Lead Like Jesus Revisited: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time

“Live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God.”

So you have recognized the ways you are a leader: leadership happens anytime we influence the thinking, behavior, or development of another person. And, aware of Jesus’ rich life experience in general and His expert leadership experience in particular, you are willing to follow Him as your leadership role model. The early disciples needed to make that same decision when Jesus extended to them this invitation: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19 ESV). Jesus’ simple statement here clearly communicated right at the start that following Him would mean becoming a different person. As they followed Jesus, He would transform them: Jesus would nurture, grow, and refine them. In other words, leading like Jesus is a transformational journey. This transformational journey begins with the willingness to do whatever Jesus commands, with a heart surrendered to doing His will, and with the commitment to lead the way He leads.

Transformation happens—for good or bad, to one degree or another—as we interact with people. Your sovereign God will of course oversee that transformation for your good and His glory, and people you lead will be tools He uses in that transformational process. So let’s look at who we are leading. As the diagram below illustrates, examining yourself is the first step: this exercise is at the core of leading like Jesus in all of your spheres of influence. You can’t lead like Jesus until you accept the fact that only Jesus can lead you. Jesus attested to this truth when He said in John 5:19: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” Think about it: we hear this principle of starting with self every time we hear a safety demonstration on an airplane. The flight attendant tells us to put on our own oxygen masks before we place a mask on someone else. This principle applies in leadership too. Let’s look carefully at our spheres of influence.

We believe that leaders who desire to lead like Jesus must first examine themselves by answering these two questions:

Your answer to Whose am I? defines the ultimate authority and primary audience for your life. Your ultimate authority and most important audience is the one you trust and look to above all else. Your decision about whose you are changes everything. If you choose to follow Jesus, you are no longer your own. You are not living to please yourself or other people. Instead, Jesus is the only authority and only audience for every life decision you make.

PAUSE AND REFLECT

Jesus is the perfect example of living for God and for Him alone. After Jesus was baptized but before He began His season of leadership on earth, He was led into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. There, the evil one tempted Jesus to turn from God’s will and instead give in to self-gratification (turning stones into bread), public recognition (jumping off the temple), and the misuse of His power (ruling over all the kingdoms of the world). Each time, Jesus stood strong: He demonstrated submission to His Father and complete commitment to His Father’s way. Jesus knew whose He was: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God” (John 13:3). Jesus came from love and knew He would return to love, so He was secure in whose He was.

Knowing whose you are can help you stand strong in your ministry and is foundational to leading like Jesus. Knowing you belong to God gives you the incredible freedom of completely trusting your life to Him. Will you trust God with your life?

The answer to Who am I?—the second question that prompts healthy self-examination—defines your identity and life purpose. We are told in Ephesians 2:10 that we are “God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works.” You were born with a God-given purpose and plan for your life, and you were created perfectly to fulfill that purpose. Your core identity is rooted in the forgiving, saving, and redeeming work Jesus did on your behalf when He hung on the cross. In 2 Corinthians 5:21, we learn that “God made [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Scripture is full of descriptors of your identity: “dearly loved” (Colossians 3:12), forgiven (Romans 4:7), chosen (John 15:19), “a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9), the apple of God’s eye (Psalm 17:8), “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14), heirs with Jesus (Romans 8:17), friends (John 15:14), and many more. Jesus clearly showed His commitment to His life purpose in Luke 19:10 when He said, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

PAUSE AND REFLECT

In what ways would your leadership be different if you truly believed that you are the person God says you are?

Choosing God as your ultimate authority and audience as well as choosing to believe your identity as described in Scripture results in a transformation of your perspective. Your answers to Whose am I? and Who am I? will change how you see everything, and you will lead others from that new point of view.

After leaving the wilderness—after standing on God’s Word and resisting Satan’s temptations—Jesus called into service those He would lead for the next three years, and He poured His life into training His disciples. Your first test of leading like Jesus will be leading another person. This person may be someone you work with every day, or it may be your child. The desired outcome is a relationship built on trust. Remember in Matthew 14 when Peter jumped out of the boat and began walking on water to join Jesus?

But when [Peter] saw the strong wind and the waves, he was terrified and began to sink. “Save me, Lord!” he shouted.

Jesus immediately reached out and grabbed him. “You have so little faith,” Jesus said. “Why did you doubt me?” (vv. 30–31 NLT)

Jesus spent three years building a culture of trust with His disciples, including Peter. So when this bold and impulsive follower started to drown, he called out to Jesus for help.

In our life role relationships, trust is the stream by which vulnerability, caring, commitment, and grace flow between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, friends and fellow citizens. Trust is extended first by loving hearts committed to serve and support one another, and trust grows with promises kept, encouragement and appreciation expressed, support and acceptance offered, repentance and apologies received, and reconciliation and restoration established. Yet the stream of trust has a fragile ecological balance: once it is polluted, it will take time and effort to restore it.

The always present power to restore intimacy and broken trust is love. Without love we are nothing and we gain nothing. Read the following words from the apostle Paul, and ponder the cleansing and healing properties of love:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Corinthians 13:1–7)

PAUSE AND REFLECT

• List three ways you nurture trust as you lead.

• List two things you do that put at risk people’s trust in your leadership.

• Think of a time when you lost trust in someone who was leading you. How did you feel? How long did you feel that way? When did you forgive the person—and why?

The ability to develop and sustain the trust of the people you lead produces community. Jesus modeled this perfectly in John 13:13–14:

“You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.”

Jesus created a community by empowering His followers to serve and then trusting them to do exactly that. Effective leaders realize they are to be good stewards of the energy and efforts of those they lead; they honor the power of diversity and acknowledge the power of teamwork. As the saying goes, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Jesus sent out His disciples to minister in teams of two (Mark 6:7). In doing so, Jesus empowered them to act on His behalf in support of one another as they accomplished the work He had trained them to do.

Without trust, these relationships cannot be developed, and community will never happen. Individuals in a group will not empower one another to accomplish an assigned task if they do not trust each other. A leader’s failure to empower others is one of the key reasons some teams are ineffective.

Family leadership can be really challenging, especially when the leader’s efforts and aspirations to serve the best interests of others directly conflict with the leader’s own priorities and immediate demands. For example, a father could be running late for work but must stop to make the most of a teachable moment when he hears his daughter ridicule her little brother. The most rewarding results of family leadership are apt to be the subtle fashioning of loving relationships and the slow development of personal character.

Finally, to be good stewards of the efforts of those committed to work with them, effective leaders must honor the power of diversity and acknowledge the power of teamwork.

PAUSE AND REFLECT

How do you think the people you lead at work and at home would describe your leadership in the following situations?

• a time of crisis

• a time of failure

• a time of victory

• a time of plenty

• a time of want

Do you think you would like what you would hear? What weaknesses do you think might be identified—and what might you do to strengthen those traits?

The quality of a leader’s influence on a broader organizational level depends on the transformed perspective, trust, and community attained in the leader’s first three spheres of influence (self, one person, a small group). Leading like Jesus in an organization creates a new culture that affects all relationships and every result. When people know the leader cares about them and wants to help them grow, a new culture of trust and community develops, resulting in both high performance and great human satisfaction.

By valuing both relationships and results, Jesus created a culture for an effective organization. In His own life, He aligned Himself with the purpose His Father had for Him. Then, in the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, Jesus clearly identified the purpose He had for His followers and their organizations. He equipped His disciples for their work in the first three spheres of influence, and then He sent His Holy Spirit to guide them at the organizational leadership level, a process we see in the book of Acts.

When Jesus called the disciples, He said: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19 ESV). And at the end of His ministry, He said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:18–19).

Jesus passed the baton to us. Wherever we live or work, whether we are influencing at home, at church, or in an organization, our paramount task as leaders is to create a culture that reflects Jesus’ core value: love. This kind of love shepherds people and organizations from where they are to where God would have them go—and that process usually is not easy!

Leading like Jesus requires leaders to be shepherds and servants, who value each person as an integral part of the organization. These leaders adopt as their core values the principles and practices of Jesus and incorporate those in the organization’s training, policies, and systems. When a challenge comes, leaders examine their self-leadership before investigating possible organizational weaknesses.

Joni and Friends, a Christian ministry for people with disabilities and their families, is a perfect example of an organization whose culture has been changed by people who lead like Jesus. Company leaders had no idea what kind of long-term impact this way of leading would have on the organization. What started out as the leadership team’s onetime opportunity to learn to lead like Jesus has become an ongoing approach to business that now involves all levels of the organization. Today, Joni and Friends incorporates the concepts of leading like Jesus into every aspect of its operations, including the interview process, new employee training and orientation, and even its conflict resolution policy.

“Leading like Jesus is the cornerstone of our culture,” explains Doug Mazza, president and COO of Joni and Friends. “It affects everything we do.”

The impact of Lead Like Jesus transformed the organization’s culture. “New employees come on board at Joni and Friends, and they are stunned,” explains Joni Eareckson Tada, founder and CEO. “They’re amazed that we offer Jesus-centered leadership training. It’s so unique for any place of business. In every situation, we want our employees to Exalt God Only, and I think leading like Jesus has really helped us infuse that in our culture.”

A word of warning: we often think outside the home when we think of an organization. Frankly, no organization is as important as your home. Our life role relationships are based on loyalty and commitment for a lifetime. We can fall into the trap of relying too much on both the resilience of these relationships and our ability to regain lost ground, lost intimacy, and lost love. Life role relationships require daily renewal and nurture; we never know when or how they will end. People in a culture that leads like Jesus will keep their “I love you’s” up to date.

Now that we have introduced how to lead in your spheres of influence, let’s proceed to the second aspect of leading like Jesus, which provides the framework for the rest of this book: to learn about the four domains of leadership and live out what we learn.