Posted by Joe Filbrun

What are you doing? What's happening? What's on your mind?

Familiar questions, aren't they? Questions our culture is obsessed with. Questions we ask, answer, and have answered for us constantly. In fact, we see the effects of this all around us: regardless of the social sphere, an inordinate amount of time and effort is spent answering questions of what or how.

Thanks to this general obsession with what and how, there's no shortage of methods to choose from these days, and it's easy to stop asking the more important question: Why? Even within the church, the siren call to focus on methods and lose sight of our deep motivation can be incredibly difficult to ignore. But as a leader, especially in the church, you can never allow yourself or the people you're leading to stop asking why.

No matter how seductive the ad campaign, or how enticing the value proposition, as leaders in the church, we must keep our eyes firmly fixed on the ultimate goal, the reason why we're doing what we're doing. No, this isn't about the end justifying the means. It's about the end defining and guiding the means. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5 & 6, we do all that we do because "Christ's love compels us."

Asking Why? gets us beyond our behaviors and goes after our hearts. A heart captured by the Gospel is a heart flooded by the love of Jesus. And the life lived with Jesus is a constant response and a compelling answer to every why.

Living in a time of amazing technological innovation, with new methods cropping up constantly, it's easy to buy into the hype and believe that the magical, revolutionary new method will change everything. But if it's Christ's love that compels us, then the methods we choose and the posture with which we employ them must pass through an entirely different lens.

We'll humbly look at how our methods are connected to our hearts. Rather than being seduced by the marketing swagger of the latest product posing as a savior, we'll remember with Paul that it was Christ who died for all "that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again." We'll stop looking for salvation in methods, and insist that every method we employ serves our true motivation: to live as ambassadors entrusted with the message that God is "reconciling the world to himself in Christ" (2 Cor. 5:18-20).