What Is Leadership?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, I have a leadership question for you, and it's really a foundational
00:00:08.520 | question. Broadly speaking, how do you define leadership? What does godly
00:00:12.440 | leadership look like, and what does godly leadership aim to achieve? I would define
00:00:17.760 | leadership as acting and speaking so as to create a following toward a goal.
00:00:26.520 | That'd be the most generic way I could think of doing it, which of course is
00:00:32.280 | morally neutral. I haven't said anything about what makes it Christian or godly,
00:00:38.120 | but that's what it would be wherever you talk about it. It seems like how you act
00:00:43.600 | and how you speak so as to create a following toward a goal. Then what makes
00:00:50.880 | that Christian, it seems like, what makes it godly or biblical is the goal is
00:00:57.520 | defined by Scripture. You want to take people, move people toward godliness,
00:01:05.520 | towards worship, towards honoring Jesus, towards loving people. And secondly, what
00:01:12.440 | makes it Christian would be that you care that the following be every people
00:01:19.840 | and tongue and tribe and nation. In other words, you're not prejudicial. You don't
00:01:25.200 | want to just get behind you the really cool people. That would be an ungodly
00:01:28.960 | leadership. You say, "I want to lead people, but the only people I want behind me,
00:01:32.400 | following me, are people who are so rich or so famous or so cool that they reflect
00:01:38.400 | well upon me in that way." You don't have that attitude at all. You want the people
00:01:44.480 | following you to be of all kinds of people without that kind of prejudicial,
00:01:49.840 | partial bent. And the third thing, it seems like, would be that the things you
00:01:55.120 | do, you know, when I say acting and speaking to get a following to go to a
00:02:00.280 | goal, well those kinds of actings and that kind of speaking is going to have a
00:02:06.280 | certain flavor to it if we're being guided by the Scripture so that we'll be,
00:02:11.360 | what Jesus said, "All the nations are trying to get people to bow to their
00:02:18.960 | authority and yield to them, and you should not be like that, but he who would
00:02:23.360 | be great among you must be the servant of all." So this leadership is
00:02:28.080 | going to have a servant quality about it, a humble quality about it. It's going to
00:02:33.200 | be trying to get under people and lift them up to something good as their
00:02:38.160 | servant rather than getting over people and oppressing and manipulating and
00:02:42.880 | using them to accomplish your private ends. So it seems like those three
00:02:47.840 | things, the goal, the breadth of the following, the humility, and the
00:02:52.960 | servant quality of the acting, takes this definition and makes it Christian. And
00:02:57.840 | the assumption in all that is all those are being defined by the Bible. It seems
00:03:04.280 | like in our culture there's an animosity towards leadership because leadership is
00:03:07.680 | agenda-driven, and it seems the self-giving nature of leadership is
00:03:11.880 | really a key element. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, totally. I agree exactly.
00:03:17.280 | For example, this pro-life things are on my mind these days, and when we
00:03:24.760 | tried to lead people to be engaged in the pro-life movement more actively on
00:03:30.480 | the ground, it was clear that the more humble, the more readiness to suffer, the
00:03:37.240 | more caring, the more empathetic that leadership was, the more authentic it was,
00:03:41.720 | the more ready to follow. But if it was strident and forceful and mean-spirited,
00:03:47.440 | then people said, "Okay, I don't want anything to do with that," and that's
00:03:52.080 | right. So I think Jesus dictated for us not only what is God-honoring but what
00:03:58.960 | is effective when people really are looking for authentic leadership.
00:04:02.480 | They're not looking for people who are on an ego trip who want to have a big
00:04:05.800 | following because it keeps their ego satisfied; he's looking for people who
00:04:09.920 | have been satisfied by Jesus, he's their identity, and they want others to enjoy
00:04:15.400 | that, and to that end they're willing to get down low, they're willing to be
00:04:19.000 | patient, they're willing to wait, they're willing to serve, and people can smell
00:04:23.120 | that, and they really do love it. They're ready, I think, to get behind
00:04:27.240 | somebody like that. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this
00:04:32.000 | podcast. Send your questions to us via email at
00:04:34.200 | askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your
00:04:37.440 | hometown. You can find thousands of other free resources from John Piper
00:04:40.440 | online at desiringgod.org. I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.
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