Be the leader God wants you to be

The next series of articles in this column will be dedicated to the lessons we learn from the psalms about what it means to be a Christian leader and a messenger of God. Today we shall discuss briefly some basic aspects of Christian leadership and link the discussion to the psalms.

Psalms 1

The first thing to note is that there is much in common between true Christian leadership and true secular leadership.

For example, good leaders must have a vision. They must have an idea of where they want to take the organisation they lead.

True leaders are not just managers who do a maintenance job of simply keeping the organisation going. True leaders must grow the organisation, take it from where they find it to a higher level, qualitatively and quantitatively.

But true leaders do not achieve this by forcing people to follow them. True leaders influence and inspire so that the people follow them willingly and voluntarily because they have bought into the leader’s vision.

This applies to both secular and religious leaders.

We are now ready to begin to identify some of the features of true Christian leadership.

In this regard, the first thing to understand about Christian leadership is that it is a calling. We are called by God: some are called to do great things; some are called to humbler missions, but every leader is called by God and we are called before we are born.

What God said to the prophet Jeremiah, he is saying to all of us: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5).

God called us even before the creation of the world. The question is: why did God call us?

Did he call us to be leaders so that we can feel that we are important messengers of the Creator and so that others can see that we were called?

Not exactly: God called us for his own purposes, and gave us the privilege of leadership so that we can play a role in the history of salvation and the coming of his Kingdom on earth as followers of Christ and participants in the redemptive mission of Christ.

In his letter to the Ephesians the apostle Paul says: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (1:4).

Again, in the letter to the Romans, Paul says: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (8:28).

We were created by God for his purpose and called by God for his purpose. The question is how should we respond when we feel God is calling us?

There are many examples of how to respond to God in the Bible. We can take the example of Mary or of Jesus himself.

But for the purpose of this article I will cite the example of Isaiah. When Moses and Jeremiah were called by God they hesitated before they accepted, but not Isaiah. This is how he records his calling:

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ “

There was no hesitation, but complete acceptance and abandonment to God.

To be able to respond like Isaiah we must have the character of the messenger of God described in Psalm 1: “Whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and who meditates on his law day and night.”

We must be spiritual people, in other words; people who walk with God and whose decisions and actions are guided by the Holy Spirit.

Psalm 1 says a person who does this “is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither — whatever they do prospers”.