Joshua and Judges: The doctrine of leadership part 119 - Essential qualities of leadership: Prayer.

Title: Joshua and Judges: The doctrine of leadership part 119 - Essential qualities of leadership: Prayer.

 

Announcements / opening prayer:

 

 

M. Prayer and leadership

 

HEB 5:7

In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety [reverence].

 

Review of the verse so far:

 

We are not to pray frivolously but with great reverence of the Father's power and authority.

 

Prayers means "definite requests in general." Supplications means "a cry from one in need of protection." Supplications carries with it a sense of urgency.

 

The unbeliever and the carnal believer have no hope of praying for what they need, but the believer in fellowship with God does. The love of God within him drives him to intercession.

 

The word cry means a loud, vocal outcry of one who is greatly disturbed. This summarizes His Gethsemane experience. It emphasizes intensity of suffering.

 

The promise Christ gives to prayer is the most valiant weapon in our armory.

 

HEB 5:7

In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety [reverence].

 

Tears refers to a visible manifestation of grief. They show intense emotional strain, also seen in Gethsemane and who knows at what other times.

 

He wept when He approached Jerusalem for the final time. He was not ruled by His emotions, and none of us should be, but His release of emotion shows His great concern for all men and for Israel. God's love does not make us grow cold to the needs of man, but does quite the opposite, and yet, like Christ, we know that we cannot force others to repent and believe. We do everything we can under the command of the Lord, and if they will not believe, then we shake the dust off our feet and leave them to the Lord.

 

Being ruled by emotions is definitely weakness, but the toughness in a man is not determined by his lack of emotion. Visible grief is a release of emotion. God has given us this so that strong emotion may run its course and come to an end. None of us could get along very well if we were always burdened by strong emotion.

 

There is something quite noble in proper, overwhelming emotion. The noble man has great concern for noble things. Strong emotion is the natural response to his intense concern.

 

Again, caution is given, but we are not to cower before those who lack concern and so disparage all emotion, even proper emotion. The caution is clear, emotion is not to rule us. The Lord rules us and so His will rules us. If your intense concern for the things of God, which you love and cherish, is something you desire for others, when they suffer for rejecting God's will, then I don't see how that cannot elicit some emotion, and perhaps a great deal of it. In Gethsemane, our Lord was excessively burdened with the coming separation from His Father in spiritual death, yet at His weakest point, He did not turn to an ulterior will, rather, He turned to prayer, multiple times. "Father, Your will, not My will be done."  

 

Every leader experiences all of these (reverence, prayers, supplications, disturbed cries, and tears) and he is not to shrink away from them, but meet them head on as he entreats the Father's direction and assistance.

 

His learning, wisdom, creativeness, humanity, divine nature, godly objectives, intense concern for good and for others as well as his intense concern for those whom he leads pushes him to a consistent and powerful prayer life.

 

We don't have to get the words exactly right, in fact we most often don't, but God knows our hearts and the promise is that the Spirit intercedes.

 

ROM 8:26 And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words;

 

ROM 8:23b…

even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.