Dear church,

The leadership to which Jesus called his disciples was a humble kind of leadership. By today’s standards, it may not even look like leadership at all. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. … It shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25-26; also 1 Peter 5:1-5).

Perhaps the reason for this humble, service-oriented “leadership” is because the ultimate leader is God himself. God told Samuel the Israelites’ cry for a king was a cry not for something new, but for someone new. “For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Samuel 8:7).

Godly leaders never let the people forget the identity of the One True King. This is why the Israelite king was to bind himself to the Torah. He was to be instructed by the very words of God “that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers.” 

The simple life, absent of vast wealth, was to enable the king never to forget he, too, was a servant. He was never to allow the people to turn their eyes backward, toward Egypt and slavery. Their future lay in the provision of God alone. 

Do we know how to live well under godly leadership – to “clothe” ourselves with humility? Servant leadership easily can be overrun by the prideful.  

Chris