Leading
You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.
Mathew 20:25-28
Are you leading well or poorly?
Everyone is leading. Leadership starts with leading yourself. After we have practiced leading ourselves, we can begin influencing others. Our influence over others will grow in direct proportion to how we influence ourselves. The better we become at leading ourselves, the better we will be at leading others. Here in Matthew, Jesus says that leadership is the act of serving. So how do we begin leading ourselves? By first serving ourselves by taking care of our bodies and our spirits. As we develop healthy habits of serving ourselves by taking care of our needs we begin to have extra resources. We can use those resources to continue to please and serve ourselves, which will be poor leadership, or we can use our excess resources to serve others. By taking care of ourselves, we are able to serve and take care of others.
The greatest leadership training tool and resource is your spouse.
Many studies have shown that there is a lack of leaders in our society. Because our spouse is the greatest leadership training resource we have available to us, it’s no wonder that there is a leadership problem in our world today because of the high divorce rate. The bad habits of not serving ourselves but seeking to please ourselves will bleed into our marriage relationships. If we don’t learn how to serve our spouse, our marriage will end in divorce, and the greatest opportunity to continue our leadership development may disappear. We first have to learn how to lead ourselves before we can try to serve anyone else.“So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh,” (Ephesians 5:28-29a). While we share DNA with our biological parents and our biological children, we are only called to be one flesh with our spouses (Genesis 2:24). “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does. And likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Corinthians 7:4). As we learn to have good authority over our own bodies, we are able to have authority over our spouses body and serve them as our own.
Don't give up on your greatest resource even if the leadership lessons are challenging.
Marriage and parenting teach us the hardest but most important lessons in life—saying no to selfishness and saying yes to servanthood. In a family setting, especially with kids, we won’t last long if we only focus on serving ourselves. We have to move into serving the needs of others, sometimes even before we get our own needs met—often both day and night. This requires a deep mastery of leadership over self so we can fit meeting our own needs around meeting the needs of others. Our spouse and family are often more understanding and forgiving of our flaws, making them the prime location to learn self-control and service. Sadly, much of our society dismisses the value of family in learning practical leadership skills and many “fail” the applied academic rigors of learning leadership at home.
You can’t use what you don’t know.
If we don’t learn how to lead ourselves, we won’t have any leadership knowledge that we can pass on to others. When we learn to follow God in our own life, we are able to teach others how to follow God in their life. “Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things… You, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who preach that a man should not steal, do you steal? You who say, “Do not commit adultery,” do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who make your boast in the law, do you dishonor God through breaking the law? (Romans 2:1, 21-23). We must know how to lead ourselves before we can attempt to lead others. If we don’t learn discipline and how to lead ourselves through the family relationships we find ourselves in, we won’t be able to use the leadership skills we didn’t learn.