The Genius of Jesus—GLSnext Event Series Notes

Exploring the lives of geniuses brings us new ways to look at the world. Few leaders know this better than Erwin Raphael McManus. In this talk at the GLSnext Event Series on May 5, 2022, Erwin explored the profound gravity that Jesus’ life and teaching has on leadership, drawing from his latest book, The Genius of Jesus.

Enjoy these official notes from his talk on The Genius of Jesus.

What does it mean to be uniquely human?

• • • This is a leadership conversation.
    • We’ve turned leadership into a domain of knowledge without ever paying attention to what it means to be human.
    • If you’re a leader, your expertise should not be leadership. Your expertise should be humanity.
    • One of the things that’s significantly different about human beings is that human beings have the capacity to materialize the invisible.
    • All around us we see the materialization of the human imagination.

The Creativity of Humans

• • • When we talk about the future, we most often talk about the future as if it already exists, as if it’s something that happens to us, rather than something that happens from us.
    • Humans create futures in the way that bees create honey, ants create colonies, and silkworms create silk.
    • Once you connect this to the essence of being created in the image of God, we realize we were imagined to imagine and created to create.
    • All of us are both works of art and artists at work.

We don’t know how to do human well.

• • • You feel it in the language of depression, anxiety, and despair.
    • You see in the outcome of suicide.
    • You see it when a person is paralyzed and is afraid, not of death, but of life.

The Weight and Power of Leadership

• • • Leadership cannot simply be about where we’re going, but who we are becoming.
    • If we can begin by asking the question, not just, “Who am I?” But “What am I?” we can actually begin to lead people more effectively.
    • What if leadership was not about convincing people to follow you in a certain direction, but about unlocking the full capacity and potential inside of every human being?
    • What if inside of every human being there was a latent genius waiting to be awakened? And the real power of leadership is to bring that genius into reality for that person?

The Art of Communication

• • • If leadership is our calling, then the human spirit is our canvas and our art form.
    • You cannot change the world if you cannot translate your ideas, your values, and your vision into language. You cannot bring healing. You cannot transform the inner world until you take mastery over the words that shape who you are.

The Power of Story

• • • We cannot carry an emotion without a story.
    • The sum of who you are is the manifestation of the story you’ve convinced is the story of you.
    • You cannot carry bitterness unless there’s a story attached to it.
    • Leadership, in its most powerful form, is expressed when we begin to give people a better story to live on.
    • I began to realize that a part of the movement of Jesus was the power of the stories we tell.

Phantom Pain & Loss

• • • Phantom pain happens when you lose a limb, when you lose a part of you that once belonged to you.
    • Phantom pain only happens when you lose something that was once yours.
    • I am convinced that human ideals are the phantom pain of the soul.
    • We actually believe and talk about things like world peace, when we have never known, not one generation or era, peace on earth.
    • Human beings are actually motivated by ideals we have never experienced. How is it possible to even conceptualize something we’ve never experienced at all?
    • I think it’s interesting when people say to me, “I can’t believe in God because I’ve never seen it, or seen Him, or seen proof of Him.” And I wonder, how in the world do you believe in love, or in peace, or in justice?
    • We long for a world where every human being is treated with dignity, respect, and compassion. Those are the human ideals that are the phantom pain of the soul.
    • I think our souls remember what it’s like to be human, and long to be, somehow reconnected with our highest ideals, to becoming the best version of us.

Humans Are Open Looped Creatures

• • • The powerful thing about our words is that when you speak words into a human being, you are literally affecting the universe within them.
    • If we were closed-loop creatures, nothing from the outside environment would affect you.
    • We can actually breathe into each other. We can exhale what is within us and translate it into the essence, into the soul, to the inner world of another human being.
    • Imagine when we are full of hope how we can translate hope to another person. How, when we are full of love, we can translate love into another human being. When we are filled with life, we can translate life into another person.

Shifting Our View of Leadership

• • • Imagine if we shifted our view of leadership from, “How do I get people to do what I need them to do?” to “How do I help people become who God designed them to become?”
    • The future is not fate. The future is not magic. The future isn’t something we step into—the future is what comes out of us.
    • Human beings are designed to create futures.
    • Every day when you choose, you are choosing a future. Every day when you act, you are creating a future.
    • You don’t have to look inside of yourself and think, there is not enough material to do what God created you to do. There is genius inside of you.
    • I know that 2% of adults test out as geniuses, but 98% of you were geniuses before you were convinced you are not.

What if the church became the epicenter of human creativity?

• • • What if every place where Jesus’ name was elevated, human capacity erupted?
    • Your only limitation is your highest thought. Your highest thought is your only ceiling.
    • God designed you to have this extraordinary space called the human imagination. And it’s on your imagination that God paints the most extraordinary future waiting to be created.
    • The future may be trapped by the words you will not speak. It’s time to open your mouth to paint on the canvas of the human spirit, to take mastery over the art of communication. And to know that you have been given the creative power of being created in the image and likeness of God.