The Hospitable Leader DevotionalExemplo

In The Hospitable Leader, Terry Smith points out that it’s easy for leaders to feel like they want to take struggles away from their followers. Parents want to smooth the path to adulthood, bosses want to ensure they aren’t giving too much work, and so on. However, it’s necessary for people who want to accomplish big dreams to overcome difficulties and barriers. If we always try to step in and defeat those barriers, they’ll reap negative results, including the fact they won’t have the privilege of undergoing the process of perseverance that produces deep character, and they aren’t the one actually accomplishing the dream!

In an intriguing passage from Judges, we see that God purposefully left enemies around his people, the Israelites, in order for them to learn from battle. God easily could have pounced on the enemies with the snap of his spiritual fingers, but he called the Israelites to something great and left the difficulties in their way. It’s important to note that this warful passage takes place within the context of God’s generally theocratic rule of the Israelite people (which we don’t have today). He was directly working through them to institute his justice in the world, which is why they’re mandated to exemplify these kinds of acts. Nonetheless, we see him leave enemies for them, and then we see an intriguing passage of them fighting the battles to live out their calling as free people of God. This is an important understanding of how God works on our behalf.

See, we are all in the process of trying to become better—to personally reflect the image of God more and more. However, our sinful nature, the thing that pulls us down to idolize things that are not of God, battles against us as we try and be who God intends for us to be. Thus, simply put, we’re in a battle to overcome our sinful natures and to develop our spiritual nature rooted in Christ. An essential part of that process is struggling, learning the negatives of struggling, and then learning how to succeed in light of the struggle. We use those learnings to equip ourselves to do God’s work now and for eternity. 

Imagine if a parent were to do all of their child’s homework so the child gets a 4.0 GPA and can go to a good college. Once there, they wouldn’t experience the joy of deserving it—never mind the fact that they wouldn’t even be able to succeed. Similarly, God lets us do the difficult work he’s allotted to us and doesn’t get rid of the barriers himself, because he’s developing us into the people who he is using to do his work for the world. God doesn’t want to do the work for us, he wants to do the work through us.

With this in mind, we can learn from God’s hospitable leadership and exemplify it ourselves. If we take the work away from others, we don’t equip them to succeed. But if we let them experience the joy of joining in a big mission, and free them to experience the beauty of work that demands perseverance, then they can flourish in their dreams.