Finding Hope When Leaders FailSample

One of the most consistent themes throughout all the Prophetic writings is that worship without obedience is offensive to God. He hates it! In today’s passage we see this reality clearly: God is not merely interested in religious acts or rituals; he desires a from-the-heart obedience to all of God’s commands.

When we read about the actions of Israel in the Old Testament, it can be easy to disconnect from their experience due to the cultural and historical gaps between us. To help bridge this gap, I want to invite you to consider the following questions:

• Do you sometimes find assurance in your faith because of your religious acts, e.g. church attendance, worship and giving, rather than your whole-of-life obedience to God?
• Have you sensed there could be a disconnect in your church between people’s actions on Sunday and their actions throughout the week?
• Do you look at what happens in your church and see some things that might be motivated more by worldly desires or values than by obedience to the word of God?

The call to obedience, or the call to “change your ways and your actions”, is a call to the whole church. It’s possible that a leadership failure can be the result of a "bad egg"–an individual leader sinfully acting alone–but that is not usually the case. Most often, there are systemic failures involved too. And even where there are not, the many tentacles of sin can be spread throughout the church, seen and unseen.

Finding hope when leaders fail involves:

• firstly, lament (as we did on day one);
• secondly, confession (as we did on day two);
• and thirdly, a commitment to complete obedience to God.

Merely replacing one leader with another isn’t going to fix the problem. Only the path of full obedience will lead God’s people to health.

As we finish today, let me ask you: what does your life reveal? What does your heart reveal? Are you truly, genuinely, committed to being obedient to God in all things? Do your actions demonstrate the reality of this? None of us is perfect, but for all of us, it is our obedience, not our performance of religious rituals, that is the measure of our faith.