We are walking in today: Weekend Meditation--The Spirit of Leadership!!! Part 6 The Secret To Leadership Greatness Is Serving Others !!!!
Witness servant throughout the Bible: H2896 ebed--slave, servant, slave, servant, subjects, bondman
1 Samuel 25:10 And Nabal answered David's servants, H5650 and said, Who is David? and who is the son of Jesse? there be many servants H5650 now a days that break away every man from his master.
Torah: Genesis 9:25, 18:3, 26:19, 41:12; Exodus 32:13; Numbers 12:7, 34:11
Prophets: 1 Samuel 16:16, 17:9, 22:7; Isaiah 49:5, 54:17, 65:14, 65:15
Writings: Joshua 1:13, 24:29; 1 Kings 2:38, 3:9, 8:29; Psalm 19:11, 19:13, 89:39, 119:91
Jeremiah 7:25 Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all my servants H5650 the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them:
Exodus 18:20-25
20 You should also teach them the laws and the teachings, and show them how to live their lives and what work they should do. 21 But you should choose from among all the people competent men who are God-fearing, honest and incorruptible to be their leaders, in charge of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. 22 Normally, they will settle the people’s disputes. They should bring you the difficult cases; but ordinary matters they should decide themselves. In this way, they will make it easier for you and share the load with you. 23 If you do this — and God is directing you to do it — you will be able to endure; and all these people too will arrive at their destination peacefully.” 24 Moshe paid attention to his father-in-law’s counsel and did everything he said. 25 Moshe chose competent men from all Isra’el and made them heads over the people, in charge of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.
THE LEADERSHIP SECRET TO GREATNESS
In the New Testament book of Matthew, one of Jesus’s students wrote this account of a request that was made by two of his fellow students who were in the leadership training school. He recorded it like this: Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him. “What is it you want?” he asked. She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.” “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father.” When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you.”
Next, Jesus made an amazing statement. Please first note that he did not rebuke the brothers for desiring to be great and seeking leadership positions. As a matter of fact, with the following statement, he went even further and showed them how to become great. Why did he not rebuke them? Because he knew and understood the nature and inherent passion of the human creature.
Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
What Jesus is stating here is that, to become the great leader you were created and destined to become, you must discover your unique inherent gift and assignment (your original purpose) and serve that to the world of mankind. Do not seek greatness, but seek to serve your gift to others to the maximum extent that you can, and you will become a sought-after person. In essence, Jesus defined true leadership as becoming a person who is valuable to others, rather than a person of just position or fame.
If you find your unique gift or special talent and commit to serving it to the world of mankind, then your significance will cause people to seek you out. You will become an influence through exercising your gift, rather than through manipulation. The more you become a person whose gift is valued, the greater your influence will be.
Servant leadership integrates all of the following precepts. It is—
• the discovery of one’s purpose, gift, and talent and the commitment to give them in service to mankind.
• being prepared to serve one’s gift to the world at every opportunity for the betterment of humanity.
• serving oneself to the world.
• “self-distribution” to your generation.
• the maximization of self-manifestation.
• the pursuit of an inherent vision in order to serve others. The natural results of servant leadership are the following:
• Authenticity, authority, and authorization
• Originality, from not being a copy of anyone else
• Genuine confidence, based on one’s natural ability
• Personal fulfillment, stemming from satisfaction
• A sense of intrinsic value, based on the knowledge of one’s significance
• No competition, because of one’s uniqueness
• No comparison, because of one’s distinctiveness
• No jealousy, because of one’s value
• No fear, because of one’s conviction
PRINCIPLES OF LEADERSHIP
A careful study of the lessons taught by Jesus in the above discourse will reveal the following principles of leadership:
• Leadership is predetermined and not a preference.
• Leadership is a prepared position.
• Leadership demands a price.
• Leadership is inherent.
• Leadership is a divine deposit.
• Leadership is not for you but for others.
• Leadership is becoming your true self for the benefit of others.
When God told Adam to name the animals, for example, Adam didn’t sit back and try to argue with him about it, saying, “There are too many animals. How can I name all these species?” He never hesitated. Instead, he just did it. He had the confidence, the conviction, and the authority of the spirit of leadership. It is important to note that God did not give Adam a list of animal names to choose from. Instead, he allowed Adam to draw on the capacity he had within him, in order to show him that his ability to do so already existed.
The nature of the leadership spirit is the inherent desire of all mankind to control and regulate both environment and circumstances.
Comfortable with Power Another aspect of the leadership spirit is that it is comfortable with power. Power, in itself, is natural for the human spirit. Again, problems arise when we distort our natural gifts. For example, when a person doesn’t have a good self-concept, a strong self-worth, and high self-esteem, he will use his power in negative ways in order to compensate for his feelings of inferiority and vulnerability. He will intimidate, manipulate, and oppress.
EVERYONE DESIRES INFLUENCE; HOWEVER, WE’VE CONFUSED INFLUENCE WITH DOMINANCE.
We all naturally seek power. The homeless man sleeping under a bridge in a cardboard box desires power just as much as the man who is sleeping in a twelve-bedroom house by a lake. We use a thousand different ways to try to gain power, such as—
• positions of influence
• money
• association and membership in influential or elite groups
• material status symbols, such as clothing, houses, cars, and jets
• status in society, such as living in a certain neighborhood or region
• educational achievements
• type of jobs or careers
Again, the desire for power, in itself, isn’t wrong. It’s our attitude toward and use of power that can be harmful. If we don’t desire power of some sort, our natural inclination has been altered by oppression, apathy, fear, or other things. I think that we need to admit to our desire for power before we can become friendly with it. If we deny our penchant for it, we deceive ourselves as well as others.
The desire for power to control circumstances is one of the most potent motivating factors of human behavior. Again, when the young Jewish rabbi Jesus began training his leadership team, one of the first things he did was to give them power—power to exorcise demons, heal the sick, raise the dead, and so forth. He sent them out, and they went and started using that power. When they returned, they told him everything they had done, and they started celebrating. The biblical account says, “In that hour Jesus rejoiced.” Why would Jesus give a group of men, which included fishermen, a tax collector, and a zealot, that much power? He gave them power so that they could taste how it felt to put their inherent leadership nature to use in a positive way, and they came back excited about it. Then he got excited about their excitement because he saw humanity exercising power in the way the Creator first intended them to. Mankind was in control of his circumstances. Imagine a fisherman having power over death, cleansing lepers, opening blind eyes, and unstopping deaf ears.
If you study the lessons he taught, they all relate to this theme. He walked on the water and said, in effect, “You can do this; come.” He healed the sick, and then he said, “Go ahead, do it.” He was showing them how to have dominion over their environment, how to have power over circumstances through the power of God.
When someone comes to us and says that he wants to do something great and big, we normally think that he is overly ambitious and proud. Actually, he’s exercising his true nature. But what do we do? We intimidate him in order to try to discourage him. Sometimes, we even use religion as a justification for telling others not to seek greatness. But here Jesus is telling his disciples, in essence, “You want to be great? Then here’s how to do it: You serve others.”
Once more, since God is our Creator and the “material” from which we were created, then in order to understand our leadership attributes, it is naturally imperative for us to explore, study, and come to understand the nature of His attributes. In essence, if you want to know and understand yourself, your nature, and your abilities, it is necessary for you to know God, who is your Source.
OMNIPOTENCE
The first attribute of God is that he is omnipotent or all-powerful. How do we apply this attribute to ourselves? Omnipotence means “all-inherent power.” It can also be described as a sense of secure ability in pursuing and fulfilling one’s purpose and will. Since we were made in the image and likeness of the Creator, and possess that same ability in a measure, this means that we inherently have power that enables us to accomplish what we were created to do. In addition, power can be defined as the proper use of energy. The application for us is this: God does not use energy in a negative way. His power is creative. A true leader who has tapped into his essential nature uses power to create
things, to make things better for people, just as God does. The Creator uses his power to produce what is good, and we are meant to do the same.
OMNISCIENCE
The Creator is also omniscient or all-knowing. Because we have his nature, we have the facility to understand and retain knowledge. I believe that we are capable of learning as much as we want to. In this sense, our ability to learn is infinite. Moreover, we can never grow too old to learn. We have the capacity to know more than we think we can. This means that whatever you’ve learned so far is not enough for you to know. Our ability to know is inherent, and any perceived limitation of this ability is based on our conclusion that we’ve learned all that we can or want to know. Yet this is not all that we are able to know. We have a long way to go in order to match our potential for knowledge. Paul of Tarsus said that a day will come when we will meet our Creator face-to-face, and then we will “know as we are known.” We can begin that process now. For example, although I can’t bodily go into the heavens to communicate with and learn from God, I have the capacity to do this in my spirit. We need to be more aware of our ability to know our Creator and the world that he has made.
OMNIPRESENCE
The third attribute of God is that he is omnipresent. This means that he is everywhere and that there is no place in heaven, the universe, or on earth that threatens or intimidates him. Here is how I apply this attribute to our In addition, as I said earlier, you can put a natural leader anywhere on earth, and in a matter of time, he is in charge of his environment. His environment doesn’t control him; he controls it. Again, because we are made in the image of our Creator, we have the ability to dominate our environments. We can control and govern them instead of becoming victims of them. But we have to first discover that we have this ability because of the Source from which we came.
Shema Selah, let us pause and consider our origins from the Most High and walk out this service to the world! Facebook LIVE video
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