Doug, even though I’ve spoken too long already. Maybe three things. First is this, build a team. If you only work by yourself, and that’s the tendency today because you can get so much done on your own iPad or computer. I say to anybody like the staff that I’m still a part of at Christ Church at Grove Farm, and I’ll be saying the same thing with the staff at Urban Impact where I will have some influence. Slow Ed is really the leader, Pastor Ed Glover, not really, he is end of story.
John Guest: 37:32 You will only ever get done as much as you can do alone if you work by yourself. So, it’s a simple statement and you will beat yourself to death. You will wear yourself out if your vision has got any kind of potential to it. We have to build a team. You have to gather others to the vision. That means you’ve got to get to know people. When Jesus uses this analogy, did you notice that phrase? He knows his own sheep and calls them by name. Do you know the price you have to pay you to get involved at people’s lives at that level when you turn that into human beings and not sheep on a hillside? To get to know people, to spend time with them, open your home to them, open your family to them, open yourself to them?
John Guest: 38:37 We have a battle on our own hands for ourselves to be authentic, authentic leaders, authentic influences, authentic followers of Jesus, authentic to the calling, authentic to the vision. We say we are authentic to the passion. We see when have we battle for authenticity. That’s a real battle. I know it. I’m still battling for it. I want to be authentic. When I mentioned that my wife and I had our quiet time together this morning before I came out. That was a little bit of influence, hoping that you had the same thing with your husbands or wives or your family.
John Guest: 39:26 I’m going to give you this book by the way, Doug. It’s a Life Focus, New Testament. I got it published. I didn’t do the work that’s in it. Walked through the Bible, did the work that’s in it and they had it by another name, like a closer walk, New Testament. This is gold. My wife and I read it together every day. You read through the New Testament in a year. Each day it takes one piece of truth from what you’ve read and gives you a page of teaching on it and it’s dated all the way through the year from January one through December, what is it, 31 days and December 31 it quotes a great Christian leader of the past every day. It’s got a list of those teachers, preachers, missionaries, all the way back to the early centuries and it gives you a one-line description of who they are at the back of this book and the dates so that you can place them somewhere in your mind in history. You can take a look at this. This is for you, Doug. I’ll just give this to you. I’d love to be able to bring enough and give every one of you,
John Guest: 40:52 I’ll let you get onto this by it if you want it, but my wife and I read it together every day and we just keep reading it around together and we have a quiet time and we prayed together. We prayed about this meeting and my wife breathed for me in speaking here, so I trust that the Lord is speaking through me as I prayed right at the beginning, but to be authentic, that gets down to right the very core of who we are. If we’re going to lead and people are going to follow and we gather a team and we want to be influences of the team and lead the team who are, we are the core of that and our own relationship to Christ and the nursing of that relationship and the development of that relationship and holding each other accountable like my wife held me accountable. Having friends who you let in, we do nothing by ourselves. Reed Carpenter and I became soulmates.
John Guest: 41:53 We spent all kinds of time together and our family time together. I’ve got a photograph on my desk to this day of Reed Carpenter on a motorcycle with two of my daughters on it with him. They were just little girls at the time, but we’ve spent hours together. We were in New York City standing on a street corner together when the idea of a Pittsburgh leadership foundation was born. We were there in New York to talk to some other leaders about some other business. Looking back at Pittsburgh and said, how do you manage
John Guest: 42:31 and direct the influence of the Christian community in Pittsburgh? Well you need resources. And that’s the second thing. Build a team. Then you’ve got to get resources. The team is a resource, by the way,
John Guest: 42:55 the whole concept of the David and Jonathan relationship in the Bible, I longed for as a young Christian, somebody I could connect with, commit with us, lay it all down, guts on the line to get done what God wanted to get done.
John Guest: 43:19 You never get there without a team and have an authentic team. If you are going to be the leader of the team, you want to be an authentic follower of Jesus, sensitive to his leading. I would say that Pastor ed Glover and his wife Tammy, absolutely positively exhibit in their lives what they want the other, the others in the team to be and they gladly the team follow them, are willing to pay the same price. So the last thing is this because there’s a price to be paid in being vulnerable on. Some of you are really intimidated by that very idea right now, and I understand that I was born stiff upper lip in England. The British don’t open up their hearts
John Guest: 44:17 they’re not very vulnerable. The British style is not to be vulnerable. Americans looked incredibly vulnerable to me when I first came here. And then a group of leaders in this town, Reed Carpenter, into one of them sat down in a motel room they rented for the afternoon, had invited me in and started talking about their own lives and they went around the room and they came to me and I wasn’t ready to talk about myself at all, nor be vulnerable as they were. I understand that problem, but by the grace of God, he’s opened me up and made me willing to share my life, willing to be engaged with someone else, vitally for the calls. That’s much larger than either of us. And then to build that team around that leadership.
John Guest: 45:17 There is a price to be paid in that and that’s a part of the price
John Guest: 45:25 you’re weighing right now, almost guaranteed. You are weighing. Do I want to pay the kind of price to be the kind of leader that John Guest is speaking about right now? Well, I would say to you that the United States of America and the world desperately needs that kind of leadership. I would encourage you to get into biographies. Do you know the name Hudson Taylor? Write it down. Hudson Taylor. He was an early missionary to inland China. He adopted the Chinese lifestyle. Had One of those pigtails were in the middle 18 hundreds when I tell you this today, more people are coming to Christ every day in China than the rest of the world put together. Did you know that it all began? Not Literally all began, but one of the great influences still at a distance over the centuries is Hudson Taylor. Do you know the name? CT Stud? Write that down. C T Stud. I think his biography written by a son-in-law is called cricketer and pioneer. He played cricket for England. He was a great athlete.
John Guest: 47:13 he paid the price.
John Guest: 47:17 I noted in the lobby upstairs. It’s something like the Livingston Lobby. Do you know who David Livingstone was? He was the missionary who opened up Africa to the Gospel.
John Guest: 47:34 David Livingston. Do you know the name? Jim Elliott. He goes back to his fairly recent, the 1950s his wife Elizabeth Elliot died recently, but he, along with four other men were martyred trying to reach a tribe in Ecuador, South America that had been unreached with the Gospel.
John Guest: 47:59 The first day they engaged actually got into the Alca Indian tribe, all five were massacred all five men. Their wives were sitting back at the base from which these folks have flown out in a little missionary aviation fellowship plane.
John Guest: 48:22 The Chameleons said this,
John Guest: 48:25 he is no fool, who gives what he cannot keep to gain, what he cannot lose was a young man. His wife Elizabeth went back into the Alka Indians, this with a little two-year-old daughter,
John Guest: 48:44 to reach out to them, translate the Gospel into their language. That all in, just the last century CT Stud said this, if Christ be God and died for me, no sacrifice that I could ever make for him will be too great. There is a price to be paid. Nothing of any consequence is achieved without sacrifice.
John Guest: 49:25 Nothing of any consequence is achieved without sacrifice. Let me pray with you. Lord Jesus, thank you for this time together. Pray that you have been walking around these tables, visiting with each of us. Thank you for the opportunity to know you, to love you and to serve you.
John Guest: 49:54 Thank you for paying the price of laying down your life for us.
John Guest: 50:03 Thank you for that huge sacrifice and becoming one of us. Thank you for your statement to us here this morning that as the father sent me, so I send you. So I do pray for
John Guest: 50:27 each man and woman here this morning and those who will listen to the podcast.
John Guest: 50:38 Lord Jesus, we need you. We do not move a step apart from you.
John Guest: 50:51 Without you, we can do nothing of any consequence with you. All things are possible. Give us the courage to live our lives for you and ground that we may take. The energy is some force of our own personality and resources and lay them at your feet that you may, that you might direct us and use us. Inspire us. Keep us going. Lord, we need you. We pray in your name, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Doug Smith: 51:38 Hey everyone. Thank you so much for listening to John Guest Talk. I really hope it added value to your life. You could find ways to connect with him, links to everything that we discussed and more at L3leadership.org/episode161. I want to let you know we recently introduced L3 membership. That’s right. You can now become a member of L3 Leadership. Why become a member? One, I believe that you need a group of leaders to go through life with. It’ll encourage you, hold you accountable to your goals and help you reach your potential and it out. Three we’ve developed that community of leaders that are ready to help you as a member. You’ll get access to our community of leaders. You’ll have the ability to join a mastermind group, which I believe is absolutely critical to your success. You’ll get access to resources, extra content in a member-only forum on our member-only site and membership is only $25 a month.
Doug Smith: 52:23 You get all of that for that and you can sign up at L3leadership.org/membership. If you enjoy the podcast, it would mean the world to me if you’d subscribe and leave a rating and review or share this on social media, all of which help us get the word out about it. Thank you so much for being a listener. I never take one listener for granted, so thank you. Thank you, thank you. And lastly, if you want to get a stay up today with everything that we’re doing here at L3 Leadership, you can simply sign up for our email list at L3leadership.org as always, I’d like to end with a quote, and I’ll quote Bill Hybels for this one. He said, “The world needs your leadership. We can’t afford to lose any more fantastic leaders.” The world needs your leadership. Thank you for listening and being a part of L3 Leadership. Laura, and I appreciate you so much and we’ll talk to you next episode.
