Pastor John, I have a leadership question for you, and it's really a foundational question. Broadly speaking, how do you define leadership? What does godly leadership look like, and what does godly leadership aim to achieve? I would define leadership as acting and speaking so as to create a following toward a goal.

That'd be the most generic way I could think of doing it, which of course is morally neutral. I haven't said anything about what makes it Christian or godly, but that's what it would be wherever you talk about it. It seems like how you act and how you speak so as to create a following toward a goal.

Then what makes that Christian, it seems like, what makes it godly or biblical is the goal is defined by Scripture. You want to take people, move people toward godliness, towards worship, towards honoring Jesus, towards loving people. And secondly, what makes it Christian would be that you care that the following be every people and tongue and tribe and nation.

In other words, you're not prejudicial. You don't want to just get behind you the really cool people. That would be an ungodly leadership. You say, "I want to lead people, but the only people I want behind me, following me, are people who are so rich or so famous or so cool that they reflect well upon me in that way." You don't have that attitude at all.

You want the people following you to be of all kinds of people without that kind of prejudicial, partial bent. And the third thing, it seems like, would be that the things you do, you know, when I say acting and speaking to get a following to go to a goal, well those kinds of actings and that kind of speaking is going to have a certain flavor to it if we're being guided by the Scripture so that we'll be, what Jesus said, "All the nations are trying to get people to bow to their authority and yield to them, and you should not be like that, but he who would be great among you must be the servant of all." So this leadership is going to have a servant quality about it, a humble quality about it.

It's going to be trying to get under people and lift them up to something good as their servant rather than getting over people and oppressing and manipulating and using them to accomplish your private ends. So it seems like those three things, the goal, the breadth of the following, the humility, and the servant quality of the acting, takes this definition and makes it Christian.

And the assumption in all that is all those are being defined by the Bible. It seems like in our culture there's an animosity towards leadership because leadership is agenda-driven, and it seems the self-giving nature of leadership is really a key element. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, totally. I agree exactly.

For example, this pro-life things are on my mind these days, and when we tried to lead people to be engaged in the pro-life movement more actively on the ground, it was clear that the more humble, the more readiness to suffer, the more caring, the more empathetic that leadership was, the more authentic it was, the more ready to follow.

But if it was strident and forceful and mean-spirited, then people said, "Okay, I don't want anything to do with that," and that's right. So I think Jesus dictated for us not only what is God-honoring but what is effective when people really are looking for authentic leadership. They're not looking for people who are on an ego trip who want to have a big following because it keeps their ego satisfied; he's looking for people who have been satisfied by Jesus, he's their identity, and they want others to enjoy that, and to that end they're willing to get down low, they're willing to be patient, they're willing to wait, they're willing to serve, and people can smell that, and they really do love it.

They're ready, I think, to get behind somebody like that. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Send your questions to us via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown. You can find thousands of other free resources from John Piper online at desiringgod.org.

I'm your host Tony Reinke, thanks for listening.