Sunday Sermon

Leadership

Isaiah 56:10

The leaders who are to guard the people are blind; they don’t know what they are doing. All of them are like quiet dogs that don’t know how to bark. They lie down and dream and love to sleep.

A part of my thinking and study over the last few years has been looking into the nature of God. What things do we know about God and how do they all fit together? Developing this understanding has helped build a faith that stands when all other things fail. Everyone knows the big things about God. First is that God is The Truth and then we know what flows from that is God’s righteousness and love. It is the next level of things that have caught my attention. How does God’s righteousness and love work in everyday situations? A quality that often gets bypassed when considering things about God but seems central to who God is and what our faith is all about is that God is a generous God. As we look at how God operates and what God does we see that God just gives things to us that we do not merit or even deserve. This happens long before we get to the grace, mercy and forgiveness that God gives that represents that highest form of God’s generosity. Simple things tell me the most about this generous God. When we read in Genesis, we see that God spends time trying to convince Cain not to kill his brother. God does not have to do that but that is not how God works. When Cain does act God then holds him accountable and I think that is a part of God’s generosity also. Abraham is another place where God is generous because Abraham is not what he should be but God keeps working with him and Abraham grows to be the man of faith God wants him to be. Over and over we see God stepping in and giving more then we should get. Of course the best example of God’s generosity is Jesus. There is nothing that says God has to deal with our sin issue but we have a God who does not want us to die because our sin and so in His generosity God offers life to us through our faith in Jesus. God’s generosity is shown in the simple fact that He gives us His word to learn from. The wisdom God hands out for free in scripture is so wonderful and so helpful to all humans even atheists understand the power of what God gives to us. Often we speak of the grace, mercy and forgiveness of God and that is quite frankly short hand for all of God’s generosity. Grace is all about God giving us what we need but don’t deserve, mercy is about God not wanting us to suffer the full weight of our sin and forgiveness speaks of God taking our sin on Himself so we can have life instead of death. The response to God’s generosity is to be thankful and to grasp just how wonderful God is and so build a relationship with God that will transform us into what God longs for us to be. Our God is generous because we need Him to be and so He pours out all the things that will help us be what we were made to be and that is the God we worship and serve with joy and love.

It is important to note that God does not use His generosity to manipulate us because all people enjoy the grace and mercy of God even if they do not believe. The generosity of God is there to tell us the kind of God He is and to speak to what God wants to do if we will submit ourselves to His authority. This generosity points to a God who wants to offer more to us if we will learn to trust in Him and accept His greatest generosity the forgiveness of our sin. A point God makes over and over is the wickedness of the human heart and how it brings destruction to us and that we need God to intervene if we are to have any hope of avoiding the destruction sin brings. Because of our condition, we find the generosity of God at work again. God speaks of how wicked our hearts are to warn us so we can understand where our biggest problem is. It is not God’s plan to make us feel bad but to alert us about our problem and to offer a solution. This is where God is at His best because God does not have to solve our problem. We are the one’s who have sinned and we deserve the death we get but God does not want that. We have this God who offers a fix for our broken lives because God hates that we are broken and wants to fix us. To comprehend how great what God offers is we have to know how terrible the human heart is and the evil that it can produce. Our hope is that we have a God who is not afraid to tell us about this and He does it not to condemn us but to let us know He offers an answer to our situation. God does not have to do this because it is not God’s fault but God knows we need help and so in His generosity He offers to fix us. The God of creation is a great and wonderful God who gives us hope and fills our lives with joy instead of worry and fear.

Because we are approaching our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American experiment, I have been considering what the founders of our country thought about the human condition. Our founders understood that to really know how to institute a government they needed to consider how humans acted. What our founders appreciated was the complexity of the human situation. Humans need to be governed but the problem was that government would be run by humans and so they tried to give the government enough power to work but limit that power so it would not be corrupted by humans. I think that our founders were considering verses like we are looking at when they worked on the Constitution. Our verse describes how leaders can be corrupt and incompetent and the idea is this is compared to God who is not any of those things. Human leaders struggle with both being able to do the job of leading and also dealing with the corruption power brings. We know from all of history that this is an issue that has not been solved by any government and it all has to do with the problem of the evil in humans hearts. Yes, there have been good people who have led their people but we know even the best of people fall to temptation. If there was ever a great leader is was king David and yet even he failed the test. No one is good enough all the time and that is why we need to submit to the authority of God and let Him lead us in our lives. God knows that we are weak and that we are prone to corruption and so God offers to lead us. In our verse we see that God understands that the purpose of leaders are to guard people and I like the idea that God sets the standard so we know what is required of leaders. In the next breath God also shows us the weakness of human leaders which God describes with considerable detail. What God is doing is making the point that humans are weak and they fail and that is for leaders as well as any other people. I bless God for doing this because it informs us about where to put our trust and what to really believe in. Humans governments are never going to be good and should be limited but learning to trust in God will give us the leadership we need. Our hope is not in our leaders but in the God who is generous and who teaches us how to be what we should be. Let us trust in God and not human leaders because we will find greater peace in doing so.

This verse is such a great step in comparing the leadership of God and the leadership of man. The evil and incompetence of man is shown for what it is and God condemns it not because it is corrupt but because it does not do what it should do, guard people. For God this is so troublesome because He is the great leader who guards His people. It all starts from the very beginning with God telling Adam and Eve not to eat something. God knew what would happen to them and He wanted guard them from the evil. One of the things the Bible does is it is a form of God being a guardian to us because the Bible outlines the things that are dangerous and it tells us to watch out for them. Comparing humans as leaders to God can be disheartening but it serves a purpose that can help us. Even though David did evil he is still considered a great leader because his heart was set on the things of God. Moses was a great leader not because he did great things but because he spent time listening to God. A good leader is one who sets his heart on God. Moses did not want to be a leader but God made him one. Best of all is the leaders who seek God seem to bring the most joy and peace to people. As a historian I know the arguments people are going to make about religious leaders being some of the worst leaders and I agree with that. I did not say religious leaders I said people who seek God to lead them so they can lead others. Even Jesus condemned the religious leaders of His time because they were filled with selfish and self centered desires. The center of a good leader is the humbleness to know that they need to be led and so they seek God to teach them and to help them so they do not end up like this verse. We have a God who knows how to lead and wants to lead each us of but we must humble ourselves and submit to the loving authority of God and that is not something easily done. Leadership is an important thing in our lives and who is leading us makes a real difference. If we let God lead us and trust in His guardianship over us we will become the people God longs for and the world will be a better place for it. What glory and wonder it is to have a God who loves us like he does and always does the right thing.

Knowing this verse can be a big help to us as we think about our faith and how it interacts with the world around us. Faith in the living God has real impact on how we live and if it doesn’t then what is our faith good for. In the book of James we are told that our faith needs to shape how we live because what God has to say has real effect on what is going on in the world. The question then comes to us, do we want people leading us who listen to and seek to know God’s leadership. Each and every person of faith has to make that choice and this verse tells us what happens when we seek something other then God’s work and will. As people of faith we should long for the leadership of the living God working in men and woman and from them will be leaders that can be trusted and will bring hope and joy to the world. Choosing the righteous living God or corrupt broken humans seems to be an easy and clear choice.