The Marks of a Spiritual Leader by John Piper

Author:John Piper [Piper, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Leadership
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Baptist General Conference that there was hardly

one of the twenty-eight years in which he

served that he was not actively opposed by

many people.

If criticism disables us, we will never make it as

spiritual leaders. I don’t mean that we must be the kind of people who don’t feel hurt, but rather that we must not be wiped out by the hurt. We must be

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THE MARKS OF A SPIRITUAL LEADER

able to say with Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:8, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not for-saken; struck down, but not destroyed.” We will feel the criticism, but we will not be incapacitated by it.

As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:16, “We do not lose heart.”

Leaders must be able to digest depression be-

cause they will eat plenty of it. There will be many days when the temptation is very strong to quit because of unappreciative people. Criticism is one of Satan’s favorite weapons to try to get effective Christian leaders to throw in the towel.

I should, however, qualify this characteristic

of being thick-skinned. I do not want to give the

impression that spiritual leaders are closed off to le-gitimate criticism. A good leader must not only be

thick-skinned but also open and humbly ready to

accept and apply just criticism. No leader is perfect, and Jonathan Edwards said once that he made it

a spiritual discipline to look for the truth in every 26

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THE OUTER CIRCLE OF SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP

criticism that came his way before he discarded it.

That’s good advice.

6. ENERGETIC

Lazy people cannot be leaders. Spiritual leaders

“redeem the time” (Ephesians 5:16). They work

while it is day, because they know that night comes when no man can work (John 9:4). They do “not

grow weary of doing good,” for they know that

in due season they shall reap if they do not lose

heart (Galatians 6:9). They are “steadfast, immov-

able, always abounding in the work of the Lord,

knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain”

(1 Corinthians 15:58).

But they do not take credit for this great energy

or boast in their efforts because they say with the apostle Paul, “I worked harder than any of them,

though it was not I, but the grace of God that was

with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). And: “For this I

toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Colossians 1:29).

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The world is run by tired men, someone has

said. A leader must learn to live with pressure. None of us accomplish very much without deadlines, and

deadlines always create a sense of pressure. A leader does not see the pressure of work as a curse but as a glory. He does not desire to fritter away his life in ex-cess leisure. He loves to be productive. And he copes with the pressure and prevents it from becoming

worrisome with promises like Matthew 11:27–28

and Philippians 4:7–8 and Isaiah 64:4.

7. A HARD THINKER

“Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.”

(1 Corinthians 14:20). It is not easy to be a lead-

er of people who can outthink you.

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