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Exodus 18:13-14   The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening.  When his father-in-law [Jethro]saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said, “What is this you are doing for the people?  Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?”

Moses’ leadership of Israel under unbelievably difficult circumstances, in terms of who they were as a nation and what they went through, is unparalleled in history.  He was God’s man, doing God’s work in God’s way, and was laying out God’s blueprint for the whole of Salvation History.  The author of Hebrews touched on the importance of his task and his faithfulness to it: “[Jesus] was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house. … …  ‘Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,’ bearing witness to what would be spoken by God in the future” (Hebrews 3:2,5).

Sometimes he had to stand alone, let down even by those closest to him.  But Jethro’s wise words to him here stand equally true for us today.  They became the basis for the later Church at the time of the Reformation in recognising the importance of shared leadership in a ‘presbyterial’ form of Church Government.

We have all seen, and even experienced, in the history of the Church, the dangers and harm brought about by ‘one-man-band’ leadership, dangers and harm to both the ‘head’ and the ‘body’.

Because we are all made in the ‘likeness and image’ of God (Genesis 1:26-27), many of us have a built-in tendency to be ‘control freaks’ and to dominate leadership responsibilities in an unhelpful way, unhelpful both for ourselves and for the people we lead.

What is Jethro saying to you today about delegation of authority?  Are there people around you to whom the Holy Spirit has distributed valuable gifts in order to complement the ones he has given to you for the mutual benefit of his Church, and yet who are being denied the opportunity to exercise these gifts?  Are you ‘clogging up’ God’s plan for growth, both your own growth and the growth of  the Church?  Remember, God entrusts us to work for his Church, even when he could do it much better himself!

– Bruce Christian