Grace Notes: The leaders we deserve

by SISTER ANNE MARIE WALSH, SOLT

It’s often been said that God gives us the leaders we deserve. If that’s true, we should then do everything in our power to become worthy of good leaders. Everyone who grows anything knows that the stock you start out with is very important. If the stock is not healthy, it will not produce good fruit. Simply saying this, in a political season, there is the pressing temptation to pivot to our leaders and complain about our options.
 
But the point is that reform begins with ourselves. If we want good leaders, we have to become good ourselves. It’s as simple as that. As a people, we produce our own leaders. But if we are trying to produce leadership without any connection to or real reference to God, and if the criteria for a good leader have become completely secularized, we are going to run right up against the impossibility of bringing anything good out of it. God the father is the source of every good gift, and if we are honest, we soon recognize that without his gifts, we can do nothing. 
 
Someone will immediately suggest God is the one who has withdrawn his gifts from us and that is the reason we are in the trouble we are. But really, God does not like to take back his gifts once he gives them. And upon honest reflection, we have to admit that God has not withdrawn his gifts, but rather, we have rejected them.  

Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say we want the gifts, but we don’t want the conditions that go along with the gifts, such as striving to live a life that is without sin and that is really pleasing to God as the source of our real happiness
 
This does not mean we will see perfection in those who acknowledge God, but rather that God will use present weaknesses for his purposes and to manifest his power. David was such a man. Chosen and anointed by God, he struggled mightily at times with his own weaknesses. Yet his relationship with the Lord was so strong that he never became separated from God but turned to him immediately in his falls (seducing Bathsheba, killing her husband Uriah, calling for a census whose repercussions resulted in the death of 70,000 people.)

One of the most beautiful prayers of contrition and repentance is found in Psalm 51, “Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness. In your compassion, blot out my offense.” 
This is David casting himself upon the Lord’s mercy.  

This is David manifesting his heart but also revealing the heart of God at the same time. David’s relationship with the Lord was so intimate that God himself said of David that he was a man after his own heart.

Imagine entering heaven and hearing the father exclaim, “Here comes a daughter (a son) after my own heart!”  What living soul wouldn’t thrill to hear those words?  These are the leaders we really need.
 
Leaders often think it is their business to create  new morality. It is not! God has given his people  a morality to follow and any leader who tries to replace it commits the original sin on a massive scale. Adam and Eve rebelled by deciding they and not God should determine what was right and wrong.  

Likewise, any leader who rejects God’s sovereignty in this area will lead his people to doom. That would be Lucifer taking his followers down to hell.  Make no mistake, a leader has the capacity to set you on one of two paths only: a path to heaven or a path to hell. That’s it!  

Because the authority of leaders comes from God himself it doesn’t matter if you reject God’s order.  You will, in the end, be judged by it.
 
 To be authentic and faithful followers of Christ requires courage. Unanimity can be very compelling and resisting that force when it is a moral question can be very difficult for one individual against the crowd.  

Perhaps if we kept the words of Dwight D Eisenhower in mind: “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups,” we would be more cautious in blindly following the latest “advancement” or “progress” proposed to us by our “leaders.”

And, please God, we would be far more prayerful, discerning, and cautious in actually choosing our leaders according to the purposes for which God has put them in their position!