Who do people need you to be right now?

Tom Harper May 29, 2020

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Sergio De La Mora, lead pastor of Cornerstone Church of San Diego, said this in an Outreach magazine article in 2013:

…God distinctly told me to stop being the pastor I wanted to be and start becoming the pastor the community needed me to be. Though it was only one sentence, its ripple effect changed the course of our church forever.

This is true of leadership in general – we shouldn’t just be the leader we aspire to be, but the leader our company, church, team and family need us to be.

It’s also true that situations and circumstances change, requiring us to lead differently, to be someone different. So how do I know who to be at any given moment? Must I catalog multiple personalities in my brain and call one up every time people need someone different? And shouldn’t I just be myself, after all?

Scripture sets our thinking straight on this:

Whoever claims to live in [God] must walk as Jesus did (1 John 2:6).

If we lead thousands or even no one at all, this command applies to us. We must imitate Christ as he walked and talked in this life. It’s like stepping into his sandals while his feet are still in them.

If we walk like him, we can’t help but start acting like him. After a while there should be a resemblance.  If we are in him, we will lead like him, love like him and live like him.

Who do people really need you to be as their leader? Do they need a different version of you depending on the day, or someone who acts like Jesus all the time?

Excerpted from Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership (DeepWater Books, 2019). For more information about the publisher and the book, visit https://deepwaterbooks.com/.

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Tom Harper is publisher of BiblicalLeadership.com and executive chairman of Networld Media Group, a business-to-business publisher and event producer. He has written five books, including Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership (DeepWater Books, 2019) as well as the Christian business fable Through Colored Glasses and its sequel Inner Threat (DeepWater, 2022). Learn More »

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