by Pastor Toks Oshokoya

Leadership: Every child of God is a leader; you are a leader of some sort. In the kingdom of God there is leadership structure and there is hierarchy. Through Adam we all have a natural tendency to be bent towards evil and disorderliness (Romans 5:12). Even with the gifts of the Spirit we have a tendency to be disorderly. While Paul was writing the first book of Corinthians about the gifts of the Spirit, in Chapters 12 and 14, he ended it with Let all things be decently and in order (I Corinthians 14:40). God did not give us gifts to do what we like. What determines whether we are sensitive to the Holy Spirit or not is our ability to know orderliness in the spirit, and when there is orderliness in the spirit there is growth. Everybody is a leader but leadership has levels and you need to consciously agree that you will submit.

At creation God made both men and women leaders, but He told the woman to submit to the man (Eph. 5:22). For the woman to submit to the man there is a price for it and for the man to love his wife there is a price to pay. In a situation where everybody is equal there is disorderliness. Every star in the sky has its own place, its own location – the sun rules by day, the star rules by night. You must deliberately say, “Yes, I’m submitting to this authority” even if the authority over you is not perfect. If you are looking for a perfect authority before submitting then know that you will not find a perfect leader.

If you are looking for a day that you will be a perfect leader you will not do the work God has sent you. Focus on the Kingdom and God will sort out the rest. The size of a man is what it takes to discourage you and stop you from the work God has called you to do.

In the kingdom of God the leader is in the front and not at the back (like in men’s leadership), and everyone knows who is leading – when you see the leader you know what everyone is standing for, because the leader is the standard-bearer. Micah 6:4….. and I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. John 10:4 And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him:………

The Price

The Price is the cost paid or to be paid for the acquisition of a good, property or service. It is also the cost paid for the attainment of a goal or a status. For example if you wanted to become Vice President, all that you paid including the stress of organizing and attending campaigns is the price. The price fixed for something may not always be the true value, so it is not all the time that the price is the value. The value depends on the assessment of the assessor i.e. either the provider of the service or the person procuring the service (the buyer).

In terms of value God paid the same price for you, me and any big-named Evangelist – and that price was His Blood. You are as important to God as any other renown Evangelist or man of God. After God bought all of us with that price (His blood) He gave us responsibilities according to our several abilities but our values are the same. In the Parable of the Lost sheep, Jesus said a man left ninety-nine sheep in search of the lost one (Luke 15:4-6). The day you realize that God left 99 sheep because of one sheep, you will not feel inferior to any man. If you don’t know who you are in God and your value, you will worship a goat or a man because of his money. When you say I submit to you because God says I should submit you have a reward. Unfortunately when many people know about their worth they start thinking they are taller than everybody else. If God reveals to you who you are will you still submit or will you catch a wrong revelation that you can now be on your own? The price of a true leader is his ability to know who he is and still submit.

Value

Value may be called the worth of a product but the price you pay for a product may not be the worth of it because it is not all the time that the price is the value. For example Esau’s birthright was not equal to one morsel of meal (Gen. 25:29-34; Heb. 12:16), but he sold his birthright for a plate of pottage. The price may depend on the willingness or how desperate the potential buyer is to achieve the purpose of owning that property. To see the worth of a product as against its price see the Parable of the hidden treasure in Matthew 13:44 Again the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hidden in a field, the which when a man had found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. You can own the field and not know that there is a treasure there. If you own the field and say that the price of your field is worth four million Naira and the man who wants to buy the field knows that there is a treasure in your field that is worth ninety million Naira he’ll pay you four million Naira or even more because he does not need the field but the treasure in the field. You think that you have made a very good bargain at four million Naira. The buyer does not care about selling all his property just to get the treasure in your field.  All he has to do is just go to the point that has hides the treasure, dig it up and then sell your field at whatever price he feels like because he has got what he needed – the hidden treasure. How many of us focus on the treasure before us and don’t mind paying the price for the field? Sometimes it may look like you don’t have anything anymore yet you sell all you have to purchase the field because you know there’s treasure inside the field.

Matthew 13:45 Again the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. The difference between the man in the Parable of the Treasure Hidden in the Field and the Parable of the Pearl of Great Price is that the second man bought it at the price of the field, the person the second man bought the pearl from knew the value of what he was selling. Sometimes you can pay a price that is lower than what you are going to get and our case is like that of the first man because Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:17 that the value of the present suffering is not comparable to the glory and the reward that is ahead of us.

In Matthew 20:1-16 the value to the service provider is the amount of energy he has dissipated. The service providers (labourers) in this Parable agreed that the price for their service would depend on the judgement/assessment of the person who wanted to buy their service (the householder). To the householder the value of all the labourers was the same. To the service providers the value for their service was the amount of energy they expended. Are you angry that God seems to be giving someone who got born again after you the same gift? It does not matter whether God employed you earlier. It is not about you. It is a mater of the kingdom. In Matthew 9:37-38 Jesus said, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth labourers into His harvest. The focus of the householder is not you; the focus is the work. You are important to him, but if He notices that the rate at which you are covering the work is not going to meet His target, then He goes out quickly to look for people to come and join in the work. If suddenly the late hour workers seem to become more dynamic than you. What do you do? A good leader should prepare his mind and know that late hour workers may come in because God wants His work done or to go on faster and that God can equip these later hour workers more than you. If you don’t prepare your mind that there will be other leaders that God will raise you will fail God especially when they come and seem to have giftings that you don’t have and you have a problem with self-worth. This is the price of leadership, because you don’t know how the Employer (God) is going to do the evaluation. Those of us who are leaders should give the allowance that sometimes our valuation of the price may not be equivalent to God’s own value otherwise we will be frustrated.

Do you know that the area boy that was saved at the eleventh hour doesn’t take God granted for a moment because he knows that one more hour and he would have spent the day uselessly? People don’t appreciate it when God increases them and increases other people too. They ask God for a helicopter and had imagined that when God gave them their helicopter other people will still be riding their okadas. If you imagine that as God increases you He also increases others then it will help you deal with arrogance because you know that the person you are helping today or that is dependent on you today may tomorrow be your benefactor or may be just as prosperous as you. Who said that just because today you are the one that everyone goes to meet for help that it will always stay the same? Situations change. If God makes every other person a millionaire it does not reduce His account for you. Leaders do not compete with people.

Leadership is the ability to raise people. It is not the ability to manipulate them and control them so that they will continue to see you at the top. Leadership is the ability to make them know that they can be greater than you. If you know your worth you cannot be threatened by another man’s progress. One of the first jobs that God did through John the Baptist was to level everybody –every valley was filled, every mountains made low i.e. everyone with low self-esteem should be filled with confidence and those who feel they are too much should be cut down.

Genesis 37:25-28. Was the worth of Joseph 20 pieces of silver? What devalued Joseph in the hands of his brothers who sold him? Lack of self worth in his brothers – they thought that if all of Joseph’s dreams came to pass he would be greater than them. Just because God said that the other 11 brothers were going to bow down to Joseph did not mean their state will remain subservient to Joseph, the moment they sold Joseph they became subservient. They lowered their self-worth.

If we don’t know that the uplifting of a brother or sister can also be the uplifting of everyone of us, we will fight his/her uplifting because we don’t that the resultant effect of his/her uplifting is also for everybody.  Many people don’t become leaders because they don’t know their worth.

Leaders are servants, some people forget that they are servants to God first before they serve the people on behalf of God.  Why leaders tell you that you will be greater than them is because there are mistakes they don’t want you to make.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash