I Can Do It All By Myself!

"I can do it all by myself!" Have you ever heard these words before, possibly from a child who is very independent? There are many times in life when we think we can handle everything on our own, whether it be job-related, church-related or otherwise. It's great if you can tackle many projects at once, but is it always best?

Delegation is the word that comes to mind with this particular subject. Hesitation is also another word that comes to mind, because so often we hesitate to delegate! Why is it that we are hesitant to pass things off to others to keep us from being bogged down and becoming inefficient? It seems that pride and fear keep us from delegation: pride because we want to show people we can accomplish the task and fear because we don't want to look like a failure for saying we need someone else to do it.

Consider the church. The role of servants (which I believe eventually developed into the role of deacons as described in 1 Tim. 3) came about as a result of the daily distribution of food needs which were threatening to take the apostles away from what they really needed to be doing. They needed to focus their efforts on prayer and the ministry of the word (Acts 6:4). It wasn't that the apostles didn't have the abilities to do this, rather it was that they needed to let someone else do it so they could fulfill their roles as apostles. This is called delegation, giving others responsibility to perform a certain task, and in turn it gets them involved in the work of the church. Though we don't have apostles among us today, the elders of the church should focus on the spiritual aspect of shepherding by delegating other areas of work to the deacons.

Go way back in time with me to see one of the earliest examples of delegation. Moses had a lot of responsibility placed on his shoulders in leading the Israelites out of Egypt. There was a point in time where he not only was a prophet, but he was also acting as a judge to determine the outcome of disputes between the people (Ex. 18:13ff). When his father-in-law, Jethro saw what was happening by these judgments taking up so much of Moses' time, he told Moses "what you are doing is not good" (17). This not only was taking too much time but it was going to wear everybody out. Jethro recommended a plan of action that would allow Moses to appoint others to judge the cases of the people, but Moses would be consulted when there were hard matters upon which to decide. Because of the advice of Jethro, Moses was able to delegate and therefore take a heavy burden off of his back, per se.

Never be afraid to delegate some task to someone else. Let go of the pride and/or fear that might cause you to help get someone else involved in the Lord's work. Delegate - don't hesitate!