Spiritual Leaders vs. Natural Leaders

#Leadership. When writing this blog post, I searched for #Leadership in twitter and got the following results:

“Leadership is not about income. Its about impact.”

“If you don’t sculpt who you want to be, you will be at the mercy of the carvings of others.”

“Be friendly with your former peers. Do not focus on creating new friends”

And of course, no leadership post would be compelte without a quote from Seth Godin:

“…if you stopped actively sabotaging your own work.
We must be talented, powerful and resilient creatures indeed given how much we manage to produce despite the constant undercutting, ridicule and needless censorship we aim at ourselves.”

I’m not really sure what any of these quotes mean and I’m not sure what they are supposed to tell me. What I can gather from these quotes, is that these people seem to be what J. Oswald Sanders calls “Natural Leaders” as opposed to Spiritual Leaders. Sanders defines the difference between the natural leader and the spirutal leader as follows:

Natural Leader:

• Self Confident
• Knows Men
• Makes own decisions
• Ambitious
• Created methods
• Enjoys command
• Seeks personal reward
• independent.

Spiritual Leader:

• Confident in God
• Knows God
• Seeks’s God’s Will
• Humble
• Follows God’s example
• Delights in obedience to God
• Loves God and others
• Depends on God

The main difference between the natural leader and the spiritual leader is this: The spiritual leader finds everything in God and his word. As christian we should seek to be a Spiritual Leader and we should seek to follow spiritual leaders. As Christians, we are to be fully relient on Christ and his word. What the world needs (and the church even more so) is not more “Natural Leaders” who are self relient, but more Spiritual Leaders who are completely relient.

“A true and safe leader is likely to be one who has no desire to lead, but is forced into a position by the inward leading of the Holy Spirit and the press of circumstances…There was hardly a great leader from Paul to the present day but was drafted by the Holy Spirit for the tas, and commissioned by the Lord to fill a position he had little heart for…The man whois ambitious to lead is disqualified…the true leader will have no desire to lord it over God’s heritage, but will be humble, gente, self-sacrificing and altogether ready to follow when the Spirit chooses another to lead.” A.W. Tozer