Episode 162: Hezekiah’s Playbook: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Leaders

—————————–

Today Counts Show Episode 162

Preview

Jim Piper: So now I’ve got momentum going. I’m going, “Okay, I am definitely thinking scarcity. I’m human, only human, only my abilities.” I am thinking that we just get through another day. That kind of thinking. And so I definitely believed that these were God thoughts. They were God thoughts. So then they were leading me then, well, what about this final thought that did not seem to correlate to the thinking small, the praying small. And then it dawned on me, well that’s why I’m thinking small and that’s why I’m praying small. I’m–

Thanks to our Donors

Winston Harris: Hey everybody, before we jump into today’s episode, we’d like to recognize all those who make this podcast possible. The Lead Today Show is supported by all the generous donors of the Lead Today Community. Thank you so much for investing in shaping leaders through this podcast. Be sure to like and subscribe on whatever platform you are watching or listening to today. Alright, let’s jump into the podcast.

Introduction

Jim Piper: Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Today Counts show. I’m your host, Jim Piper. We call it the Today Counts show because there’s a compounding truth in our life that what we do today impacts our tomorrow and our tomorrow impacts our future. And it’s a podcast about life and leadership. Now, today’s a solo podcast, meaning, you know, I’m not really going to be talking to anybody except for those of you who are listening and watching here on the show.

I want to talk to you about leadership today. I want to talk to you specifically about some leadership lessons that we can learn from an ancient character in the Old Testament in the Bible. If you’re not familiar with the Bible, I just encourage you to, you know, hang with me for a while and I think that you’ll find many of the things that I’m going to share with you today to be fascinating really.

But I want to back up. Earlier this week, I had some space in my calendar that frankly surprised me. And I’ve already told this story a few times in a few different contexts this week. But I’m telling the story because it relates to what I’m going to be talking about today in some fashion. But because it’s on my heart, and I think you might appreciate it. So anyway, as I said, I found that I had a couple hours on my calendar that was kind of a surprise.

And so you know, I asked myself, what am I going to do with these two hours because my life is not normally like that. Like you, I go, go, go, I prioritize, I plan. I would consider myself a pretty disciplined person. So I was shocked when I saw that I had two hours of white space on my calendar.

So when I read through books, I tear them apart, so to speak by highlighting, speaking back to the author by writing questions in the margins. If it’s a book that really strikes me, then what I do is I stand it up. What I mean is I don’t just throw it in my library. I stand it up in a place that I can see it on a regular basis because it communicates to me, “Hey, Jim, you need to pick this up again and read through it again. But this time, you’re going to simply read the highlighted areas. And then if you need to, you can read before it and after it to gain context of what it was.”

So that’s what I decided that I would do those two hours. I came down to the podcast studio where I’m sitting today. And I grabbed a couple of books, but I didn’t get to the second book in my stack. But the first book had a powerful impact over me in the two hours that I was thumbing through it, and sped read, if you will through it.

Three Profound Thoughts and Discernment

Three thoughts occurred to me as I was getting close to the end and as I concluded that time. The first thought was that I’m thinking too small. I’m thinking too small. The second thought I had was, I am praying too small. And then the third idea I had is I’m doing too much, which to me didn’t seem to correlate with the first two thoughts. When I have thoughts that to me at the time are profound, and in this case, found that those I thought I considered those three thoughts to be profound, then I asked myself this question because I’m a believer. I have a biblical worldview. And with that said, it means that I do a certain something with these thoughts. Not just random thoughts, but thoughts that, like I said, strike me.

And so I put it in the form of a prayer, maybe not immediately, but I put it in the form of another thought, where I said, “Are these Jim thoughts?” Now, let’s talk about Jim thoughts for a minute, my thoughts. Of course, I have thoughts that are dark thoughts and that are negative thoughts and that are maybe sinful thoughts. And so those are easy to know that I need to discard those thoughts. Then I have gem thoughts that are good thoughts, and sometimes useful thoughts. But even those need to be filtered, because some really aren’t worth chasing and other and other ones are.

But then I do believe that God still speaks to us today. Now, I believe that he speaks to us primarily through the Bible, but he also speaks to us through other people, and he speaks to us through circumstances. And I do believe that he speaks to us, I guess many of us call it a still small voice. His spirit, God is spirit, and he speaks to our spirit. And so discerning whether these thoughts, those three thoughts that I already shared with you, are they Jim  thoughts, which, you know, I didn’t see any of them as inherently bad or evil, so I’m considering them.

Are they Jim thoughts? Are they God thoughts? Well, why do I ask that question? Because in my experience, I know that there is a huge chasm between even my good thoughts and God’s thoughts, because if they’re God’s thoughts, I get pretty excited about that. Sometimes fearful about that because they’re usually not small. They’re usually challenging.

And so anyway, I decided that I would do nothing with those three thoughts except to say, if I remembered those three thoughts in the morning, and then I would dig more to see if I could discern how good of thoughts these were. I do have a morning routine that does involve contemplation. It involves meditation, it involves reading, it involves some prayer. Sure enough, when I woke up the next morning, those three thoughts were there.

Thinking Small vs. God’s Thoughts

So here’s where I’m at in the process of that. It wasn’t difficult for me to agree that I was thinking small thoughts. I’m not going to go into detail. But one of the things that as I was examining that kind of thinking, I realized that in a lot of cases, I was thinking volume versus quality. I was thinking working having ends meet, versus thinking bigger than that. I was thinking thoughts of scarcity, thoughts of what will it take to meet the budget? What will it take to take care of kind of like the daily type of things?

In other words, they’re not really visionary thoughts, they were thoughts of necessity. And you know, when your mind is in that place, and again, I don’t think that’s an evil place, necessarily. It’s kind of a human place. But it’s a limiting place. Well, how is that not going to spill over into your prayers? So you might be somebody who says, “Well, you know, when I do talk to God, it’s kind of a 911 situation. It’s a foxhole Christianity kind of thing.” I see God as much more available than that.

And so as I’ve aged, I’ve come to lean on his wisdom. I’ve come to converse with him like I would with another person and on a regular basis. I’m not saying that in any spiritually prideful way. I’m just saying that I’m learning that as I get older, that that is available to me. And if, and if you could get your brain around the idea that you can actually talk to the Creator all the time, why wouldn’t you take advantage of that? That’s kind like I’ve been slapping myself and saying, “My goodness, I have missed a lot of that over a lot of my life.”

Thinking Small and Praying Small

If I’m thinking small, then I’m going to probably be praying small. And I will give you some examples, better examples of there. I noticed that though I pray for my family on a regular basis, as I examine my most recent prayers for my family, they’ve been about safety. They’ve been about protection. And you might say, well, what’s wrong with that? Well, nothing’s wrong with that. But it’s too small.

Because if I change my prayers to things like blessing for God’s hand to be upon them, if I were to pray for my grandchildren’s spouses, their future spouses, they’re just kids today. But what if I prayed into the future? And I asked God to bring champions into their lives, and that they would be champions and that my kids’ kids would be world changers, warriors, people that make a difference. Then if you think about that just for a little bit, what and all those things in necessity also mean protection? Of course they would.

So now I’ve got momentum going. I’m going, okay, I am definitely thinking scarcity. I am thinking human, only human, only my abilities. I’m thinking that we just get through another day. That kind of thinking. And so I definitely believed that these were God thoughts. They were God thoughts. So then they were leading me then, well, what about this final thought that did not seem to correlate to the thinking small, the praying small that I’m doing too much?

Realization of Doing Too Much

And then it dawned on me. Well, that’s why I’m thinking small. And that’s why I’m praying small. I’m doing too much. I am hurrying and scurrying. I am busy. And busy is bad. A lot of times when people ask you, “How have you been?” and you say busy because you really don’t know how you’ve been because you haven’t taken enough time to think about it, well, that is my story here. I’m going, “How did I get in this place?” Because if anybody knows me, and with my clients and the people that I minister to, and serve and partner with, I’m always on your case about Quadrant One and Quadrant Two.

That goes all the way back to the 1980s in the Stephen Covey days where he wrote the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that Quadrant One is important and urgent and Quadrant Two is important and not urgent. And we simply don’t spend enough time in the important and not urgent. You know, that’s the exercising, that’s the reading, that’s the praying, that’s the deep relationships, that’s the good resting, that is project work, big goal work, thinking. So that was powerful for me. So now what I’m doing is I’m resizing, rethinking, reframing my thinking and my prayers, and my calendar. And I have got a lot more work to do on that.

Introduction to King Hezekiah

So I use that as an introduction to what I want to talk about today. And this might seem kind of odd to you, but I want to go way back. Because I studied a character in the Old Testament. His name is King Hezekiah. There’s some leadership principles that his life teaches us that I want to share with you. So I’ve got some notes here. I’ll be referring to my notes as I walk through this episode with you. But I believe there are some powerful things to learn.

Hezekiah’s Background and Contrast to His Father

King Hezekiah lived, give or take, 2,700 years ago. It’s a long time. And he was the 13th king of Judah. If you’re not familiar with that, if you can just think of the territory of Israel, back in the day, you don’t have to worry about the region or the size. Just imagine that. And during this time, it was a divided kingdom, they were still brothers, so to speak. They were still Hebrew people, but they were divided into two different kingdoms, Israel to the north, and Judah to the south.

King Hezekiah was the king of the south, the king of Judah. As I recall, I believe he was made king at 24 years of age might have been 25. I think it was 24, 24 years of age. What sets him apart is a lot of things that we’ll talk about. There’s a lot of you who believe because you have told me this, I’ve heard a lot of leaders tell me that you don’t believe people can change or that your lineage is so powerful that you can’t escape it. King Hezekiah is a story that would come against that kind of small thinking, defeated thinking.

King Hezekiah was the son of King Ahaz. And King Ahaz clearly was wicked. A brute. He was an idolater. Idolatry is not a term that a lot of businesspeople use today. A lot of irreligious people use today. Frankly, a lot of church people don’t use the term idolatry, because probably what’s in our mind is, you know, we see these great statues and people bowing down around them worshiping a pillar of stone of some sort.

What we miss by that is in the Christian worldview, it does seem that there was some evidences that when people did bow down to these idols, that there was some sort of power that came with it. And if that’s true, we believe that any power that came with that would come from a demonic realm. And I don’t know where you’re at today in your life, whether you believe in demons, the devil, Jesus, God, or all of those kinds of angels, all those kinds of supernatural ideas.

But if you do or if you don’t, the biblical worldview is that if an idol does have power, they’re anti Christ powers, they’re real powers, but they’re less than powers. And they’re also bully powers. In ancient days, people would cut themselves to get the attention of these gods, so to speak, with a lowercase g. They would even sacrifice children and babies as a way to demonstrate allegiance to these gods.

So you might say, well, Jim, why are you even bringing this up then? I mean, nobody does that today. Well, that misses the point because idolatry from a biblical perspective is simply misplaced devotion. I want to say that again. Modern day, well, not just modern day, it’s always been true. Idolatry is simply misplaced devotion. It’s giving something or someone the worship, the trust, or the priority that belongs only to one, which would be our Creator, which would be what Bible calls Jehovah, our God, our Father, Son, Holy Spirit, these kinds of things.

Hezekiah’s Key Achievements and Reforms

This was who King Hezekiah’s father was. But King Hezekiah the son of this idolater was just the opposite of that. Some of his key achievements, I would say would kind of go like this. He led reform in Judah. He led spiritual reform in Judah. In other words, in business terms, he was a fix it guy. He was a turnaround guy. He was a turnaround specialist. This is who he was, he probably would have been a pretty good starter as well.

There is a there’s a lot of similarities between people who are gifted in starting successful enterprises, and those who can turn them around. There usually is a little bit of difference in that those who turn things around tend to have a little more patience than the starters do, or at least the younger starters do. But I’m just trying to paint a picture. you know, kind of his attributes.

So he was definitely a reformer. And reformers can, like starters can be a bit on the rebellious side. Rebellion doesn’t always mean a bad thing. When you rebel against a bully, when you rebel against wickedness, when you rebel against those kinds of things, I think you would agree, well, no, that would not be the same as rebelling against, you know, good authorities or good rules or good principles.

And he rebelled against Assyria, the nation of Assyria. Assyria was an evil empire. And if you’ve done any history in your background, you know, the Assyrians will definitely come to mind as well as the Babylonians. Those are two things that would come to mind. And so they were kind of being bullied by Assyria and he said, “No, we’re not going to go there.” That brings up more here in a little bit.

He also restored the temple, the Jewish temple, because it was being used for pagan purposes, and of course, was abolishing idolatry. This kind of gets into the war, which I haven’t mentioned yet. But he also was very strategic in that Jerusalem was located in Judah. To step aside here just for a minute, a little bit of history and geography. So Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem, was located in the country of Judah. And there was no river that went through Jerusalem. But what he did is he took the underground springs and he tunneled them into Jerusalem, which is an important piece of Hezekiah’s story and his strategy as a leader that we’ll get to it in a little bit.

Something interesting of note is that according to the Bible, he was to die of a disease, but he asked God for more time because he felt he had more work to do. And God actually granted him, according to scripture, 15 more years to do that. And I think a lot of what we’re talking about in this episode is going to be covering those 15 years. That’s my theory anyway.

Leadership Lessons from King Hezekiah

So anyway, I would say that when I look at King Hezekiah, I would say that what he teaches me is faith. And a lot of us think that faith has nothing to do with leadership. And I’d like you to rethink that. that you can’t bring your faith in God into your leadership context. I really want you to rethink that. Courage. He demonstrated all kinds of courage. And he also demonstrated the importance of strategy.

1. Trusting God Above Human Alliances

All right. So I’m going to try to tell the story while I also go through some of the leadership lessons. The first one that stands out to me is that he was a man who trusted in God. So when we started this episode, I confessed that I caught myself in a season of thinking small. Well, when you’re thinking small, you’re not trusting in God. I think that’s a clear thing. I mean, God wants us to do big things with our life. He wants us to think big.

So the example, you know that I would like to share with you about why I believe that besides the fact that he was reforming the nation from pagan idolatry into coming back and worship of Jehovah is that unlike his father who relied upon Assyria to take care of them and of course, they had to pay allegiance to Assyria and all of their idolatry, Hezekiah trusted in God above human alliances.

In business, often fear is what causes men and women to lie, to cut corners, to do things against their conscience. Business has a way of potentially has a way of doing that, or at least motivating us in that way. So in a similar way, Hezekiah would take the moral, the high moral ground, which of course belongs to God and trusted that that is the best way to live, regardless of what the feedback loop might bring to him, what the repercussions might bring to him in doing that. So he trusted in God above all human alliances and threats, unlike his father.

There’s a scripture in 2 Kings 18, 5-6 that says this, “He,” meaning King Hezekiah, “trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel.” It says, “There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him. He kept the commands the Lord had given Moses.”

You know, it’s interesting, a lot of the laws that we have in our nation today, in our world today, follow in the way of the Old Testament. Many people don’t realize that, but you can take the 10 commandments and, and many of those commandments are still written in courts of law around our nation. They’re on walls, they’re on statues. Now, of course, you know, culture is trying to cancel a lot of those things, which is so silly, because even in a selfish way, they’re self-preserving. They keep us alive and healthy, as a nation as a community.

But you know, the question that I would ask you as a leader is, have you set principles for yourself? Have you spent enough quadrant two time? Maybe it’s not urgent, but it’s super important to think through what you believe, and why you believe it, and to govern your life in that way, your home life, and your leadership life. To me, the leadership principle here that Hezekiah is teaching is that great leadership, trust in God’s guidance, God’s wisdom over human strategies. Now some human strategies, of course, are rooted in God’s wisdom, but some are not and you know the difference.

2. Moral Courage and Standing Against Corruption

All right. The second thing that his life teaches us is moral courage. As I said earlier, basically what he told Assyria to do is go fly a kite and that brought war. The Assyrians had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. And apparently God didn’t step in and bail the people out. But in a lot of ways, they were no longer God’s people because they weren’t walking in God’s way.

Basically, the way that works is when you and I decide to just punt all of that as religious nonsense and we compartmentalize it, even if we go to church and we leave it there, and we don’t bring it into our culture, into our homes, into our workplaces. And then we don’t get the benefit of the power of God, you know, being incarnate in us and bleeding through our pores, radiating through our existence into our environments. Meaning we simply don’t trust that it has context and power to do that.

When I talk about moral courage, I’ve already mentioned earlier that in taking the stand that he did against Assyria and against even his own people in idolatry, he did bring on wrath. So we do have to admit that. And maybe that’s why we back down. Hezekiah boldly removed idol worship. He destroyed idols. In fact, in 2 Kings 18, the story it says, “He removed the high places. He smashed the sacred stones and cut down these poles of worship. He broke into pieces the bronze snake.”

And if you remember the story of the Israelites wandering the desert for 40 years, there was a snake, a bronze snake that was erected, and God told the people when they got sick or bit, if they looked at the snake, they’d be healed. Just like a lot of us do, we take a good thing and we make it bad. And they kept this statue and then kind of made it an idol. And he even did away with that. That’s what we would call a sacred cow.

Businesses have sacred cows. You’re still doing things the way you’ve always done them, because you’ve always done it that way. And whether you realize it or not, it’s become an idol, it has become a sacred cow in our lives. Hezekiah had the moral courage to get rid of stuff like that. So leadership principles that true leadership requires standing against corruption, even standing against good things that are no longer effective. And that’s going to sometimes make you unpopular.

3. Spiritual Renewal in Leadership

So the first lesson that we’ve learned is to trust that strong leaders trusting God above human invention. Second, moral courage. And then third, which you might think doesn’t have a context for your place, but spiritual renewal, spiritual renewal. I’m going to tell a little story. But when I was an executive at the bank, yes, we’re going back decades. I didn’t think it was my place to take my faith and spew it upon everybody. But I did believe that if my faith was worth anything, it would guide my decisions as a business leader and my words and my attitudes. I didn’t have to take on the same language as other people did. I didn’t have to cut corners as other people did. And I didn’t have to lie like other people did.

That right there is spiritual renewal. When you bring, you know, your moral convictions into your workplace, you’re bringing spiritual renewal, because people will notice in time. And you know, that’s still very much alive and well today. Today, we don’t call it adultery, we don’t call it fornication, we call it sleeping with others. But I’ve had folks even tell me, as somebody who is serving corporate America, that this sleeping around corrupts their organizational culture. And that didn’t come from a preacher, that came from the organizational breathing that when people see this, it only builds distrust. People get hurt when people aren’t living by these high ideas of morality.

So the example that I’m going to bring in spiritual renewal in Hezekiah’s place is that he reopened and purified the temple. As I said earlier, he reinstated the priesthood and restored proper worship, including the Jewish Passover celebration. And in the same way, when you bring morality into your workplace, you’re bringing in spiritual renewal. I used to bring a New Testament with me too. At lunchtime, I would sometimes read from it, but I put it on the corner of my desk.

It’s interesting with a lot of my clients, I kind of remind them that being a boss, being a supervisor, being a manager, being a leader is a lot like being a shepherd and how a shepherd cares for their sheep. And then, you know, once that seems to be well received, I’ll use the word. What shepherd really means is pastor, is that a lot of us are pastors at work, but we just haven’t embraced that idea because we still have this religious idea of what a pastor is. That’s too bad because it’s not just a religious idea. It’s not just a spiritual idea, but it’s a healing idea. It’s a leading idea, it’s a caring idea, and it’s also a strength idea.

But anyway, in 2 Chronicles 31, it talks about this, verse 11-12, it said, “Hezekiah gave orders to prepare storerooms in the temple of the Lord, and this was done. They faithfully brought in contribution, ties, and dedicated gifts.” You know, when you bring in a healthy culture, people will give to it. And I don’t just mean financially, they’ll give praise to it, they’ll give support to it, they’ll give their own self to it. So when you bring spiritual renewal into your place of business, you will have support, but you gotta have faith and believe that support will come.

2 Chronicles 30:23 says it this way. “The entire assembly then agreed to celebrate the festival seven more days. So for another seven days, they celebrate it joyfully.” The leadership principle is this, leaders must restore spiritual and moral integrity in their communities. It’s just that simple.

So let me just kind of recover, and I gotta go faster here, but the first principle we talked about is trust in God, and the principle is that great leaders trust God’s guidance over human strategies. The second moral courage leadership principle is true leadership requires standing against corruption, even when that’s unpopular. The third is to bring spiritual renewal. And even though you know, it may not be appropriate to turn your workplace into a church, when you bring moral high ground into your place of community, you are bringing spiritual renewal because it comes from the creator who has engineered these things. And the leadership principle is leaders restore spiritual and moral integrity in their communities.

4. Prayerful Dependence in Crisis

All right. The fourth thing is prayerful dependence. You can pray about your work. You can pray about anything. Now, let me tell you what’s happening now in this story. So I said earlier that not everything went great when Hezekiah led. He also had a revolt against them from the Assyrians. And at this point in time, 185,000 soldiers were camped outside of the walls of Jerusalem, ready to destroy them like they had destroyed every previous town, village and city that they had worked from the north through Israel down through Judah, and now outside of the walls of Jerusalem.

And so now they were facing this invasion. Hezekiah, rightly so, was freaked out. He was doing all the things right. But now it looked as though maybe your rightness will cause you your life, cause you your job. What I want you to know First of all, is he did everything that he felt was right to do up to this point, including hiding the natural springs of water so that outside of Jerusalem, so that the Assyrians would not find the water, because if they don’t have water, they’re not going to be a very strong army.

And he rerouted these, I’ve already explained this earlier, but he rerouted these streams underneath the ground and tunneled them in Jerusalem so that the people of Jerusalem would have water. And he fortified because you know, this all happened in a period of years, not days or months when this, you know, invasion was coming from the north. So he also fortified the walls of Jerusalem, making them more difficult to break, because they were breaking down walls, the Assyrians, and they were creating ramps and all kinds of things. But he also was hiring mercenaries to come and to join.

So he did everything that he knew humanly possible. Then what he did, the scripture tells us, is once it got to this place, he tore his clothes and then he put on sackcloth. And that was a sign of calling things the way they are. And good leaders do that. They don’t just talk about vision and butterflies. They talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly in order to be truthful about things, to gain their followers’ respect that they do know what’s going on. And they do know that trouble is here.

But along with tearing his clothes, he prayed. He prayed to God for help. It says this in 2 Kings 19, 15 to 19. It says, “And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord, Lord the God of Israel enthroned between the cherubim, you alone,” that’s, you know, the angels, “you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth.” He’s acknowledging God to be God. Right? When’s the last time you’ve done that over your situation? “Now, Lord our God, deliver us from His hand so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, Lord, are God.”

So the leadership principle here is that leaders must develop a habit of seeking God’s intervention before making crucial decisions. So that’s number four. He prayed.

5. Responsiveness to Counsel

Now, I’m not going to tell you what happened yet, because he still had another thing that he did. He was very responsive to counsel. Good leaders seek counsel, and they’re responsive to counsel. So he prayed, and probably during that praying process, he got the idea that he needed to send some of his messengers to his coach.

His coach was a prophet. His name was Isaiah. And he sent this cohort to Isaiah to bring Isaiah up to date with all that was happening, and then asking Isaiah what he thinks to see what Isaiah might say back to Hezekiah what to do, as if Isaiah didn’t know what was going on, which of course, he did. Second Kings 19 and 20 says this. “Then Isaiah, son of Amos, sent a message to Hezekiah. This is what the Lord the God of Israel says. I have heard your prayer concerning the Sennacherib king of Assyria.”

The leadership principle here is that wise leaders seek and heed good counsel, and ignoring warnings can have long-term consequences. So, why did Isaiah say that God heard his prayer. Well, Isaiah went on to tell him that he had heard a word from the Lord, that they weren’t going to have to do anything, that God Himself was going to step in. And 2 Kings 19:35 says this, “Then the angel of the Lord,” which could be translated that the angel armies of heaven went out and put to death 185,000 in the Assyrian camp.

There was actually more than 185,000 in the Assyrian camp because the story goes on to say that when some of the Assyrians woke up in the morning, because this happened during the night, they woke up and they saw this hundred-plus-thousand corpses everywhere. Crazy story. If you haven’t read it, you should read it. It’s a great story.

So counsel. So what have we talked about it so far? Regardless of whether your leadership is for a church, a ministry, a nonprofit, a for-profit, a Fortune 50, an entrepreneur, whatever it is, these are still true, and I hope that you will consider them. Trust in God, moral courage, spiritual renewal, prayerful dependence, and responsiveness to counsel. And there is two more that I want to share with you real quickly.

6. Humility and Repentance

Number six is humility and repentance. Repentance is a church word, I know. But humility means admitting things. Repentance means stop doing that dumb thing and turn around.

One of the mistakes that Hezekiah made is that he kind of flashed his wealth to a competing country. He was kind of showing off. And here’s what the Bible says about it. When he was rebuked by Isaiah for doing a dumb thing, you know, which was basically saying, “Hey, look at all this gold that I have, you know, come and get it.” Right? I mean, that was really kind of dumb. But in 2 Chronicles, it says this, 32:26, “But Hezekiah repented of the pride of his heart, as did the people of Jerusalem. Therefore, the Lord’s wrath did not come on them during the days of Hezekiah.”

The principle is that great leaders acknowledge their mistake, and they change, they repent. And great leaders, and because pride leads to a downfall, but humility preserves favor. My counsel to those of you who are leading is that when you do make a mistake, get rid of the spin, you know, get rid of the blame. If you made a mistake, you’re actually going to build trust by admitting the mistake by standing up with moral courage and saying I blew it, I called it wrong.

And get as grimy as you can. I mean, lay it out. You miscalculated. You assumed you didn’t look into the detail, you were lazy, you took a shortcut. Or maybe you didn’t do any of those things, but you were just wrong in the end. If you say that, that will turn people’s head. And to be honest, it’ll cause heaven to look into who you are and what you’re about. I know this is encouraging you. If you’re still sticking with this episode, it’s encouraging you, regardless of where your faith is at.

7. Preparation and Strategy

All right. And then the seventh and final thing I think that Hezekiah is teaching me is what I would call preparation and strategy. And even though this would fit very well in the front end. As I already said before, he fortified the defenses, he brought the water underground. You know, God has given us a lot of wisdom and strength and we are to use that. You know, I think the message is basically, do what you can with what God gives you. Don’t throw up your hands and say nothing can be done. See yourself as in partnership with God.

2 Chronicles 32:30 says this, “It was Hezekiah who blocked the upper outlet of the springs and channeled the water down to the west side of the city of David.” 2 Chronicles 32:7 says this, “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged because of the king of Assyria and the vast army with them for there is a greater power with us than with him.”

The question that I would have to you is who are you listening to? Are you listening to the whispers of your current-day Assyrian enemy? Are you listening to those whispers? And are those getting down into your heart into your soul? Because see, faith does not exclude preparation. You can’t do what I did in high school. I didn’t study for a test. So I threw up a missile prayer to God. If you just get me to pass this test, I promise you I will now study. That’s baloney.

I’m not sure God answers those kinds of prayers. But you know, God, I’ve done everything I can do. I don’t know what else to do. Would you help me? I think those are the prayers that gets God’s attention. When you do your part, but at the same time recognize that it may not be enough. And then you give room for God, you know, to work. So wise leaders do plan ahead. They do work hard. There’s no doubt about that. And so God blesses both faith and strategic actions.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

So in conclusion, trust God deeply for his guidance, confront wrongdoing with courage, lead spiritual renewal with conviction, seek God through prayer in times of crisis, listen to godly counsel and act wisely, remain humble, and change your mind and change your direction when necessary. Man, use the gifts that God has given you prepare, be strategic, while at the same time, recognizing that many times it won’t be enough. But you have God on your side. If you’ve never heard me say this before, hear it for the first time. I believe personally that God is big enough to be small enough to care about you and to care about me.

Outro

Winston Harris: Thank you for joining us here at The Today Count Show. Be sure to like and subscribe on whatever platform you listen to or watch, so you don’t miss any content. Stay tuned for more coming soon.
—————————–