Leadership Thought: Which Shelf Are You On?

Dear Friends,

This past Good Friday I shared an illustration I heard several years ago while attending an evangelism conference. At the conference one of the speakers presented an interesting way of offering an invitation to receive Jesus.

He invited us to think of a bookshelf. On the top shelf were the great saints like Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, and Corrie Ten Boom.

On the shelf below would be great people, many of them national heroes like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln Mahatma Gandhi etc.

On the next shelf would be the morally respectable, church going and law-abiding individuals who for want of a better word we might describe as good, but very ordinary people.

One the fourth shelf would be those whose reputations we might consider a little suspect-perhaps they would be the kind of people who cut corners ethically and morally, who seldom could be trusted, and whose life is lived primarily to serve themselves. They fall below the shelf of those ordinary people on the shelf above.

And on the bottom shelf are those who we would classify as morally despicable, the rapists, the bank robbers, the murderers, those we might consider the dregs of society.

The speaker then asked us to draw a line where we thought we would fall on these shelves.

Most people drew a horizontal line somewhere across one of those five shelves.

Having done that, the presenter then took a marker and drew a vertical line from top to bottom right down through the middle of the paper to point out that Jesus doesn’t measure goodness as the world measures goodness. It is not goodness that determines our salvation, but it is grace. It is not what we are, but whose we are, that determines, (pardon the expression), our shelf life.

The bible makes it abundantly clear that “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” (Rom. 3:23), and that “The wages of sin (not sins) is death,” (Rom. 6:23) or separation from God. No one is good, for we are reminded that “There are none righteous, no not one,” so how could anyone ever presume to be good enough to inherit the kingdom of God? And after all, doesn’t Jesus tell us “That you must be perfect even as your heavenly Father is perfect to inherit the kingdom God,” and who among us can live up to this standard?

You see the Mother Teresas and the Billy Grahams are  in the same boat as those residing on the bottom shelf if they have not received Jesus as Lord and Savior. No, God does not grade on a curve. It is not a person’s goodness, but a person’s faith that opens the door to salvation. It is God’s grace and not our goodness that determines our eternal destiny.

The line drawn straight down through the center of those shelves presents us with only two choices. We either possess a heart that is separated from Him, or a heart by faith that has yielded itself to Him. That is the only line that is of value in God’s economy.

Paul reminds us “It is by grace that you have been saved through faith, it is not of yourselves; it is a gift of God, not by works so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

I love what Oswald Chambers has written, “In new birth when one is born again, God does three things that are impossible: the first is to make man’s past as though it had never been; the second, to make a man new all over again, and the third, to make a man as certain of God as God is of Himself.”

May your ‘shelf life’ be eternal.

Yours in faith and friendship,
Tom