Most Christian leaders have a habit for handling failure: confess it, learn from it, ask for help. Far fewer have any habit for handling applause. Dr. Nicole Martin argues that this gap matters, and she proposes a discipline she calls nailing it to the cross: once a day, you name a recent success before God and hand it back to him, so that it serves his purposes and stops propping up your sense of who you are. Over one week, you will read four short passages, test her idea against them, and try the discipline with your own hands.
You can work through the reading alone in about twenty minutes, then spend five minutes a day on the practice. A group can cover the reading and discussion in one meeting and compare notes a week later. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone your wins or your weaknesses. Where a prompt invites sharing, sharing stays optional.
Begin by counting
Before you read anything, take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write down every success from the last seven days you can remember: a meeting that went well, a compliment, a post people liked, a problem you solved, a moment someone said they needed you. On the right, write down every failure, mistake or weakness you noticed in yourself over the same week.
Stop after five minutes. Then look at the page and answer three observation questions in the margin:
- Which column filled faster?
- For which column do you already have a spiritual habit, such as confession, prayer or asking for help?
- Which items on the left would you be uneasy about losing?
Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end of the week.
You may find you have a practiced response to failure and none for success. The count will show whether that is true for you. If it is, Martin’s argument deserves a hearing, because she believes applause shapes a leader as surely as failure does.
Read the texts before the teacher
Read each passage below twice. The first time, write down only what the text actually says: who is speaking, to whom, and what verbs appear. The second time, write one sentence on what it might ask of a leader. Keep those two kinds of notes separate.
Luke 9:23
“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)
Notice the audience. Luke says Jesus spoke this “to them all,” not to a leadership class. Notice the word daily. Jesus describes a repeated act, not a single dramatic decision. Whatever surrender means, the text frames it as ordinary and recurring.
Galatians 2:20
“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)
Paul is not describing gloom. He says he lives. What has changed is who the life belongs to and what it rests on. In its setting, Paul is arguing that people are put right with God through faith rather than through performing the works of the law. The verse is first about the ground of a believer’s standing. A leader can fairly apply it to the ground of a leader’s identity, but that is application built on top of the text’s main point.
1 Corinthians 4:7
“For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7)
This one speaks directly to success. Paul writes to a church splitting into fan clubs around different teachers. His question does not deny that the Corinthians had real gifts. It asks where the gifts came from. A win you received cannot coherently become a trophy you built.
2 Corinthians 12:9-10
“My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul concludes in verse 10, “for when I am weak, then am I strong.”
Paul prayed three times for his thorn to be removed. The answer was not removal but grace. Note what Paul does next in verse 9: he says he will glory in his infirmities. He moves his boasting from his strengths to his weakness.
A note on the phrase itself
Scripture does contain the words “nailing it to his cross,” in Colossians 2:14. There Paul describes God blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us. That verse is about what God did with our debt. It is not a command for leaders to nail their successes anywhere. Martin’s phrase borrows the image and extends it into a discipline. That is a legitimate application if the passages above support it, and you should judge whether they do.
What Martin adds to the reading
On the Jude 3 Project podcast, Nicole Martin described why she built her leadership book around the cross. She said, “I think we have lost the important role that crucifixion plays in our lives.” She does not treat this as a leadership technique. “This isn’t just about leadership, this is life,” she said.
Her most useful contribution for this guide is that she puts success in the same sentence as sin and weakness. A faithful life, she says, requires awareness of sins and confession of them, and bringing weaknesses to the cross. Then she adds the third category: “that I’m aware of my success and the places where people like me and the places where I quote unquote go viral. And then I’m willing to say, God, take that. Use it for your glory. Nail that to the cross so that it might find glory in you.”
Notice the two parts, because they become steps one and four of the practice below. First comes awareness: she names where people like her. Second comes a request: she asks God to use it. She does not pretend the success did not happen. Her stated purpose is that she won’t “build myself up and think that that’s me.” That lines up closely with 1 Corinthians 4:7. The danger is not the gift. It is glorying as if you had not received it.
Martin also explains why wins grab hold so tightly, and this is the reason the practice ends with step five. “I think we refuse to acknowledge our insecurities,” she said. When leaders cover insecurity, the cover often looks like pride and self-promotion. She describes the inner voice that results: “I want my introduction to say fastest, greatest, best, you know, most fill in the blank.” On this account, clinging to success is often a way of hiding weakness.
She uses Paul’s thorn as her example. “We ignore the thorns in the flesh,” she said, and she warned that we can numb weakness so thoroughly “That we don’t even let it do its work.” She is speaking about spiritual avoidance. In the same conversation she called depression and anxiety “authentic conditions” and thanked God for counseling and medication. Surrendering a thorn to God never means refusing care for it.
Test the practice before you trust it
Any discipline of surrender can go wrong. Before you start, check the idea against four distortions. For each one, write down whether you are personally prone to it.
False modesty. Some leaders hear surrender your wins and start deflecting every compliment. That is not what Martin describes. When she talked about seeking God’s affirmation, she said, “the discipline is, Lord, help me to receive it when it comes from people that maybe I hadn’t even expected it from.” Receiving is part of the discipline. You cannot hand God a gift you refused to open.
Performed gloom. Martin said plainly, “I’m not suggesting that we wear sackcloth and ashes all the time.” Galatians 2:20 ends with a living person, loved by the Son of God. If the practice leaves you joyless, you have probably turned it into self-punishment.
A bargain. The subtlest distortion is surrendering wins so that God will hand you bigger ones. Martin named this directly. Clinging to the cross is “not because that’s the only way we’re gonna be successful.” She rejected the manipulative version that says, “If I give Jesus my heart, then he’ll give me the kingdom.” Her alternative was simpler: “I would rather have Jesus.” If you notice yourself keeping score of how surrender is paying off, that is the platform mindset returning in religious language.
An empty ritual. A daily routine of handing things over can itself become a performance, something you do to feel spiritual, or a box you tick without attention. If by midweek the words come out automatically, skip the practice for a day. Notice whether you miss it, and why. A discipline that only proves you are disciplined has become one more win to surrender.
Finally, Martin said, “there’s no such thing as having arrived.” Treat this as a first week, not a cure.
The practice: a daily handing over
For seven days, set aside five minutes at a consistent time, ideally before your first leadership responsibility of the day or at the end of the workday. Use the same notebook throughout.
- Name one win. Write down one specific success from the last twenty-four hours. Be concrete: not work went well but something like the board approved the proposal or three people thanked me after the talk.
- Receive it. Before you surrender it, thank God for it honestly. Say what was good about it. This step guards against false modesty.
- Trace where it came from. Using 1 Corinthians 4:7 as your prompt, write one line naming what you received that made the win possible: a skill you were given, a person who helped, an opportunity you did not create.
- Hand it over. Pray in your own words something close to Martin’s request: God, take this. Use it for your glory. Then write one way the win could serve someone else today.
- Name the thorn underneath. Ask what insecurity this win might be covering. You do not have to solve it. Write one word if that is all you can manage, and leave it before God.
On day four, add a step. Choose one person you lead and ask what is actually weighing on them right now, then listen without steering. Martin said that caring for discouraged people “is not a show of weakness to pause and care for them and give them hope. It is a show of strength to do that.” A surrendered win often becomes attention you can give away.
On day seven, return to the two-column page from the beginning. Add a third column for anything you noticed during the week. Compare how you felt about the left column then and now.
If you are leading a group through this, try the practice for a few days yourself before the first meeting, and feel free to describe it in general terms. Do not ask anyone to read their notebook aloud. If someone mentions an insecurity, resist answering it with a quick verse. When the group reconvenes, ask about the practice itself rather than people’s private entries: what was hard about it, what changed, what felt forced.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- When you did the opening count, which column did you have a spiritual habit for? What do you think explains that?
- Paul’s question in 1 Corinthians 4:7 assumes the Corinthians really had gifts. How does a leader tell the difference between honestly recognizing a gift and glorying as if it had not been received?
- Martin links pride to hidden insecurity. Does that match what you have seen in yourself or others, or are there forms of pride her account leaves out?
- Of the four distortions, which do you find most tempting, and why might that one appeal to you in particular?
- Lisa Fields observed in the same conversation that people who follow a prideful communicator tend to become prideful themselves. What might the people you lead be learning from how you handle success?
- After a week, did handing over your wins make you enjoy them more, less, or differently?
The second week
Keep the notebook open for another seven days, and drop any step that has gone stale for a step you write yourself from one of the four passages. Martin described the preference she hopes the cross will form in a leader: to dwell for one day “In the presence of the crucified savior than to spend thousands of days on my own platform in my own kingdom.” A second week will not settle that preference. It will tell you more honestly than the first where it currently stands.