Male and female alike, the Bible exalts the importance of the home as our first place of leadership. What does that mean? There is no minimization of how challenging and important the task of loving your spouse is. There is no diminishment of how difficult and important the task of fathering or mothering is.

Who are the most influential leaders in your life? What made them such great leaders?
I fear that our cultural understanding of leadership is going further astray from true leadership. We Americans seem to have a bizarre attraction to two types of leaders: celebrities and powerful communicators with bold, brash opinions. We judge leaders by the size of their platform.
Some time ago I was asked to speak to the Moms Matter group in our church about healthy leadership in the home and beyond. One of the comments made by the leadership team was that many moms believe they “don’t need to be or can’t be a leader because they are just moms.” We can all similarly dismiss ourselves.
If leadership is influence, then every one of us is called to leadership. God has gifted you with influence. God has called and equipped you to influence your family. God has called and equipped you to influence your friends. God has called and equipped you to influence your church.
You are called to lead.
However, the order in which we develop as leaders is essential. We are called to lead our home first and that leadership is intended to cascade outward.
Some are captivated by the possibility of leading “out there.” That can be a holy aspiration. But if we try to lead “out there” before we lead ourselves and our families first, then we have mixed up God’s order of what leadership was designed to be.
The world gets leadership wrong. Our culture judges leadership by the size of the leaders’ platform.
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The gospel reminds us that God, who has no limits, does indeed love us. So much, in fact, that Jesus died for us. And that through Jesus, we can be reconciled to God and find our perfect acceptance and validation in Him. This is really the only way that we can live within our limits, isn’t it? Isn’t it when we don’t have the compulsive need to prove our own worth and validate our own existence through our work or our kids or our own achievements? 

The story is familiar, even if a person doesn’t happen to be a Christian.
There was nothing at all, except for God in the beginning. And then in the beginning, God created…
Everything else. Ex nihilo. Everything from nothing at all. God spoke it all into existence, all of creation born from his divine creativity, including human beings. These first human beings, placed in a perfect garden, free from any of the marks of guilt and shame so pervasive in us today, in perfect fellowship with each other and with Him.
Harmony. Peace. Productivity. Simplicity. All was very good.
But then came the snake. The temptation. The great fall, and that perfect creation was turned upside down.
Again, a familiar story. But I wonder if we might for a moment just zoom out a bit, and not focus on the kind of fruit or the specific nature of the temptation or even the immediate and far-reaching effects of that choice. When you zoom out a bit, here are a few bullet points about the situation:

There is a loving Creator who knows what is right and best.
There are created human beings who, though made in the image of that Creator, are far inferior in knowledge, wisdom, and power.
In His love and in His authority, God gave His creation limits.
The rebellion, then, was a refusal to trust in those limits and follow them.

Those four bullet points provide a number of friction points with modern society. There is, of course, the issue of a Creator at all. Despite the clear evidence of design threaded throughout creation, it’s certainly not a given that there is a Creator to begin with. And if there is a Creator, there are plenty who would argue with the character of that Creator. If you begin with a fundamental questioning of the Word of God, which is meant primarily to reveal to us who God is and what He is like, then we are left to imagine the nature and character of this Creator on our own.
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Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
There is an ever present need to take heed to ourselves. Our lips are always a few steps ahead of our feet. There, we must be resolute in guarding against the multitude of temptations that Satan will seek to use against us.

This past Tuesday, I had the privilege of giving a pastoral charge to two men coming to be licensed to preach within the bounds of our Presbytery. The charge to those being licensed or ordained is a solemn event, happening only once in a man’s life and ministry. The charge was built largely on the ministry of the Apostle Paul and some of his charges to Timothy and Titus in the pastoral epistles. Though one can only say so much in a three to four minute charge, I carved out five practical points for these men as they enter in on a preaching ministry. Here is the essence of that charge:
1. Prioritize first preaching to yourself whatever you plan on preaching to others.
John Owen once famously declared, “Truly no man preaches that sermon well to others that doth not first preach it to his own heart”…Unless “he finds the power of it in his own heart, he cannot have any ground of confidence that it will have power in the hearts of others.” We never want to step into the pulpit without having seriously and soberingly preached first to ourselves whatever passage we are preaching to the congregation. When a man does not preach the Scriptures to himself, first and foremost, he will deliver hyper-intellectual, experientially theoretical, or dry and lifeless sermons to the people of God.
In Lectures to My Students, Charles Spurgeon explained the dire need a minister of the word must have to be so affected by God’s word that he has a burning fire for the proclamation of it within. This will only come as we preach God’s word consistently to our own hearts, the Holy Spirit fanning the flame of love for the triune God and the ministry of His word. Spurgeon wrote,
“I have such a profound respect for this ‘fire in the bones,’ that if I did not feel it myself, I must leave the ministry at once. If you do not feel the consecrated glow, I beseech you return to your homes and serve God in your proper spheres; but if assuredly the coals of juniper blaze within, do not stifle them, unless, indeed, other considerations of great moment should prove to you that the desire is not a fire of heavenly origin.”
2. Keep Christ and Him crucified and risen central in all your preaching.
The Apostle Paul said, “I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Nearly every man I have known began his ministry of preaching starts it off his ministry with this commitment. However, as the years roll on, so many deviate from this and allow themselves to be sidetracked by subjects and emphases that–while they may have roots in the teaching of Scripture–supplant the central focus of Scripture on Christ and the salvation that is in Him alone. As Geerhardus Vos explained,
“It is possible, Sabbath after Sabbath and year after year, to preach things of which none can say that they are untrue and none can deny that in their proper place and time they may be important, and yet to forego telling people plainly and to forego giving them the distinct impression that they need forgiveness and salvation from sin through the cross of Christ…there ought not to be in your whole repertoire a single sermon in which from beginning to end you do not convey to your hearers the impression that what you want to impart to them, you do not think it possible to impart to them in any other way than as a correlate and consequence of the eternal salvation of their souls through the blood of Christ.”
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