We don’t muddle through life trying to make the best of things without a robust dependence on the Word of God as it proclaims the lordship of Christ, only at the end to say, “Oh yes, and one more thing, this is how you can be saved.” The grand redemptive narrative of our Trinitarian God, as it is revealed in the Bible, is the primary way we are to make sense of all the world, whether it is currently occupied by pagan leaders or those who claim Christ. As that narrative clearly says, sin and the dominion of Satan are the problem, and Christ is the conquering solution. This means that leadership problems are ultimately spiritual problems that require theological solutions.

There is a crisis of leadership. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or alarmist. I’m not selling a grift course on how to solve all our leadership challenges. And I didn’t create a leadership assessment tool to unlock your potential. I don’t have a leadership degree from an Ivy League school plagued with leadership malfeasance (and I don’t want one). I am trying to be a realist. And we do actually have a significant global problem that bandies the word leadership around like being a leader is an essential human right. To highlight the problem, let’s say you’re going to have a conversation with a friend a few minutes after you read this essay. Your friend will start the conversation by saying, “I just read a news article about a well-known leader.” What do you think will follow that statement? The leader’s sordid financial dealings? A sexual scandal? A report on his gross incompetence? Accusations of plagiarism? A pattern of crude and abrasive language directed toward employees and colleagues? How far down the list do you need to go before you guess that your friend really wanted to tell you about the leader’s virtue, altruism, or skill at his profession? I’d guess it would be pretty far down the list. Even when we look at the leadership of clergy, men who used to be considered paragons of virtue in a culture, we find a similar problem.1 And to that, you might respond that it is only due to the media’s propensity to publish the salacious. To that, I’d say, “yes,” and “maybe.” But beyond media coverage, what is your personal experience of folks who go by the moniker “leader”? When we’re honest, we notice a strange tension. On the one hand, leaders have never had more access to leadership training, certificate accrual, books, or podcasts. Forbes reports that leadership development is a $366 billion industry. Someone is paying an NFL franchise-sized amount of money to grow as a leader. At the same time, leaders are struggling and not improving as leaders. In other words, in the face of enormous (faux) resources, leaders are actually getting worse and quitting in record numbers. Yes, there is a problem—in our culture and in the church.
Not the Problem You Thought
No, you did not make a mistake and visit the Drucker-Lencioni Weekly. This is a theological journal. And I’m not going to make the same argument that many make. The typical take on leadership issues (which also surface in the church) is that they are best sorted out at the corporation level and then applied piecemeal to the church. In this view, the church is downstream from where the real leadership work is being done—in very large secular institutions. In fact, the modern idea is that the church is so far downstream from secular leadership that it is a minor tributary tucked away in the reeds and marsh. The church is a kind of niché leadership environment, an oddity of low consequence to modern leadership concerns. So once the adults have figured out what plagues leaders, they’ll let the kids in on what might work for them in the church. I’d like to argue that this is entirely backward and has been for a very long time.2 This is why when most pastors want to study leadership, they read business books that are five years old or older.
I contend that the leadership crisis is a theological problem, that theological problems are always upstream from practical problems, that theological solutions are always primary, and that they tell us how to form and apply practical principles. The church (should be) is upstream from every form of instantiated secular leadership. That doesn’t mean that Microsoft would make a bazillion more dollars if the Bibles were on the desks of every VP, though I would be thrilled to find out that a Bible was on the desk of every VP at Microsoft. The Bible doesn’t work that way. But the Bible does reveal Jesus and the theology that describes his person and work. And that theology governs the world in which all of us live. It describes the world not as we’d like it to be but as it is. It describes the plight of every leader, no matter what his faith commitments are. It describes the general human condition, whether that human is a leader, CEO, VP, manager, colleague, or client. So, I believe one of the major reasons that leaders are struggling today isn’t just because of a post-COVID workplace filled with DEI-silliness, ESG regulations, and corporate greed. The problem is that we aren’t solving modern problems with correct solutions.
And I should add that upstream theology trumps any non-theologically based solution—conservative, liberal, left, or right. Many on the right want to return to the founding fathers, Classical literature, or the Great Books. These solutions aren’t necessarily bad3 but are incomplete and ultimately unable to solve what ails our leaders. They are giving out bandaids to treat cancer. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics are rather profound for a pagan and can make your immediate life and workplace a significantly better working environment compared to the morass that passes as wisdom today. Plato’s Republic is rather insightful as age-old wisdom for ordering loosely associated people. But even the (secular Greco-Roman) classics of Western Civilization are downstream from Christian theology. Christian theology takes precedence.
Returning Christian theology in general, and as it speaks to leaders and organizations specifically, to its rightful place as divinely revealed wisdom, centered on Christ, and able to equip the Christian for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16) has significant import for addressing what we’re currently facing in the crisis of leadership. This reorientation frees pastors from a schizophrenic mindset that attempts to reconcile Bavinck and Maxwell. It provides the watching world with wisdom and truth that are solely accessible through the church. It restores the church elder to the prominence in society that Jesus intended, if not in status, then definitely in influence. It guards against baptizing general leadership principles with biblical footnotes and calling it Christian. Ultimately, it recognizes that there is one great leader, one great king, and his name is Jesus. But before we get to solutions, we need to parse out this idea of revelation a bit more.
General and Special Revelation
To be more precise with my upstream-downstream analogy, the church has inverted general and special revelation when it comes to considering leadership. The world will always do this, as we’ll see, because all they have access to is general revelation and because special revelation looks foolish or weak to them (1 Cor. 1:20–25). That is expected. What is not expected is for the church to go along with this switcharoo, which we have. If you have turtled your boat and want to correct the problem, an essential thing to know is the deck from the hull. And yet, when considering issues around leadership—in society and in pastoral ministry—the church has been sailing along on a capsized ship, wondering why things aren’t going so well.
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No one remembers the furniture in the throne room. They remember the king on the throne. This is the end of all the enemies of God. They are destined to be a means for the exaltation of Jesus to the place of highest prominence. Do you want to know the purpose of human history? It is designed by the Father, as the master interior designer, to exalt his Son to the place of highest prominence (Eph. 1:9–10).

The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”Psalm 110:1
I always say that my biggest influences are three Johns and three Toms—John Owen, John Calvin, John Calvin, Thomas Watson, Thomas Brooks, and Thomas Boston. And even though I’d like to say of the six, my biggest influence is John Calvin, it is really John Owen. I wish I could say that I’ve read or planned to read the collected works of all six, but my forty-five years tell me that I must choose. And so I’ve begun the gradual and daily reading of one of them. I chose John Owen.
Out of all of them, Owen stands above the rest as a Christ-maximalist. But he arrived there being a thorough-going Trinitarian. And by that, I mean that he was no Christo-monist. He did not decide to focus on Jesus because it was cool, trendy, or hip. He didn’t hop on the Christo-centric bandwagon because he read about it in a popular book by a platformed1 author. Instead, Owen is thoroughly Trinitarian in his thought, as all good Christian theologians have and should be. But as he pondered the Trinity, he found that there is a Christ-centrality woven into the godhead. The Father is most enamored with his Son. And the Holy Spirit is heaven-bent on glorifying and extolling the person and work of the Son.2 And so, Owen is theologically bent on Christo-centrism, not because he is committed to Christ over the other members of the Trinity, but because he is thoroughly Trinitarian in all his theology.
For example, I have four sons. I have never thought that they should be just like me, though, inevitably, they will bear my likeness, for better and for worse (I’ve warned them about this). But I want them all to be the kind of men that I would be honored to call a friend. And that is all what they currently are—noble men who you and I would be honored to know, honored to call friends. And yet, if you were friends to my sons, you would only know them as they are. But if you knew them, and knew what I had to say about them, you would love them more than if you only knew them without knowing what I had to say about them.
To know a man is one thing; to hear what his father has to say about him is quite another. And this is because a father’s love for his sons, a father’s bestowal of fatherly honor, is an addition to a son’s glory, no matter how great that son’s glory may be. And in this, I think we arrive at some of the beauty behind our trinitarian theology. It is one thing to know the Son. It is an additional thing, an additive and greater thing, to hear the Father gush over his Son.
The Greatest Psalm
The book of Psalms is the most quoted Old Testament book in the Bible. Psalm 110 is the most quoted chapter of the Old Testament in the New Testament. Psalm 110:1 is the most quoted Old Testament verse quoted in the New Testament. Jesus, Paul, the author of Hebrews, and Peter all chose Psalm 110:1 to speak clearly and definitively about the person and work of Jesus, the Christ. And it is a psalm that has become even dearer to me over the past few years.
I’ve made it a personal practice to spend time daily in the psalms and learn to sing as many of them as possible from memory. Aside from the benefits of meditating on God’s Word and singing it back to him in praise, I noticed something consistent throughout Christian history, something begun from the earliest days recorded in Acts. Whenever we read of Christians imprisoned for their faith, we find them often spending their time of imprisonment in prayer and singing psalms. I thought to myself, “If I’m ever imprisoned for my faith (and I’d like to live my life in such a way as this might be possible), I don’t know any psalms to sing.” And so I decided I would learn some psalms by heart, in case I ever had to gladden the walls of a prison cell.
And that, of course, led me to decide where to start with 150 to choose from. And so I asked myself, “Which psalms did Jesus and apostles think were most important?” Clearly, the psalm at the top of the list is Psalm 110. So I started there. Not a week goes by that I don’t sing Psalm 110 a few times. And I say that because this devotion is not just born out of the academic fact of its prodigious use in the New Testament but also out of its frequent place in my life.
And to return to the emphasis of John Owen, few verses in the entire Bible tell us of what the Father thinks of the Son. And in meditating on Psalm 110:1, we have the opportunity to join our heavenly Father in his delight in his Son.
Psalm 110:1 was a mystery to the Jewish scholars who studied it before the incarnation. How could there be a “lord” who sat at the right hand of “the LORD” who was also a greater king than King David, a king that even David would call Lord? The general consensus was that this was a reference to the coming Messiah. And they were right. Jesus (as well as Peter, Paul, and the author of Hebrews after him) unequivocally teaches that he is the mysterious Lord that David wrote about in Psalm 110:1. So, to use New Testament divine familial nouns to describe what is going on in Psalm 110:1 is to say, “The Father said to the Son, “sit here at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” In this brief and profound verse, we see two things that God the Father says about God the Son.
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In those hours on the cross, Jesus would perform the greatest act in human history, accomplishing salvation through the atonement that only He as the God-man could offer (1 Peter 2:24). Part of God’s redemptive plan was for Jesus to be humiliated, a humiliation that involved the nakedness that David predicted in Psalm 22:18. The redemption alluded to was fulfilled in the redemption accomplished.

Good teachers teach in three parts: they tell you what they’re going to teach you, teach it to you, and then remind you what they just taught you (and why it’s important). These three views of a topic—forward looking, in the present, and backward—are critical for mastering any subject. The Bible, with God as master-teacher, does the same thing. The Old Testament tells what redemption will look like when it comes. The Gospels tell what God did through Jesus Christ to accomplish redemption. And in the rest of the New Testament, God details the intricacies of the redemption already accomplished and how He applies it to the church. In this way, the Bible tells of redemption alluded to, redemption accomplished, and redemption applied.
Consider how this schema plays out in Psalm 22:18, wherein David writes, “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” Here we have a redemption allusion. How do we know? First, we don’t have any biblical evidence of lot-casting enemies taking David’s clothing. This could be just an example of poetic metaphor employed by David to describe a particularly difficult situation he experienced.
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The Proverbs speak often about honest work and the importance of guarding against laziness and sloth (Prov. 12:24, 27; 15:19; 18:9; 19:24, 21:25; 22:13, 24:30; 26:13–15, KJV). And this is the type of sloth that most people think of when they think of sloth. Where the theologically slothful are misapplying doctrine, the proverbially slothful are choosing sinful foolishness over God’s way of godly wisdom. A man who doesn’t even work to take care of his basic needs is foolish and slothful. 

When was the last time you used the term sloth? It doesn’t count if you talked to one of your children about a minor character in Ice Age or Zootopia. A quick Google Ngram search, which allows users to chart the frequency of words and phrases in literature, shows that the use of the word sloth peaked in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries. Now, let’s go one step further. When was the last time you repented of sloth as a sin? Maybe never. Should sloth even be a sin on your radar as something for which Jesus died, something for which we should repent?
What Is Sloth?
Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins in Dante’s famous work The Divine Comedy, and Dante considers sloth from the perspective of love. He puts three of the seven deadly sins under the theme of love distorted: pride, envy, and anger. He puts another three sins under the theme of love excessive: avarice, gluttony, and lust. In between the first three and the last three, Dante places a single sin, sloth, calling it “love defective.”1
With this theme of sloth as “love defective,” Dante comes close to a biblical definition of sloth. Sloth isn’t just laziness. There is a deeper inner motivation to sin that, at its core, is a defective love. Biblically speaking, sloth is laziness that comes from carelessness about the commands and priorities of God, a lack of love for God and His ways that undermines a biblical doctrine of vocation (Judg. 18:9; Eccl. 10:18; Matt. 25:26, KJV). For a working model of sloth, we can consider two different types of sloth—theological and proverbial.
Theological Sloth
The Christians at Thessalonica had what we might call an over-realized eschatology. It seems that someone had sent a Pauline forgery to the church at Thessalonica, teaching that the day of the Lord had already come (2 Thess. 2:2). And in the soil of false theology, sinful idleness had sprung up (2 Thess. 3:6).
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Where did Edwards fail? It is difficult to say. Sometimes leaders face an intractable situation that is impossible to solve, situations that sometimes lead to the clarity that their time in a congregation is over. But, all leaders, especially pastoral leaders, must grow in their ability to lead, even as contexts change. And, no, the problem wasn’t that Edwards needed to know his Enneagram or Working Genius. After all, you can’t become a good leader by studying leadership.

Jonathan Edwards was unequivocally the greatest mind of Colonial America. He was arguably one of the greatest minds America has ever produced. An in-depth reading of his copious works shows his facility with precise argument, big-picture thinking, biblical exegesis, redemptive-historical scholarship, and the philosophical underpinnings of the global culture he found himself in. He preached with skill and led a revival that spread throughout the colonies that now comprise the Northeastern United States. Admittedly he was also a little quirky, overly introspective, completely wrong about the slave trade,1 and, at times, unnecessarily speculative.2 He could also be pietistic to a fault. But despite his foibles, Jonathan Edwards was one of the most gifted pastor-theologians that the world has known (having a significant influence on modern theologians like John Piper and Tim Keller).
But he was also fired.
How could this happen? We tend to think that the powerful combination of theological training and homiletic skills ensures a long and mostly-peaceful pastorate. Where Edwards failed was in leadership.
Leadership — The Dirty Word
Let’s say it clearly. Many, many church leaders have unwittingly attempted to baptize the most recent leadership books to serve organizational needs. It isn’t that churches can’t benefit from the common grace insights of the popular leadership material (mainly covering managerial skills). They can (and should). General principles—wisdom and foolishness—govern how leaders organize and engage with the people they lead. But our book wasn’t written by Maxwell or Covey. Our book is the Bible, written by the Lord.3
So what should we do? We have to keep the Book primary while benefitting from other books. We must be students of Scripture before we are students of organizational principles. But we also can’t neglect to learn skills to help us avoid making stupid mistakes.
What Happened in Northampton?
Despite their initial positive response to the First Great Awakening, Edwards had several twenty-something young men within his congregation who now showed themselves, from all signs, not to be truly converted. And yet Edwards was tasked with shepherding them. One of these young men found a midwifery manual (with illustrations). He not only shared the manual with his buddies but began to make lewd comments to girls in the congregation based on a lascivious reading of the midwife manual. It became a congregational issue.4
Edwards was disturbed for several reasons. Where were these young men’s parents? 
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Every Sunday can (and should) have Easter expectancy. Every Sunday is about the person and work of Jesus. If there is a significant gap between Easter Sunday and all the rest of the Sundays, then we’re doing something very wrong.

We would often go to my grandparent’s for Easter. It was a special occasion. There were Easter eggs, Easter baskets, and a run through the front yard on Easter morning for little candy-filled plastic eggs. My grandmother made rosemary-encrusted roasted lamb for lunch after church. We all dressed up and caravanned the two miles to the local Episcopal church in that small Virginia town. The church had an Easter tradition that involved placing a cross in the front of the sanctuary, a cross made of rough, aged wooden boards, about four feet tall, loosely wrapped with chicken wire. It stayed that way throughout the Sunday service. At the end of the service, the children would come forward bringing the cut flowers—mostly daffodils of yellow and white—that they brought from home, cut from flower beds in their yards.1 They’d affix them to the cross through the slots in the chicken wire. When the bustle of children up front died down, the cross looked like it had sprouted dozens and dozens of spring flowers. I was young and unconverted, but it was something that I looked forward to every year.2
It would be years until I was born again and understood the significance of that image—of a rough cross, new life, and resurrection. It would be a few more years until I was ordained, and a few more years after that until I was pastoring the church I had planted, understanding the weight that a pastor bears getting ready for that most important of Sundays—Easter Sunday. Did I choose the right hymns and psalms (in the right versions)? Was my sermon clear enough to grip the seasoned saints in my congregation that had heard more Easter sermons in their life than I would likely ever preach? Was my sermon pointed enough to call the non-Christians, who would likely be in attendance, to repentance and faith? Was our nursery staffed enough for the influx of visitors? The expectancy was thick, almost like God offered the opportunity to work mightily on this one day, unlike what he was up to the other fifty-one.
Easter Sunday has always been a big deal, from my earliest unconverted memories to my recent pastor labors. I cherish those memories and my current family traditions.3 But I now know that all that expectancy was misplaced.
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Jesus taught us to conclude the Lord’s Prayer proclaiming God’s eternal kingdom, power, and glory. This reminds us that God is sovereign and hears our prayers. Resolve in 2023 to pray with confidence, a confidence that isn’t rooted in your ability or worth but in God’s great power and love. So, if resolutions help you, make them. If New Year’s resolutions aren’t a helpful practice for you, don’t make them. But Jesus commanded us to pray specific themes to remind ourselves of who our God is and what he’s up to. 

December isn’t just the time of year that annual planning is done. It is also the time of year that resolutions are made. And whereas I’m grateful we possess the resolutions of Jonathan Edwards, let me suggest that they aren’t the best guide for making our own resolutions. First, he was rather odd, in part due to his astronomical intellect.1 But second, duplicating other people’s practices can be as harmful as they can be helpful. After all, you are not Jonathan Edwards. For this very reason, Robert Murray M’Cheyene was known to be reluctant to share his own practices of personal piety. Even if they were helpful to him didn’t mean they would be helpful to someone else, or so he argued.
So, does this leave us avoiding resolutions for the new year? Maybe. Studies have shown that very few people continue with resolutions throughout the year. We might better call them hopes or aspirations rather than resolutions. But then there is the whole thing about timing. If God is calling you to change something about your life, why wait until January 1? Why not make the resolution today?
I want to suggest that there is a simple way forward. When we discussed annual planning in my last post, we looked at the Decalogue as a picture of all reality. Planning should be made aligned with reality. As we look forward and long to see changes in our personal lives and families, there is another guide that the Lord gave us: the Lord’s Prayer.2
The Pattern Jesus Gave
When his disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he provided a model prayer (Luke 11:1–4; Matt. 6:9–13). Should that prayer be prayed verbatim? Absolutely. Should that prayer serve as a pattern for the main things for which we should pray? Absolutely. And by mentioning “daily bread,” there is good reason to believe that Jesus intended us to pray this prayer or about these themes daily. When we pray the Lord’s Prayers (as a prayer or a pattern), we are aligning ourselves with the will of God. We don’t have to wonder what resolve God wants from us; he’s told us and told us how to pray for it.
Where does this get us with resolutions? Instead of making resolutions, what if we resolved to pray the Lord’s Prayer daily and work our way through each of the six petitions it contains? Many of these things we could or would resolve actually fall under one of those six heads. And when we change our resolving to daily prayer, we practice bringing our desires before the face of God and seeking the will of Christ.
How Might this Look?
Traditionally and catechetically, the Lord’s Prayer is broken down into eight parts: a preface, six petitions, and a conclusion. So if we used that suggested breakdown of the Lord’s Prayer and resolved to pray it daily or multiple times a week, how could that replace the usual practice of resolutions making?
The Preface: Our Father in Heaven
Resolve to remind yourself often that through the finished work of Christ, God is both your Father and in heaven.
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The Ten Commandments, not often associated with annual project planning, actually are a reliable guide for what is real. God actually did segment the potential thematic elements of all we will face, and he did it on tablets of stone. So the Decalogue serves us as a way to put our feet on a firm foundation when other factors try to convince us that life is a chaotic mess.

December is for the next year’s planning, or so many of us think. No one plans the next year in November. And no one plans for the next year once it has begun (i.e., in January). But is that the best time to plan for such a large chunk of our lives, a whole twelve months? I suppose it is inconsequential since yearly planning seldom occurs outside of the time-honored month designated as the twelfth.
The lean and pull to planning in December relates to how we account for time in twelve months, somewhat related to the seasons. A full description of how all this works out is beyond the scope of what I’m trying to cover in this brief essay. But I’ll say in broad and sweeping (and potentially reckless terms) that the reason we plan in December is that we’re trying to make sense of reality—a reality segmented into batches, batches that end and begin and begin again. But that leads to some honest introspection as to whether December is the best time exactly to make sense of the reality of time.
When we’re honest with ourselves, December is really difficult. If you’re a pastor, this is obvious. Whatever you did for Thanksgiving is in the rear-view mirror faster than deacons resign before the mission conference. And now you have to prepare for a Christmas Eve service, Christmas morning service, and whatever else falls in between. Adding to this, the bulk of your crisis counseling will happen between December and February. There are reasons for this,1 but again, they are outside the scope of this brief essay. Scheduling and people’s problems are enough to prove the point that December is difficult.
And if you’re not a pastor, the same truth controls. December is hard. You’ve said goodbye to Thanksgiving. And now you’re staring down Christmas (and New Year) with all of their requisite family gatherings, and joys, and dramas, and memories, and uncle Jack staying longer than expected with his whittling kit setup in your living room—wood shavings on the carpet and all. You get the point. December has a bit of psychic trauma attached to it. So, I know what we’ll do; we’ll sit in the middle of it and plan for the next year. What could go wrong? Could I suggest that December isn’t the greatest time to plan for anything, and yet that is precisely what we need to do? There could be a better way.
Enter the Decalogue as Real
There is a better way. When God’s people left Egypt, God buried the greatest military might of that generation under a few metric tons of Red Sea water. You can imagine the elation and fear of the Israelites—this is awesome; how do we avoid a watery grave? The answer was clearly God’s grace because the Israelites hadn’t done anything to be saved except to be in slavery and be favored by God. But God, following that deliverance, provided a Decalogue—ten words that would forever shape the world’s understanding of reality.
And I mean that; the Ten Commandments shape reality. They summarize everything we could and should consider about God and the world he created for us to live in. They aren’t just ten suggestions. They aren’t just the most important ten things. They are the only important ten things. They are an outline of reality.
The Positive in the Negative
I always have to address this whenever I say things like I’ve said so far. The Ten Commandments, in their negatives, also include their positives. What I mean by that is that the Decalogue is mostly “thou shalt not.” But for each “thou shalt not,” there is a “thou shalt” included. And for the minority “thou shalt” among the Decalogue, there is included the negative “thou shalt not.” So, when God says, “don’t murder,” he also says, “protect life at all costs.” When God says to rest on the seventh day, he also says don’t rest on the other six.2
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