Men's Leadership

When you add up your influence on those around you, would you say you’re in the asset column or liability column? Are you a credit or a debit? Do you contribute to the “bottom line” of those you lead (and we all lead someone, whether we want to or not), or do you drain “cash flow” from that bottom line by squandering the opportunities you’ve been given?

Put leadership into financial terms and it seems so much more meaningful, doesn’t it? If your life is a budget, where are your cash resources going each month? Are there holes in your budget that need to be tightened up so you don’t waste precious cash in a tough economy?

And a tough economy it is. If the collective leadership of American men are accounted for on a balance sheet, the country is bleeding red ink and living on the productivity of just a few leaders-some of whom are fleecing their followers unscrupulously. That’s the thing about leadership. When we don’t step up to our responsibilities, there will always be those who will step up in our place. But we may not appreciate the direction they take us.

We American men have become so complacent that maybe we deserve what we’ve become. We have squandered authority, leadership, and influence, parting with it as easily as profit on a home sold during the peak of the real estate bubble. But just as we suddenly remember to look under the couch for spare change when spending money becomes a little more scarce, we’re now in a position of looking far and wide for good leaders. Unfortunately, sometimes we’re just stuck with “spare change.”

Don’t lose heart, however. There are valuable lessons from the history of Israel found in the Old Testament. Often, Israel would lose its generational memory and slip into dark, leaderless periods, only to rebound when things got bad enough for a leader to emerge. Some of those leaders-or judges, as the Bible calls them-were better than others, but they all had God’s blessing and a mission to restore the Israelite nation.

That’s where we’re at in America right now. It is a dark moment, to be sure. But if we start now cultivating a new generation of godly leaders, future generations will be impacted more than we even imagine.

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