Spiritual Leadership

In the earlier letter of 1st Timothy Paul wrote

“I urged you when I was leaving for Macedonia, stay on in Ephesus to instruct certain people not to spread false teachings, nor to occupy themselves with myths and interminable genealogies. Such things promote useless speculations rather than God’s redemptive plan that operates by faith.” (1st Timothy 1-4)

It was a difficult task as a young leader. Timothy was reluctant to lead firmly when as a young man he did not have the standing in the church that an older man might have had.

We do not know how well Timothy carried out Paul’s instructions. But we do know that in his second letter Paul reminds him of his responsibility.

Paul writes to Timothy.

“I remind you to rekindle God’s gift that you possess through the laying on of my hands. 7 For God did not give us a Spirit of fear but of power and love and self-control. 8 So do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord or of me, a prisoner for his sake, but by God’s power accept your share of suffering for the gospel.” (2nd Timothy 1:6,7)

Paul’s admonition to Timothy is that he rekindle the gift of the Spirit that was given and was confirmed upon him through the laying on of hands (2nd t Timothy 1:6,7). That gift was the gift of leadership in the role of Pastor to the church in Ephesus. 

Though the letter was addressed to Timothy, it is useful and instructive to all of us who have been gifted and called to servant leadership in whatever role that may be.  

Paul’s admonition was to exercise leadership with the Spirit’s power and Holy Spirit energized love and a Spirit enabled soundness of mind and discipline.

Let’s look more closely. We notice, first of all, that this leadership is SPIRITUAL. The gift of leadership is given by God. And ii is made effective by the Holy Spirit. As all the gifts are.

That is the first truth I want to explore:

·         Leadership in the church is to be a Holy Spirit empowered endeavor.

Many men and women have been gifted and called to positions of leadership in the church. It is an honor and a sacred gift and office in which they serve. All who lead well earn honor and thanks. But not all who serve as leaders understand the “spiritual” part of it. Too many lead in the strength of their personality or by applying the skills of leadership used in the world of business or finance or government service.

Their leadership is wise by the world’s standards and is often backed by experience in ordinary endeavors. But such leadership falls short of the power needed in the church. As a young man in my teens and twenties, I aspired to leadership and believed God was calling me to become a pastor. I loved the scriptures and desired to read them deeply and pass on the truths I found to others. I imagined a life spent studying and teaching. But as I met men who impressed me as leaders and pastors, I began to realize that there was more to leadership than a good grasp of the Bible and the ability to teach.  

These men did not lead by their personality or by their knowledge ---  nor by a strong or dominating leadership style. They were if anything quiet and unassuming. But when they spoke or provided guidance or preached the gospel, people listened. And we who listened went away deeply marked by the wisdom we heard from these men. There was truth in their wise guidance and teaching that spoke to the heart.

That truth and wisdom I felt was due to the power of the Holy Spirit who not only gives the words but impresses them powerfully upon the minds and hearts of the hearers. When men or women lead with the power of the Holy Spirit, lives are changed. Churches are changed. And the glory and praise goes not to men but to the Lord who is powerfully present in the words spoken.

In America, that Spirit empowered leading seems almost old-fashioned now. We are impressed by men who command large audiences and have built large congregations, or men who write books and have television ministries.

But the church in America is not spiritually healthy for all that. The reality is that the wisdom and the leadership of men and women endowed by the Spirit spoken gently but with the power of the Spirit is much needed in American churches.

In a church culture where too many are attracted to flashy productions or emotional leaders I long for the truth to be spoken with passion born of the Holy Spirit and striking deep in my heart. It is like fresh water to the soul, for it brings conviction and a change of heart and mind.

It is not that these men do not speak truth or lead men and women and organizations with skills or styles that are effective in the wider world. I have known many leaders who had those skills and used them in the church. It is simply that the power of the Holy Spirit to make that truth powerful to change lives is too often lacking. I go away, agreeing with the truth spoken. I go away impressed by the biblical knowledge and the rightness of the message. My head is full, but my soul is unmoved.

God, give us such men and women with spiritual power!

That is true also in many places where elders lead with ideas and skills borrowed from the world but without the power of the Spirit. It is true in small home Bible studies where leaders simply follow guides given them without having been deeply move themselves by the truths they teach. It is true in youth meetings that attract young people with activities and fun times, but are not speaking to the heart.  It is true in church kitchens where organization and work are personality driven.

How have we come to this in America? 

I do not know the spiritual condition of your church. I pray that you have not followed the popular example of church leadership. I pray that this truth, spoken in the power of the Spirit to your hearts, will be a strong reminder to continue to depend absolutely upon the Spirit and his power, as you lead in whatever role that may. There is nothing the church needs more than this.

The second thing Paul urges Timothy is to stir into flame love.

·         Love must be Spirit inspired love.

I mean by that, the love we must have as leaders for those God has given us to lead must be supernatural love, breathed into us by the Holy Spirit. We all find it easy to love those whom we find congenial and who follow our lead with enthusiasm. But that is not always what we find when we take up the role of leader whether as pastor or teacher or elder – or women given the role of leading the ladies as helpers preparing and serving food or ministering to the women and children of the church. Or the role of leading a Sunday school class. Or the role of evangelist leading people to the Lord. 

In whatever leadership role you are given, there will be reluctant followers. Sometimes there will be rebellious followers who need correction both of their behaviors and their hearts. There were in Ephesus. That is one of the realities Paul was preparing Timothy for.

This is where love becomes hard – and crucial. This is where love must be inspired and empowered and directed by the Holy Spirit. And the truth is, even when you have the joy of leading eager followers, the love we have for them must be love generated by the Spirit.

Love must be tenacious and long suffering, as God’s love is for us. It must be wise, with the goal of our love always being the good of those we love, just as God’s love is for us. And it must be deeply real, arising from hearts that have been infused with the love of God for those we serve. We cannot fake God's love. 

We as leaders must understand that the activity we lead is not the goa, whether that is preaching or serving. The goal is to touch the heart of those we serve. The goal is spiritual. This kind of love desires in the Spirit to see hearts changed.

One thing I have observed as I have visited on the internet with many Pakistani, Indian, and African Christians is the great need of the poor and especially the poor children in their towns. I am overwhelmed by that need.

I am equally overwhelmed by the need of the thousands and thousands of lost people living on the streets in our American cities. Those needs will only grow greater as the world experiences the stress of the last days. There will be wars that create stress and anxiety, as there are today in Ukraine and Israel. There will be violence and political upheaval in our cities. There will be plagues and hunger greater than we have seen, as there are right now with more than 4 million children facing starvation in East Africa. The physical needs of many will increase.  And the spiritual needs will increase as well.

How can I even grasp that need?

I have had to allow the Lord to give me a balanced and clear-headed understanding of how I can be a part in responding to that need. The Lord led me to understand that my responsibility and opportunity was to focus on those right before me. 

It was one of those revelations given by the Spirit. It changed me and allowed me to be effective in serving the needs of people whom God brought to me.  And more important, it allowed me to love them with God’s love.

That Spirit-given revelation allows me to see the needy as men and women and children whom God loves and whom I may love. They become people rather than problems. You are faced, as I am, with the realities of those needs all around you. Meeting the needs, including the deep spiritual needs of people, requires Holy Spirit inspired and guided leaders as we lead our people in meeting those challenges.

Whatever need brings people to us, our love for them must be Spirit-sourced love that sees and responds to the needs of hearts and souls as well as the needs of the body.

The Holy Spirit reminds us that more than anything else they need Jesus.

Spirit-driven love makes that the goal of our loving response to their need: Feed them Jesus. Spirit-driven love focuses on the heart. But the same is true in every leadership role we have. We must be given insight to see the deeper need of the heart in those we lead and serve. And we must seek and desire deeply God’s answer to that deep spiritual need.

Our people come to church with spiritual and emotional hurt and fears we do not easily see. If we are to truly serve them (and that is what a leader does) we must know those deeper needs. And we must love them in their need. We must love and desire God’s best for them no matter how unlovely they may be -- as the people on the streets in America may be.

Those deeper needs are Holy Spirit revealed, and the love we must have is Holy Spirit enabled and inspired love. That does not mean the skills and the wisdom we have gained over the years are not needed. We are not carried along by the Spirit without thinking, disconnected from the understanding and thinking and skills we have gained. It simply means that deep love in the Holy Spirit must be added to those skills and that understanding. They will not be deeply and eternally effective without the Spirit.

Paul’s final admonition to Timothy is regarding Timothy’s manner of life.  

·         Spiritual Leadership must be undergirded by the Spirit’s discipline in our own lives. 

That is what I think is the best understanding of the Greek word sóphronismos in 2nd Timothy 1:7. It is not self-control that we learn or develop humanly by practice and habit, or have naturally by a temperate personality. It is not self-control. IT IS THE CONTROL OF THE SPIRIT. It is being Spirit-controlled in our personal lives.

In a later chapter in 2nd Timothy Paul tells Timothy that if anyone competes as an athlete, he will not be crowned as the winner unless he competes according to the rules. That is a word picture that means living a temperate and holy life honoring to God. There have been far too many men in all positions of leadership who have ruined the influence and the respect of those they led by ungodliness.

 In Romans 8:4 Paul says that those who live in the Spirit will not live under the domination of  the desires common to the flesh. But Spirit control also results in the moderation of human emotions and reactions. We are temperate. 

We recognize Spirit control when we see it in our leaders. While serving as a teacher, I worked under a principal who was a Spirit-controlled and wise leader. Even in the most serious situations he faced, he always went to the Lord in prayer before acting. He did not react in anger. He did not respond hastily.

 He went to the Lord first to seek the Lord’s guidance, and he waited until he heard from the  Lord and his spirit was at peace with the decisions or actions he knew the Lord was guiding him to do.  And he always asked advice from others who considered Spirit-controlled.

 The decisions he made were always good and healing and protective of the people involved and the faculty and school he led --- and honoring to the Lord. On one occasion a  male teacher was accused of misconduct in relation to his female students. Mr. Ketchum  after prayer and waiting on the Lord knew that he had to be decisive in protecting the students. But he knew that he must not be angry or hurtful toward the teacher. That would the human response. God would change the heart and heal in time. He knew that he must be healing.

 He knew the offending teacher was a child of God who had allow the flesh to rule his conduct. Mr. Ketchum talked and prayed with the teacher and continued to pray for him, even as he dismissed him from employment. He knew that the students needed protection  and that as the leader of the school, he was responsible for protecting them. The result was compassion for the teacher and safety for the students.

 There is rarely anything but a fire which needs an immediate decision.

 We must learn to give the Holy Spirit time to direct us and to infuse every leadership response to every challenge with his wisdom and love. Those decisions may be critical. They may even seem urgent. But wait on the Spirit. Get the Spirit’s leading and insight. You will be amazed at how healing and compassionate  and wise the Spirit’s leading is. I have had similar difficult challenges in my serving people given to me to lead. I walk away from  those shaking my head and saying to myself, “That was a miracle.”

Be under the Spirit’s control in your thinking and your responses and decisions.

 That brings us to the crucial question, HOW?

 In this we should take note of how Jesus regularly went to the Father. He would often rise  from sleep while it was still dark to seek a lonely place where he could pray.

 Why? Because he was dependent just as we are upon the wisdom and power the Father gives us through the Spirit.

 When the Divine and Holy Son chose to put aside his rights as God the Son and chose to become a man, he chose to live just as we live, in dependence upon the Father and the Spirit. All the power to do miracles he displayed, the deep love he had for people, the wisdom in his words and his Godly character were the product of the Spirit within him who breathed into him the wisdom and power of Godly spiritual living and leadership.

 The gentle but effective leadership of his disciples, yes, including the times Jesus strongly corrected them, was the product of the Spirit who inspired and guided has every action and every word he spoke. The works that he did were the works of the Father.

 We assume that he could not have done otherwise as God the Son. But that would have  made him more than human. No, he put aside those rights when he became a man. He  lived not in dependence upon his own Divine nature, but in total submission to the Spirit and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit with which he was anointed.

 That did not make him less the Divine Son; he could not be less than God, but it did make him human.

If the Son of God living as a man needed the Spirit’s power and wisdom, we all the more so. In doing so he gave us an example to follow. His waiting upon the Father was crucial to his life and his character and his leadership. In those hours as the Divine Son yet a man needing the power of God and the wisdom of God to be infused in his words and acts, what did he pray for?

Along with praying that God’s kingdom come and His will be done on earth and in the lives of every man and woman, he prayed for the same thing he taught his disciples to pray for. He prayed for the Holy Spirit.

 We read in Luke 11:9

  “I tell you: Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; 

knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

And for what should we ask with such urgency and intensity and perseverance as we wait upon the Lord? We should ask for the Holy Spirit.

 And we may ask, because that is exactly what the Father desires to give. 

“how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

As we ask and wait and as the Father gives, we may do, as Jesus said, the things he did and greater. Believe that. Believe Jesus. Ask for the Spirit. He is the greatest gift the Father can give.

Don’t ask for the signs of the Holy Spirit. Many have missed that truth.  And they pursue the  signs. God gives signs of tongues of fire, the sound of a wind, or the ability to speak in tongues or earthquakes that shake the house as he chooses. But it is as He chooses.  

 In American, we have had movements that have focused on seeking the signs. But even as the signs were given, the results in the lives of the saints have not been what God really desires. They did not result in changed lives and holiness and power or love. And signs has gradually faded. They always do. No, God desires holiness and changed lives. He wants to move and empower men and  women to be like Jesus.

Much like the experience of Moses which Paul relates in 2nd Corinthians 3, Moses when he met with God came forth from the tent with his face aglow. That was a striking sign to those who saw it. But the effect of the sign did not last. What these people needed was to see the Lord with their own eyes.

And so Paul says that we all, who spend time with the Lord gazing with the eye of the spirit upon Jesus, will reflect the glory of the Lord, and are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Gaze upon Him. Wait upon him.

Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist of the 19th century who led thousands of people to the Lord made it his spiritual practice to wait upon the Lord. He would often do so in the morning in a quiet room, but sometimes even as he walked the streets of Chicago. On more than one occasion he was so moved by the Lord’s glorious presence that he had to turn aside to the house of a friend and ask to use a quiet room, for his eyes would be full of tears of joy in the presence of the Lord and he did not want to be questioned the reason for his weeping.

He went forth from these times in the power of the Spirit to do what God had given him to do. Without that personal meeting with the Lord, he would have been powerless. And he knew it.

Seek the power and fulness of the Holy Spirit in your minds and hearts and decisions and in your leading and serving in the place God has placed you. That is what every leader needs. Without that we lead in the power of the flesh.  We lead in the way of the world. And we fail to see the results in the lives of the people we serve that are the results only the Holy Spirit can give.   

If you are as cautious of this talk about the Holy Spirit as the Baptist churches I have pastored, look to Acts. Nothing spiritually God-honoring and God-blessed came except by the Holy Spirit’s filing and direction and power. When the men and women of that early Jerusalem church looked to the Lord and asked for direction or courage or boldness, the Spirit gave it to them. 

Remember Peter at Pentecost. Peter was a fisherman, as you recall, and not a preacher. And he had the habit of putting his foot in his mouth. He was timid and afraid. And was a man of rude and rash speech. He was unlearned in the schools of his day. He did not have the degrees the leaders of Israel had. But when the Holy Spirit came, Peter boldly spoke to the crowd a powerful and life changing message that spoke to the hearts of his hearers.

 How was he able to do that? By the Holy Spirit who inspired and gave him the words to say.

 When the men who were chosen servers as deacons in that first church were selected, the criteria were that they be full of the Spirit and wisdom. And how were they successful in meeting equitably the needs of the people? By the Holy Spirit’s inspired wisdom.

 When Paul needed guidance at Troas about where to go next, whether back into Galatia or west into Macedonia, God gave him direction in a Spirit-inspired dream. It was this Spirit- inspired and endowed leadership in all the Apostles that made them effective in leading the church.

 It was this Spirit-inspired direction to and through Paul that resulted in the wise and inspired letters he wrote for the edification of all Christians. 

These men depended absolutely on the Holy Spirit’s guidance and the Holy Spirit’s wisdom and power.

And that is what we need as well.

 We cannot and must not lead in the power of the flesh. That will not result in any good thing. We must lead with the power and love and control of the Holy Spirit.

Oh, how I pray for that for the American church.

 We have all the resources of money. We have books written by successful leaders in the world of business and the building of organizations. We should be successful. But we are failing to see true deep heart change that results in  the character of the Lord being created in us and the passion of the Lord for the lost moving us. We are busy with programs and organization.  But too often ineffective.

Those who see these things clearly, pray for revival. I pray for revival.

What we need desperately is a fanning of the flame of the gift of the Spirit given to us. We need his power. We need to love as he loves.  We need to be controlled in all our being by Him. We have had enough of traditions that have led to routine and deadness. Enough of attempts to renew the power of the Holy Spirit by emotion and the power of personality.

 You all have all the gifts given by God including the gift of leadership by the endowment of the Spirit.  You have been given all you need. Now, fame those gifts into flame. Wait upon the Lord until he does that in your lives.

 Wait upon the Lord until he does that in the church.

 If you wait upon the Lord, he will give you and the church a fresh movement of the Spirit. You will see God give a new Pentecost. I have seen it.  I know God will give it to any and all who wait upon him. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but he has given us the Holy Spirit who infuses our service and leadership with power and our love with the genuineness of his love in us and with the Spirit’s discipline. 

 I pray that may be true in you all as Paul prayed for Timothy.