Audio Transcript
Bad leadership makes everything about the leader. We’ve all seen this in some form, and that’s why Jesus’s teaching on leadership is so refreshing, so counterintuitive. He flips what so-called leadership so often looks like in this world and flips it right-side up. He says if you want to become great, you must serve. If you want to be first, you must be last. If you want to lead, you must give yourself. Today, we are looking at holy leadership, whether that is in your church, your family, or your workplace. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we read it in our Navigators Bible Reading Plan today, Matthew 20 — a text on the mind of Jonathan in Seattle, Washington:
“Pastor John, hello! My question for you is about Matthew 20:26–28. How has Jesus’s radical redefinition of greatness, that ‘whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,’ challenged your own measures of success and significance? In a culture that equates leadership with privilege and authority, Christ offers a counterintuitive path where true power emerges through self-giving. As you consider Jesus’s ultimate servant act of giving ‘his life as a ransom for many,’ how does his sacrificial standard reshape your approach to family and church leadership?”
Just a heads-up here at the beginning for folks who want to know more about Christian leadership: I did write a little booklet called Marks of a Spiritual Leader, which is free at Desiring God, or you can get an audiobook of it. That little booklet talks about an inner circle of characteristics that make us a leader — a spiritual or a Christian leader — and an outer circle of characteristics that mark all leaders, whether they’re Christian or not.
“You must be the servant of the people you lead, or you’re not a Christian leader.”
There are a lot of characteristics of what makes a person an effective leader that are not distinctively Christian but are shaped — at least for the Christian — in Christian ways in their exercise by the spiritual marks of the inner circle. And it’s that circle that Jonathan is asking about here, I think. Specifically, Jonathan wants to know how Jesus’s teaching affects our conception and exercise of worship in the teaching in Matthew 20:25–28.
Defining Christian Leadership
Let me read that:
Jesus called [his disciples] to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25–28)
Before we can dig into how Jesus’s words shape Christian leadership, we need a definition. We need to define leadership so that we know what we’re talking about. I define leadership in general like this: knowing where you want people to go and taking the initiative to get them there in such a way that they follow you. That’s my definition of leadership in general. In other words, you don’t have leadership if you don’t have a destination, and you don’t have leadership if you don’t have a following. If nobody’s following, you’re not leading (by definition), and you don’t have leadership if you’re not the one taking the initiative to get them to the destination. So, there are always these three components in leadership: There’s a destination or a goal, and there’s some kind of initiative that somebody takes, and then there’s a following.
Now, what makes leadership Christian or spiritual is that you bring Jesus Christ into that definition. Christian leadership, or spiritual leadership, is knowing where Christ wants people to be and then taking the initiative to use Christ’s methods to get them there, in reliance upon the power of Jesus Christ, such that people gladly follow. That’s what makes leadership Christian.
Leading and Serving
So, what I try to do in that inner circle of defining Christian leadership is give a biblical answer to the question “Where does Christ want people to be?” If you’re going to take them and lead them somewhere, where are you going to take people? My short answer is that he wants people to live for the glory of God. He wants their lives to be filled with good deeds of love so that others see their good deeds and give glory to their Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16).
The text that Jonathan refers to in Matthew 20:25–28 specifically addresses the peculiar method of bringing people to live by faith, in love, for the glory of God. The Christian leader is not left to choose whatever means he thinks might work. He listens to Jesus, he submits to Jesus, and Jesus says that the method he wants us to use is marked by servanthood.
“Christian leaders need the humility and the love of a servant, and they need the goal-oriented zeal of Jesus Christ.”
You must be the servant of the people you lead, or you’re not a Christian leader. You must be the slave of the people you lead if you would be great in your leadership. And with Jesus as your example, you must be willing to lay down your life for the people you lead. And over against that, Jesus warns against lording it over people. In other words, a Christian leader does not use his position as a means of self-aggrandizement. Leadership is not for the sake of puffing up the leader’s ego, or getting satisfaction from using power over other people, or demanding rights because of a position of authority.
The whole mindset of the Christian leader, the spiritual leader, is “How can I spend and be spent for the earthly and eternal benefit of the people I lead?”
God’s Design Upholds Leadership
But here’s the peculiar challenge of that text: When Jesus said, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant,” he was not denying that the aspiration of greatness and effectiveness in leadership was to be abandoned. That’s important. He was not canceling the reality of leadership; he was defining the reality of leadership.
This is crucial, especially in our day, because I think a lot of people are skittish about the whole concept of leadership. It’s been abused so many times. People want to keep their distance from it. But biblically speaking, families need a dad to be a leader. Churches need elders to be leaders. Schools need teachers and administrators to be leaders. Every organized group that is going to function with any kind of aspiration toward a goal is going to need leadership. God has simply designed it that way.
We might think everybody should be on the same plane, with nobody leading anybody. God simply didn’t set it up that way. “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17). When Jesus stripped off his outer garments and bound himself with a towel and got down on his knees with a pan of water and washed his disciples’ feet like a slave, nobody in that room at that moment doubted who the leader was (John 13:4–5).
Servant leadership is not the abdication of leadership. Most people are designed by God to be happily inspired and motivated by gifted leadership. That’s the reality — and in the family and in the church, that means inspired and motivated by leaders who are not on an ego trip, who are manifestly humble, who are thrilled to be like little children in the care of a good heavenly Father, who are amazed that they themselves are saved, who are full of zeal to take a people to places of joy and faith and fruitfulness in the accomplishing of God’s purposes.
So, Christian leaders need the humility and the love of a servant, and they need the goal-oriented zeal of Jesus Christ.
