Four Kinds Of People Every Minister Will Meet by Apostle Johnson Suleman: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Every crisis in a work of God is not necessarily a setback. When conflict broke out between Abraham's herdsmen and Lot's herdsmen, God told Abraham that the very trouble caused by someone he had raised and trusted was actually positioning him for his next level Genesis 13. Someone God brings into an assignment can still become the occasion of real pain, and that pain does not automatically mean the assignment itself has failed.

The Gift of Men

1 Chronicles 12:22

From day to day men came to David to help him, until there was a great host, like the host of God. David became who he was partly because men came to stand with him.

The man at the pool who had been in his condition for thirty-eight years told Jesus plainly, "I have no man" John 5:7. The younger son in Luke 15:16 reached the point where no man gave to him. There is something that actively resists the gift of men in a person's life, and it can be broken. Not everyone who has ever been helped stays; if everyone a leader has ever touched remained permanently attached, there would be no room left to grow. But there is a difference between people leaving because a season is over and people being driven off deliberately, and a wise leader learns to know which is which.

Four Kinds of People Every Minister Will Meet

2 Kings 14:26-27

The Lord saw the affliction of Israel, that there was no helper, and He saved them by the hand of one man. Two of the four kinds of people below are dangerous. Two are genuine gifts.

1. The Jacob Kind (a gift)

   Genesis 30:27

   Laban said, "I have learned by experience that the Lord has blessed me for your sake." The Jacob kind of person is a multiplier. Whatever is placed in their hands, they increase. Given an assignment, they innovate rather than wait to be told each step, and they carry the work as though it were their own, needing little supervision. Availability is not the same as value; the Jacob kind of person is genuinely valuable. The caution is that they must be taken care of. A productive person who is neglected or underpaid will eventually respond to the voice of hunger, not the voice of God, and leave.

2. The Jonah Kind (dangerous)

   Jonah 1:4-6

   The Jonah kind of person causes crisis inside a system while remaining personally untraceable to it, sleeping through the very storm their presence has stirred up. They resist correction, quietly undermine structure, and their disrespect for spiritual authority tends to surface only after real damage has already been done. When someone consistently signals, directly or through their conduct, that "even this place cannot change me," the wisest response is often simply to let them go. No genuine work of God has a permanent vacuum; whoever replaces a person who leaves in rebellion very often does better than the one who left.

3. The Judas Kind (dangerous)

   John 13:2, John 12:6

   Then the devil put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot to betray Him. Scripture is direct about the reason for Judas's objection to the costly perfume, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief in charge of the money bag. The Judas kind of person is loyal to benefit, not to the vision. Their commitment is proportional to what passes through their hands; the moment personal advantage stops, the loyalty stops with it. They tend to stay closely connected to people who oppose the leader's authority, and their favorite disguise is a spiritual-sounding complaint, "why all this attention on one man, isn't it God we should be worshipping," which sounds humble but is actually a resistance to legitimate authority. Discernment here has real value: deliberately observing how a person responds when personal benefit is removed can reveal exactly who they are.

4. The Joseph Kind (a gift)

   Genesis 39:2-4

   The Lord was with Joseph, and his master saw that the Lord made all he did to prosper in his hand, so he was put in charge of everything. The Joseph kind of person protects the one they serve even under pressure to betray them, the way Joseph refused Potiphar's wife rather than exploit his position. These are people who guard a leader's weaknesses rather than expose them, the same way Peter, James, and John were the ones Jesus drew close in Gethsemane, when His own humanity and sorrow were on full display. Access to someone's vulnerability is a privilege; the right response to being trusted with it is to stand and cover, not to broadcast it. What determines whether a person moves to their next level is largely the relationships and information they surround themselves with.

Guard Against Those Who Sow Discord

People who come into an assignment either add, subtract, multiply, or divide. Of these, those who sow discord among brethren are the most damaging, quietly telling one person what another supposedly said until trust between people who once worked well together erodes entirely. The wisest response to gossip is often simply not to give it airtime; a leader who visibly refuses to engage with rumor starves it far more effectively than a leader who addresses it publicly.