Great Leaders or Great Talkers? (Part 1)

Everyone has gifts that they are born with but those gifts need to be identified and nurtured in order to materialize and make a difference in their lives and the lives of those around them.  Leadership is just one of those gifts one may be born with but never realized for many reasons. I believe many will go to their graves without ever identifying their God-given gifts and talents partly because those that had the power to help them didn’t mentor them or because the individual themselves weren’t willing to put in the effort to nurture their own souls to develop their personal gifting. This may sound a little cold and calculating but I believe history will back this up. I do not believe we are solely a product of our environment but are a combination of others, ourselves and God’s purposes in our lives. The question often comes up…….Isn’t God’s will always done? Isn’t he “Sovereign”?

Way too often we try to solve complex issues through simple answers by identifying simple solutions. I have challenged others for making this mistake and, at the same time, made simple answers to hard and complex problems myself.  What I want to do is pose the question of personal destiny and how we arrive or miss our God ordained gifting.  Even though God has a great plan for our lives by using the gifts he has given us it doesn’t mean those callings or gifting will ever change us or others. Let’s speak first about the idea of “God Always Getting What He Has Designed”.

First, if we go back to the book of Genesis, we discover that God intended for our first parent to be blessed and productive.  History bears out that our first parents never enjoyed for very long all that God intended for them to enjoy. Adam and Eve were given the task to cultivate the garden of Eden and they were told not to eat from the tree of good and evil. Many have asked why God would put such a tree in the garden if he wanted our first parents to truly be blessed and not cursed. The truth is in the test which destroyed their potential for being blessed and being a blessing.

Genesis 2:15-17 

“Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

As you read through the scriptures you discover that God is always trying to get man to desire goodness over evil and, at the same time, God gives man the option of choosing between opposites. Without the options to choose one thing or another there is no true freedom in an individual or humanity at large. You can’t discover if someone loves you unless you give them the option to hate you. Life is a test of choices.  What we desire, in most cases, can be chosen even if the cost is high. I had the privilege of knowing Richard Wormbrand when I lived in California. He had been tortured in communist Romanian for years for his faith. Had he chosen to deny his faith he would have been freed from prison, but he chose to endure torture for the sake of his love for God. The reason I bring him up is that often people will say you are forced to do thing against your will in life. Richard Wormbrand is a good example of just the opposite. No matter how hard the circumstances in life may become we always have free will to choose our path. People may restrict your travel down that path, but we all have our God-given freedom to choose between opposites……just like our first parents in the garden we are free to choose.

So, even when God designed greatness in us we can go against his wishes. God would be considered cruel and unjust if he designed man to do evil and then judged him guilty and punished him. The world listens to Christians teaching that God is sovereign over everything and then he sends people to hell for what they had no power to resist. As believers, it feels comforting to say God is sovereign in our life when things seem unfair and we don’t understand why God didn’t change the outcome of those things. Many have been taught the sovereignty concept that on the front end seems to answer the question of why life seems unfair and yet on the back end it makes God look unjust and cruel.  King David and others in the Old Testament spoke about God being a just God.  So, if that is true, our concept of how he leaves us to choose and deal with our actions has to line up with our understanding of what is just and fair or they are not truly just. Let me also say for the record that you can’t have one definition of justice for man and one for God. The very use of language breaks down if we have two standards or definitions. If justice is different for God than for man then the case for reading the Bible is a waste of time if the words aren’t what God meant. Definitions are important.

Deuteronomy 16:19-20 

“You shall not distort justice; you shall not be partial, and you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous. “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, that you may live and possess the land which the LORD your God is giving you.

Moses gave the children of Israel the thoughts of God so they would order their lives accordingly. If God’s justice was not the same as God’s then the law of God means nothing.  When King Solomon was given whatever he asked for he asked for the right thing and God blessed him greatly. God so loved Solomon’s request for wisdom to know what is just and right that he gave him what he did not ask for.

1 Kings 3:11-13

God said to him, “Because you have asked this thing and have not asked for yourself long life, nor have asked riches for yourself, nor have you asked for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself discernment to understand justice, ¹²behold, I have done according to your words. Behold, I have given you a wise and discerning heart, so that there has been no one like you before you, nor shall one like you arise after you. “I have also given you what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that there will not be any among the kings like you all your days.

David wrote that God was both good and upright – if those words do not mean what they say then there is nothing reliable in God to trust. Too many say that God’s ways are above our ways but that doesn’t mean that our understanding of justice is different from God.  God’s ways are far superior to ours because of his vast insight and understanding, not because of the basics of justice and fairness.

Psalms 25:8-10 

Good and upright is the LORD; Therefore He instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in justice, and He teaches the humble His way.  All the paths of the LORD are lovingkindness and truth To those who keep His covenant and His testimonies.

We could grapple with this current misapplication of the sovereignty of God for hours, but space in this article is limited. Let me close by saying that each of us are blessed with great potential!  However, that doesn’t mean that just because God gave us such potential, or desires us to use it for good, that we will actually take that path.  To illustrate, consider Jesus and his simple action of prayer.  The book Philippians says that Jesus emptied himself of all his powers and became a man. Therefore, he was obligated to discipline himself in order to accomplish his God-given role of becoming the savior of the whole world. One factor was his need to pray before dawn even though his body and mind were tired.

Mark 1:35 

In the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went away to a secluded place, and was praying there.

Jesus didn’t just tell people what to do, he showed them by example. A great leader does not drive people but leads them. Jesus set the example for us to follow. He prayed when it was not convenient or easy. He got up before his disciples to lead by example. Don’t be fooled by leaders that talk a good game. We have become a people who love a charismatic speaker without looking to see if that person is walking like they instruct others to. If you find a leader that lives in the Kingdom more than he talks about it – follow him!

Questions:

1) Are you waiting for God to “cause” you to follow Him? Repent and ask for His help to follow.

2) Have you been caught wanting a flashy speaker to follow rather than one that leads by example? Evaluate why.

The second article on this topic will be dealing with what causes us to walk in our gifting and calling.

Pastor Dale