How to be Actually Influential

How to Actually Be Influential

Trust is running out.

In 2007, 43% of Australians said the people running the country could be trusted to do the right thing. By 2019 it was 25%. Cut in half in just over a decade.

The church hasn't been exempt. When Roy Morgan first measured it in 1996, ministers of religion were the sixth most trusted profession in Australia, ahead of police and judges. By 2021 we had dropped to thirty per cent.

And now you can't even trust your own eyes. AI means a video of me saying something I never said is only a matter of time.

That's the water we're swimming in. But here's the thing. In a country running out of trust, the people who will shape what happens next, in their families, in their workplaces, in our culture, are the ones who can actually be trusted.

Real influence goes to the trusted.

Wanting influence is not a sin

I've always been ambitious. That's an uncomfortable thing to admit in this country, and even more uncomfortable in church, where putting your hand up and saying I could do that gets you the look.

We value humility, and rightly. It took me years to work out that humility and wanting influence are not enemies.

The wanting isn't the problem. It's page one of the Bible.

God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

Genesis 1:28

Paul agrees.

Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task.

1 Timothy 3:1

He takes the two words we're nervous about, aspires and desires, and blesses them both.

So if you follow Jesus, you should want influence. In your family. At work. For God's kingdom. Jesus said let your light shine, not keep it under a bucket where it feels safe.

The wanting is fine. It's the how that gets us into trouble.

Two different lists

Our culture has a list for how you get influence. Be impressive. Be beautiful. Be loud. Be angry. Be first.

1 Timothy is a handover letter. Paul is old and near the end, writing to a young leader running a church that is a mess. He has a list too. It is completely different.

God doesn't hand things to the impressive. He hands them to the trustworthy.

Three principles. All three are about order. All three are about what comes first.

1. Mercy before merit

Paul doesn't open his handover with instructions. He opens with his own record.

I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointing me to his service. Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy.

1 Timothy 1:12-13

Read that again. He considered me trustworthy. Jesus looked at a man who was hunting Christians and dragging families out of their homes, called him trustworthy, and handed him the gospel.

That is not a reward. Paul had not earned a thing.

And notice the tense a few verses later: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst." Not was. Years into ministry, his assessment of himself hasn't improved.

That isn't low self-esteem. That's remembering mercy. Skip this and everything else becomes a self-improvement plan, or worse, a reason to think you're better than other people.

The people you can actually trust are the people who know exactly what they are and have stopped pretending otherwise.

2. Private before public

Paul does eventually describe the kind of person you hand a church to (1 Timothy 3:2-7). Listen to what isn't in that list. Nothing about giftedness. Nothing about results. Nothing about how many people they can draw.

Paul is the most experienced church planter in history and he says nothing about how to grow a church. Why? Because character matters more than strategy.

Now watch the order:

Public reputation matters. But it's built last, not first. Most of us want to run that list backwards and hope the private life catches up.

Trustworthiness begins with what you do when there's no advantage in it.

3. Reps before results

My kids are starting to dream. They want to be great at sport, or music, or get good marks. They don't especially want to do the daily work that gets you there.

There are two desires at war in us.

I want to be healthy. But right now I'm craving chips. I want a great marriage. But right now I'm tired. I want to know God. But I don't want to sit and read the Bible.

The shallow desire wants the result. The deep desire is willing to do the reps.

Paul puts it like this:

Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

1 Timothy 4:7-8

Train yourself. That's a gym word.

There's an enormous difference between trying and training. Trying is deciding, in the moment, to be a better person. Training is what you did in the weeks beforehand so that in the moment you actually could be.

You cannot try your way into character. Nobody drifts into generosity. Nobody wakes up one morning and discovers they've become someone you'd trust with their children.

So what does training look like?

And then Paul says something remarkable about what the training produces:

Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress.

1 Timothy 4:15

Not your arrival. Your progress.

Nobody is watching to see if you've arrived. They're watching to see if you're moving.

He trusted you first

Here's the strange and wonderful thing.

God entrusted himself to untrustworthy people. That's the story of the whole Bible. He put his gospel in the hands of a persecutor. He put a church in the hands of a nervous young man in a difficult city. Peter the betrayer. Moses the tongue-tied. Gideon the terrified.

If you're reading this thinking I'm not the person anyone should be relying on, I know what I'm actually like, then good news. God's mercy is new every morning. Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.

He does not wait for you to become trustworthy before he trusts you. He trusts you, and that is what begins to make you trustworthy.

This letter was written by a man in prison to a young pastor in a struggling church, in a backwater corner of an empire trying to stamp it out. No strategy. No platform. No buildings. Just a description of the kind of person God can make someone into.

Roughly a third of the people alive today call themselves Christians.

It turns out this is how real influence actually works.

Mercy before merit. Private before public. Reps before results.

You say yeah, but I'm…

God says: I see what you can't see.