Joshua and Judges: The doctrine of leadership part 20 - Essential qualities of leadership: Decision, courage, humility, humor.

Title: Joshua and Judges: The doctrine of leadership part 20 - Essential qualities of leadership: Decision, courage, humility, humor.

 

Announcements / opening prayer:  

 

 

7. Essential qualities of leadership.

 

D. Decision: When all the facts are in, swift and clear decision is the mark of a true leader. A visionary may see, but a leader must decide.

 

Impulsive is to make a decision without the facts. Procrastination or indecision is to fail to make a decision with the facts.

 

Once sure of the will of God, a spiritual leader springs into action and the consequences he leaves in the hands of God. Pursuing the goal, the leader never looks back or calculates escape strategies if some plans turn sour. Nor does a true leader cast blame for failure on subordinates.

 

Greatly outnumbered Abraham made a swift decision to rescue Lot and his family from the hands of the four kings that conquered Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

GEN 14:13 Then a fugitive came and told Abram the Hebrew. Now he was living by the oaks of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol and brother of Aner, and these were allies with Abram.

 

GEN 14:14 And when Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he led out his trained men, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen, and went in pursuit as far as Dan.

 

GEN 14:15 And he divided his forces against them by night, he and his servants, and defeated them, and pursued them as far as Hobah, which is north of Damascus.

 

GEN 14:16 And he brought back all the goods, and also brought back his relative Lot with his possessions, and also the women, and the people.

 

This was a life threatening decision to go out against superior forces, but if he didn’t act quickly, Lot and his family may have been gone forever from him. He knew what he needed to do and despite the odds and the dangers, he did it quickly.

 

Very soon after the death and resurrection of Christ, all the apostles were called to spring into action, and they did, beginning at Pentecost, just 50 days from His resurrection they were in full time evangelism mode.

 

The spiritual leader will not procrastinate when faced with a decision, nor vacillate after making it. To postpone a decision or action is to weaken it. It is like a battery that is left idle too long and loses its charge. A decision is at its peak effectiveness at the proper time. The longer it takes for one to make it the weaker is its effectiveness.

 

The true leader knows that he cannot foresee all the results of certain decisions or actions, but he is ready and willing to live with the results.

 

Chambers relates a story about a young man beginning his work with the Coast Guard. He was called with his crew to try a desperate rescue in a great storm. Frightened, rain and wind pounding his face, the man cried to his captain, "We will never get back!" The captain replied, "We don't have to come back, but we must go out."

 

E. Courage: the attitude of facing and dealing with anything recognized as dangerous, difficult, or painful, instead of withdrawing from it; quality of being fearless or brave; valor [Webster's]

 

Leaders require moral courage and sometimes physical courage. Courage enables a leader to think under pressure. It is a quality of mind which enables him to encounter danger or difficulty firmly, without fear or discouragement.

 

This doesn't mean that he never fears. It means that when he does fear it doesn't stop him and that he quickly casts that fear upon the Lord.

 

PSA 56:1 Be gracious to me, O God, for man has trampled upon me; Fighting all day long he oppresses me.

 

PSA 56:2 My foes have trampled upon me all day long,

For they are many who fight proudly against me.

 

PSA 56:3 When I am afraid, I will put my trust in Thee.

 

PSA 56:4 In God, whose word I praise,

In God I have put my trust;

I shall not be afraid.

What can mere man do to me?

 

Paul admitted to knowing fear, but he wouldn't let it stop him from continuing onward.

Paul went to Corinth after the gospel was rejected in Athens. Athens discouraged him greatly. Paul had been called to go to Macedonia and there his preaching had not been fruitless: he left small groups of converts behind him in Philipi, Thessalonica, and Boroea. In each of these places Paul eventually met with violence from those who wished to discredit him and the gospel, and he was forced to leave.

 

2CO 7:5-6

For even when we came into Macedonia our flesh had no rest, but we were afflicted on every side: conflicts without, fears within. But God, who comforts the depressed, comforted us by the coming of Titus;

 

From Boroea he went to Athens. He did not meet with any violence in Athens, but with something that was worse, they dismissed him with polite amusement. At least violence showed that some impact was being made. As he travelled to Corinth, Athens greatly discouraged him, plus he had upon his mind, misgivings about the well-being of the churches in Macedonia. Despite this he didn't quit. He didn't go home. He arrived in Corinth, as he says, "in weakness and in much fear and trembling."

 

1CO 2:1 And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God.

 

1CO 2:2 For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

 

1CO 2:3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.

 

1CO 2:4 And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,

 

1CO 2:5 that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

              

There was no reason to assume that Corinth would prove any less troublesome than the cities of Macedonia or that they would also dismiss him with polite amusement.

 

Any traveler of the Aegean world in those days must have known of Corinth's reputation [play the Corinthian]; this city would provide uncongenial soil indeed for the good seed of the gospel. Yet here he would spend eighteen months - a longer time than he spent in any city since he left Antioch, his home base.

 

But in Corinth there were many who would believe the gospel. But of course, Paul didn't know this yet.

 

Only God knows where the fertile soil is and He will send His servants to them, but only the servants that are willing to go anywhere that God wills.

 

For as in Corinth, these fertile fields for the gospel might be in the most unlikely places.  

 

Shortly after he arrived, he again received encouragement from the Lord, just as when the Lord sent Titus to him. And though we will not get visions like this, from the word and the Spirit we will receive encouragement to keep going; leaving the success in the hands of God.

 

ACT 18:9 And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, "Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent;

 

ACT 18:10 for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city." 

 

ACT 18:11 And he settled there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.

 

There was a synagogue in Corinth, and as he often did, attended the Sabbath services for several weeks, speaking, and he made it his base of operations.

 

He came to recognize that, while Corinth had not figured on his own program, it had a prominent place in the Lord's program for him.

 

His time in Corinth, and his experiences with the Corinthian church during the years which followed his departure from Corinth, did much to deepen his sympathy and compassion, and to promote his pastoral maturity. It was in Corinth that Paul maintained himself by working for a tent making firm owned by a Jew from Rome named Aquila and his wife Priscilla. As it turns out they were already Christians who had been expelled from Rome by the edict of Claudius and they became Paul's lifelong friends and were great supporters of him and the churches.

 

Paul was as human as the rest of us. He experienced fears, depressions, discouragements, and exhaustion. But where others quit due to a lack of divine courage, he did not.

 

The goal is not to never, ever have these things, for then our goal would be sinless perfection, but our goal is to keep going despite these things. We do not court fear, anxiety, and depression, or condone them; we just keep moving in spite of them.

 

Martin Luther was a fearless man. After loudly proclaiming the true gospel in the midst of a Catholic Europe penchant on salvation by works and alms, he was summoned to Worms to face the questions and the controversies that he teaching had created. He said, "You can expect from me everything save fear or recantation. I shall not flee, much less recant." His friends warned of the dangers; some begged him not to go. But Luther would not hear of it. "Not go to Worms!" he said. "I shall go to Worms though there were as many devils as tiles on the roofs." When Luther appeared  before the court of Emperor Charles V, he was shown a stack of his writings and was called upon to recant. Luther replied, "Unless I can be instructed and convinced with evidence from the Holy Scriptures or with open, clear, and distinct grounds of reasoning, then I cannot and will not recant, because it is neither safe nor wise to act against conscience." A few days before his death Luther recalled that day. "I was afraid of nothing: God can make one so desperately bold."

[Pastor Joe referenced this but did not read it]

[begin quote] First light came to Ste.-Mere- Eglise (Santa-mer-engliseh) around 0510. Twenty-four hours earlier, it had been just another Norman village, with more than a millennium behind it. By nightfall of June 6, it was a name known around the world, the village where the invasion began and now headquarters for the 82^nd Airborne Division. At dawn on June 7, Lt. Waverly Wray, executive officer in Company D, 505^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, who had jumped into the night sky over Normandy twenty-eight hours earlier, was on the northwestern outskirts of the village. He peered intently into the lifting gloom. What he couldn’t see, he could sense. From the sounds of the movement of personnel and vehicles to the north of Ste. Mere Eglise, he could see and figure that the major German counterattack, the one the Germans counted on to drive the Americans into the sea and the one the paratroopers had been expecting, was coming. Six thousand Germans were on the move, with infantry, artillery, tanks, and self-propelled guns - more than a match for the 600 or so lightly armed paratroopers. A German breakthrough to the beaches seemed imminent. And Lt. Wray was at the point of attack. Wray was a big man, 250 pounds with “legs like tree trunks.” The standard-issue Army parachute wasn’t large enough for his weight and he dropped too fast on his jumps, but the men said hell, with his legs he don’t need a chute. He was from Batesville, Mississippi, and was an avid woodsman, skilled with rifles and shotguns. He claimed he had never missed a shot in his life. A veteran of the Sicily and Italy campaigns, Wray was - in the words of Col. Ben Vandervoort, commanding the 505^th - “as experienced and skilled as an infantry soldier can get and still be alive.” Wray had Deep South religious convictions. A Baptist, each month he sent half his pay home to help build a new church. He never swore. His exclamation when exasperated was, “John Brown!” meaning abolitionist John Brown of Harpers Ferry. He didn’t drink, smoke, or chase girls. Some troopers called him “The Deacon.” On June 7, shortly after dawn, Wray reported to Vandervoort - whose leg, broken in the jump, was now in a cast - on the movements he had spotted, the things he had sensed, where he expected the Germans to attack and in what strength. Vandervoort took all this in, then ordered Wray to return to the company and have it attack the German flank before the Germans could get their attack started. “He said ‘Yes Sir,’” Vandervoort later wrote, “saluted, about faced, and moved out like a parade ground Sergeant Major.” Back in the company area, Wray passed on the order. As the company prepared to attack, he took up his M-1, grabbed a half-dozen grenades, and strode out, his Colt .45 on his hip and a silver-plated .38 revolver stuck in his jump boot. He was going to do a one-man reconnaissance to formulate a plan of attack. Wray was going into the unknown. He had spent half a year preparing for this moment but he was not trained for it. In one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time, none of the American intelligence agencies had seen the dominant feature of the battlefield, which was the maze of 9 foot hedgerows that covered the western half of Normandy. Wray was finding this out on the morning of June 7. The Germans knew all about the terrain and had been training hard to fight within it. Wray moved up sunken lanes, crossed an orchard, pushed his way through hedgerows, crawled through a ditch. Along the way he noted concentrations of Germans, in fields and lanes. A man without his woodsman’s sense of direction would have gotten lost. He reached the main highway that was the axis of the German attack. Wray, “moving like the deer stalker he was” (Vanervoort’s words), got to a place where he could hear guttural voices on the other side of a hedgerow. They sounded like officers talking about map coordinates. Wray rose up, burst through the obstacle, swung his M-1 to a ready position, and barked in his strong command voice, “Hande hoch!” to eight German officers gathered around a radio. Seven instinctively raised their hands. The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him instantly, between the eyes. Two Germans in a slit trench 100 meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him. Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right ear. Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seen officers, one at a time as they attempted to run away. When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each, from 100 meters away and he hit them right in the head. Wray made his way back to the company area to report on what he had seen. At the command post he came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing. “Who’s got more grenades?” he demanded. Then he started leading. [You go first, you don’t just point the way] He put a 60mm mortar crew on the German flank and directed fire into the lands and hedgerows most densely packed with the enemy. Next he sent D Company into an attack down one of the lanes. The Germans broke and ran. By mid-morning Ste. Mer Eglise was secure and the potential for a German breakthrough to the beaches was much diminished. Wray later buried the bodies of the men he had killed. Before the battle was joined, Hitler had been sure his young men would outfight the young Americans. He was certain that the spoiled sons of democracy couldn’t stand up the solid sons of dictatorship. If he had seen Lt. Wray in action in the early morning of D-Day Plus One, he might have had some doubts. [end quote]

 

Most of us will never face a situation like this, but in the ones we do face, courage comes from the same place - a tenacity to do what is right and needed (the will of God) in the face of all opposition and to do so with determination knowing that the All Mighty has our backs and has supplied us with all things, His word and His Spirit. For us the battlefield is the soul and in that soul we must have the courage to lay aside the pull of the flesh and to love, knowing and expressing all virtues and producing fruit. We must all herald the battle cry, “Come what may, I will do His will, and to the death if I have to.”

 

Reminder: this is not from the flesh or our human ability. Courage comes through the Spirit and the word that God has graciously gifted us with.

 

PRO 16:32

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty,

And he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.

 

Courage comes from spiritual growth by means of the Spirit.

 

JOH 20:19

the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews

 

ACT 4:13

Now as they observed the confidence of Peter and John, and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were marveling.

 

Notice the contrast and note the reason for the difference. They saw the resurrected Christ and so were convinced of His victory over death. He breathed upon them the Holy Spirit and instructed them in the scriptures concerning Himself. They received the filling of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. By means of instruction, faith, and the Spirit they changed from timidity to courage.

 

2TI 1:7

For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline.

 

Good leaders face unpleasant and even devastating situations with courageous patience and composure and then they act firmly in pursuit of goodness in the midst of trouble, even if their action is unpopular. Often coming upon him is the natural human inertia of fallen creatures attempting to push him one way or the other. But courage follows through on the good work of the will of God until it is finished.

 

During a crisis the courageous leader is calm when others might be losing their heads.

 

MAT 8:24-25

And behold, there arose a great storm in the sea, so that the boat was covered with the waves; but He Himself was asleep. And they came to Him, and awoke Him, saying, "Save us, Lord; we are perishing!"

 

JOS 1:9

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go."

 

2CH 32:6 And he [Hezekiah] appointed military officers over the people, and gathered them to him in the square at the city gate, and spoke encouragingly to them, saying,

 

2CH 32:7 "Be strong and courageous, do not fear or be dismayed because of the king of Assyria, nor because of all the multitude which is with him; for the one with us is greater than the one with him.

 

2CH 32:8 With him is only an arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles." And the people relied on the words of Hezekiah king of Judah.