We are in the second week of our Tuesday morning study on Jeremiah, still in the overview. Longer books, Jeremiah qualifies as a longer book, take a bit longer to get an overview done, in fact we are going to invest one more week on the overview.
One of the themes that seems to be emerging as I read quickly through the book is the failure of leadership. Now I know that there are a lot of books and articles out there about the importance of leadership and leadership’s impact on the organization and individual. I cannot hope to add much of anything to that corpus, but I want to make a couple of observations.
In the context of Jeremiah the failure of leadership is to not elevate, honor, and obey the Word of God as the foundational element for the life of the nation. Instead God, through Jeremiah, describes what the leaders are doing twice (6:14; 8:11) as healing the brokenness of my people superficially. It is like the leaders identified the symptoms, treated those, but ignored the root issue. The root issue was a systemic disdain for and disobedience of God’s Word. Where I am at in the study right now the key passage is 23:21 – 40. If you spend some time in that passage you will find that the Lord rebukes the prophets for not coming to Him when He is near to them. Rather they share their dreams rather than His Word. Since they refuse to come to Him they are unable to minister to the people whom the Lord has charged them to lead. Look at 23:22. Note the import of what God is saying there. If these men had come to Him, instead of sharing their own ideas and dreams, He would have equipped them to turn the people back to God.
This is not just true of churches, nations, organizations – it is true for our families. If as fathers we are to lead, to turn our kids toward the Lord, we must continually be coming before Him. Otherwise, we are just like the leaders of Judah, sharing our stuff, our dreams.
That will not turn out very well.
In the context of Jeremiah the failure of leadership is to not elevate, honor, and obey the Word of God as the foundational element for the life of the nation. Instead God, through Jeremiah, describes what the leaders are doing twice (6:14; 8:11) as healing the brokenness of my people superficially. It is like the leaders identified the symptoms, treated those, but ignored the root issue. The root issue was a systemic disdain for and disobedience of God’s Word. Where I am at in the study right now the key passage is 23:21 – 40. If you spend some time in that passage you will find that the Lord rebukes the prophets for not coming to Him when He is near to them. Rather they share their dreams rather than His Word. Since they refuse to come to Him they are unable to minister to the people whom the Lord has charged them to lead. Look at 23:22. Note the import of what God is saying there. If these men had come to Him, instead of sharing their own ideas and dreams, He would have equipped them to turn the people back to God.
This is not just true of churches, nations, organizations – it is true for our families. If as fathers we are to lead, to turn our kids toward the Lord, we must continually be coming before Him. Otherwise, we are just like the leaders of Judah, sharing our stuff, our dreams.
That will not turn out very well.
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