Influence: It’s About Ideas
God wants to bring great influence your way, just as he did with Joseph. There is a Pharaoh’s house for every Christian. It’s a place where God brings together everything you’ve learned for a great season of significant influence.
If you’re going to be ready for influence when it arrives, you will need to be an ideas person.
Mel Gibson’s movie masterpiece ‘The Passion of the Christ’ has defied easy categorization. It had people talking about it a year before its release. That’s rare in any movie - and even more so when it centres on a religious theme.
Why all the fuss? The movie caused controversy partly because people are not used to being confronted with Christian truth in the realm of mainstream art and thought.
Normally, they can dismiss Christianity out of hand, as irrelevant or having nothing to say to them. They’re used to Christians living in a cultural bubble. People aren’t used to meeting Christians in the arena of great ideas.
That’s a shame, because ideas are the great motivators of change. Ideas are the core of all good communication. Ideas drive history forward.
We cannot be people of influence unless we train ourselves to generate and work with ideas.
When Joseph finally appeared before Pharaoh, he was read for his moment of influence - he had a big idea to match his big revelation. ‘This is what God is showing Pharaoh,’ he explained, ‘and this is what you should do about it.’
To be influential, revelation must be married to great ideas.
Revelation is built on enlightenment, while ideas are based on education, both formal and informal. They’re different, but they are not mutually exclusive events.
In a truly enlightened mind, education is submitted to revelation; and revelation is applied through education.
We become people of ideas by deliberately developing our mental muscle. I am sometimes amazed at how little Christians read, and how uninspiring are their choices of reading material.
Edward de Bono said: ‘To write about the past you only need some skill as a writer: the past is there to be described. To write about the future also needs some skill as a thinker.’ If we’re to be future-minded people, we need to think!
Obesity is a huge problem in today’s world. It results from taking in more than we can burn on in useful physical activity.
Mental obesity can be just as dangerous. It involves taking in more than we can burn off in useful mental activity.
We need to burn off some of the overload of information we take in everyday; to use our knowledge in constructive ways.
We become people of ideas by making a practice of having ideas. If, as some psychologists have suggested, only perhaps six percent of our ideas are really useful, the more ideas we have, the greater the chance that we’ll come up with something really revolutionary! With ideas, quantity leads to quality.
We become ideas generators when we allow our ideas to be tested. Most of the time, you can tell if a prophetic word you’ve given someone is accurate within seconds - by their expression or response.
But think about Joseph. He had seven years to wait until his prophecy was fulfilled. He had seven years to think on what the consequences might be if he was wrong.
During those seven years he taxed the people heavily, taking a good percentage of their crops to store them for the coming drought. What would they do to him if the drought never came?
Joseph put his neck on the line to test his ideas. Many Christians will never step up to a higher level of influence simply because they won’t take a risk, they won’t allow their ideas to be subjected to trial.
Finally, being an ideas person involves an attitude of service. Helen Keller said, "Life is an exciting business and most exciting when lived for others."
Morgan Spurlock’s entertaining documentary, Super Size Me, demonstrated how much damage a steady diet of fast food can do to the human body.
At the end of a 30 day marathon of eating nothing but McDonald’s fast food, the downhill spiral in Spurlock’s health left even the medicos in shock.
The best thing about this movie, and the reason it has had an impact on viewers the world over, is that Spurlock put his own health on the line to make a point he felt needed to be made.
In a world of claim and counter-claim, of polls proving this and polls proving that it’s refreshing to see someone putting his or her future on the line for a cause. Real moral authority comes to those who put themselves in the firing line.
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