That I may Know HIM - A Devotional

Day 18: Seduced To Lead

The people forced leadership upon him, and together with them, a golden idol was the outcome of his new roles. That sin, God said, made the people "naked" – like the prostitutes that they had become (Exodus 32:25). In his case also, it was "the people" that moved the motion (v.1), but everybody paid for it.

4. An Anointed Mistake

Anointing to preach or heal does not mean anointing to lead. A good preacher does not necessarily make a good leader. This is where many promising ministers have missed it. Because they prayed a prayer and someone was healed; because they sang a song and people were blessed; because they preached a sermon and somebody said it was great, they no longer are able to sit under any other person’s leadership. They have also been ‘called.’ What can anyone else teach them! Soon they set about starting their ‘own’ ecclesiastical kingdom - a ‘ministry,’ a church - where they also might rule.

Some of these Gideons did not set out with the motive to become rulers, but forgetting (or ignoring) the specifications of their fundamental mandate, they fell prey to the seductions of "the men of Israel," who would usually say to them, "Be our leader. We are your ready congregation. You need not look far to start."

When mundane men rather than the great God orchestrate you into leadership, you might grow into an "ornamental idol," but would sooner crash as a disused, decorated distraction from the very God you had sincerely set out to glorify.

He becomes an anointed mistake who makes himself (or is made by "the people") a leader merely because he is an anointed man of God.

5. Jesus: A Crown to Flee

Ahead might be anointed for a crown, but not every crown fits every anointed head. It is the common temptation of the great to be persuaded into good things that are not the best for them. In the days of His earthly ministry, Jesus Himself faced this temptation of the great. He saw it coming, after He had miraculously multiplied bread and fish and freely fed five thousand hopelessly hungry men and a countless number of women and children. He saw that they were going to come and "carry him off" (Philips) to make Him a king "by force" of their unanimous vote.

When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force to make him king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone (John 6:15).

He departed to hide and pray. He knew that His Kingdom was not of this world. Unfortunately, for many of us, that could not have been the time to flee. It would just have been the time to spread our plumes and show our arse, like a foolish, proud peacock. After all, praise God, we are becoming popular and powerful, we would have thought.

Jesus had a focus. He knew that He was to receive a kingdom (Luke 19:12), but He knew also that His Kingdom was not of "this world" (John 18:36).

The bread-and-fish campaign was not the first time Jesus was confronted with a distracting crown. That temptation had come first in the early days of His ministry. He had fasted forty days and forty nights when the Tempter (as the Bible there describes Satan) came offering Jesus "all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them," but not without a great price that then did not seem so great (Matthew 4:8-10). Jesus’ response to the Tempter showed His awareness that these great and generous offers usually carry in them the hidden seed of the idolatrous ‘ephod.’ He said to the devil, "It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him ONLY shalt thou serve" (v.10).

May each one of us know when to sneak away from the ovation to hide and refocus. All promotions are not from God. Some are distractions so packaged by the enemy of our soul. Some promotions are glamorous demotions with a lying label. Moses was not so ignorant.

6. Moses: Made in Egypt for Canaan

That I was trained in Oxford does not mean that I must teach in Oxford. All who serve in Oxford were not made in Oxford. Moses was made in Egypt, but not for the throne of Egypt. Even though Moses was aware that he had been called to lead, he was also aware, like Jesus, that his call was not to the enticing throne of Egypt, to which he was an heir as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter. Because of that awareness, he chose "rather to suffer affliction with the [enslaved] people of God, than to enjoy the [palatial] pleasures of sin for a season" as a Pharaoh (Hebrews 11:23-28). It was a choice.

When the choices confront us, between the passing pleasures on the wrong stool and the transitory pains of oppression in the Lord’s school; between the people’s mandate and the Father’s purpose; between the glamours of their generosity and the pains of His longsuffering, may we make the right choice. It’s all a choice.

7. The "Where" and the "When"

Jesus and Moses were each aware that they had upon their lives the anointing to lead, but they also knew where they were not to be that leader, so they waited for their time. One might be truly called to lead, yet miss the time and the place of that mandate.

Unlike Jesus and Moses, Gideon and Aaron were anointed for something other than they were further persuaded by the people to also accept, strangely in the name of the Lord. One was anointed to be a deliverer, the other to be a priest, yet they got seduced by "the people," their people, and their choice produced idols that blighted them and all.

Several years ago, the world renowned evangelist, Billy Graham, was magnanimously offered the prestigious presidency of the United States of America by one of the two principal political parties. He was the best candidates they had found in the entire country. His people needed him in that season. All they needed was his consent. His campaign bills were entirely guaranteed. Billy Graham declined the offer. He was doing a greater job, he said, serving the King of the universe. He must have told himself that he was not a called as a Daniel or a Nehemiah. History has now vindicated him; the same history would have judged him.

8. Finally

Anointing for one thing does not mean anointing for everything. A good preacher does not necessarily make a good leader. May we be careful how we interpret the signs that God performs through His people, and may we not become the ‘majority’ and ‘demon-cratic’ instruments of leadership distraction to some person upon whom the Lord has placed His hand. May it not be said that someone who otherwise would still have been serving God in their proper place was glitteringly idolated by our sincere but blind persuasions, or that we ourselves became the victims adorned in those glamorous but restricting ‘golden mantles’ made out of earrings voted unanimously from the ears of a dying, deaf multitude.