The countdown began a long time ago and has been a long journey; but by God’s grace, I am less than 1 week away from marrying the one whom God is entrusting me with. Why is that important you ask? Or why is it even necessary for me to bring up here? Do I just like speaking about the big day as much as possible? No, it’s none of those. It’s not in here because of how excited I am, nor is it because I’ve just been telling anyone willing to listen.
Rather, it’s because in this season of preparation for that big day, God has given me a new spelling and a new meaning to the word leader. Rather than leader, which is defined by the Webster Dictionary as, “the person who guides or commands a group, organization, or country,” the word for me in this season of preparation, has become lead-her! While the casual definition or picture of a leader is of a person who influences large quantities of people, as the definition suggests, there is another aspect of leadership that focuses not on the large quantities, but on the quality of the influence. That is where our focus lies today!
Ephesians 5:22-25 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
There are at least 3 keys that this Scripture provides on leadership. Firstly, it is abundantly clear that all leaders must be willing to also be led! As the husband, who wishes for his wife to submit, I must first be led by God, His Word, His instructions and His precepts! In order for my wife to gain the confidence to submit to me as her leader, she must see the right example of that submission. In other words, leaders cannot go around yelling, screaming and commanding that “I’m the captain now” and expect others to fall in line when we ourselves have not fallen in alignment with Jesus Christ, our head!
The second key of leadership is leading by love. This Scripture admonishes the husband, who is the leader addressed here, to love his wife. In other words, the Bible is stating that in order for us to effectively lead someone else, we must actually have love for that person! If we need to identify what love looks like, we can go to 1 Corinthians 13 to visualize it. The more we grow in God, who is love, the more effectively we can lead.
Last but not least, in order to lead, we must be willing to sacrifice. The standard of love here is the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ, who gave himself up for others. As leaders, have we put the interests, cares, needs, etc. of those we are leading above our own, or are we still putting ourselves first? For me, this is the area I have mostly been working on. No longer can I strive to make decisions, do things considering just myself, or think about things from just my perspective, because God has entrusted me as the husband to lead through sacrifice, as Jesus Christ did for us!
When we truly incorporate these 3 aspects of leadership, we will be truly successful in leading. I leave us with a prayer: I pray that God will pour out grace for leadership to us all; and that the God of all grace will give me the grace to lead – her – ship as the captain that He is calling me to be!
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