Lead Like Joshua

Lessons For Today

Derek Tidball

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783595556
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Église chrétienne

1. Assume responsibility (Joshua 1:1–6)

Let’s begin at the beginning. Joshua was a new leader for a new day. After years of being in Moses’ shadow, he now steps into the spotlight in his own right. From the sidelines he is now to occupy centre stage. ‘Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the River Jordan into the land I am about to give them – to the Israelites’ (verse 2). God makes it clear that Joshua is the one to lead the people forwards: ‘you will lead these people to inherit the land’ (verse 6). So the challenge of leadership begins.

It had been obvious for some time that Joshua was to succeed Moses and, as we saw in the Introduction, he had been publicly commissioned and ordained for the task. Yet now the moment had arrived, did he feel prepared for it? Graeme Auld claims, ‘It is perennially true that quiet, unobtrusive, observant apprenticeship to a great leader is a perfect preparation for a good succession.’1 True, it helps immensely. Any emerging leader should seize the opportunity if it is offered. But I’d rather go with Nancy Reagan, who once said that nothing could prepare you for living in the White House. Many leaders confess that all their years of training and all their time as apprentices to senior leaders never fully prepared them for the moment when they occupied the hot seat, having to take the decisions themselves, rather than standing by while someone else took them. The difference is that they now have to accept the responsibility. The weight of leadership falls on them and on them alone.

Accepting responsibility seems an obvious characteristic of leadership, but it is amazing how often would-be leaders fall at this first hurdle. What does it mean? We will look at four elements.

Responsibility means accepting the burden

Although commissioned some time earlier, Joshua still had to activate the commission and go to work when the moment came. He could have flunked it at this vital moment, pleading all sorts of excuses: he was still grieving for Moses; he wasn’t up to standing in Moses’ shoes; he was too old to go through with it; if only he had been needed sooner; and so on. Yet he didn’t. He stepped up and accepted the responsibility of leadership.

Some people envy leaders because they think, quite erroneously, that leadership is about status and power, and gives you freedom to do what you like. In reality, leadership is primarily hard work. It’s demanding. Some pastors love the title and the position, but seem oblivious to the responsibility that accompanies the honourable rank they occupy. To be a leader is to accept that extra demands will be laid on you, higher standards will be expected and longer hours will be required. The easy life enjoyed by others is not for you. To be a leader takes skill, as we shall increasingly discover as we examine Joshua’s leadership, not least because a leader’s power is often highly restrained by others, by circumstances and even by the law. To be a leader is to accept the range of obligations that go with it and especially one’s duty to the stakeholders in the enterprise.

In his, by now dated but still classic work Spiritual Leadership, J. Oswald Sanders wrote, ‘The young man of leadership calibre will work while others waste time, study while others sleep, pray while others play.’2 From a different field and a different age, Sir Alex Ferguson agrees. He speaks of the way ‘great footballers and great artists are not made on ninety minutes a week’, and points to the example of ‘Stanley Matthews, who used to play with a ball for six to eight hours a day’.3 He mentions how ‘the crowd looked at the goal Beckham scored from the halfway line against Wimbledon in 1996 as if it was some sort of miracle. It was nothing of the sort,’ he assures us. ‘He must have practised that same kick hundreds of times so, when the opportunity struck in south London, he seized it.’4 His best team players were not those who headed for a shower or a massage as soon as training was over, but those who stayed and continued to practise.5 His co-author agrees, observing that what separates leaders ‘from other helmsmen’ is ‘obsession’. ‘Obsessives can’t imagine doing anything else with their lives.’6

Responsibility means being accountable

Rudolph Giuliani earned global public acclaim as Mayor of New York for his handling of the tragic 9/11 crisis. Writing later about leadership, he describes how when he became mayor, the city was dysfunctional, with a high crime rate and the appearance that no-one cared for it. Contact with any city official always led to passing the buck. No answers were given to any question, no action taken to overcome any difficulty and no solutions offered to any problem. On becoming mayor, Giuliani describes how his priority was to instil a culture of responsibility in the city’s public servants, from the lowliest city employee upwards. He had, he wrote, ‘a two-word sign on his desk which genuinely summarizes my whole philosophy: I’M RESPONSIBLE’.7 ‘More than anyone else,’ he explained, ‘leaders should welcome being held accountable. Nothing builds confidence in a leader more than a willingness to take responsibility for what happens during his watch.’8

Joshua demonstrates this quality in abundance, as the unfolding story will demonstrate. Not all contemporary Christian leaders – or secular ones, for that matter – demonstrate the same quality. They’re often only too willing to pass the buck. ‘The deacons wouldn’t let me . . . The congregation just didn’t get it . . . My colleagues were incompetent or lazy. The Parochial Church Council held me back . . . The Board refused to buy into my vision. People were too set in their ways to change . . . Circumstances dictated . . .’ We’ve heard every excuse in the book.

The apostle Paul in the New Testament was a model in this regard. He was acutely conscious of his accountability to God for the quality of his work in the churches in a way that is rarely seen today. His eye was always on the day when he would present the results of his labour to God. He didn’t want his work to fail the test of fire to which it would be subject on that day.9 He feared lest he himself would ‘be disqualified for the prize’, and was prepared to subject himself to disciplined training in order to ensure he wasn’t.10 He was desperate to present his converts ‘as a pure virgin to Christ’, unsullied by dalliances with others who would divert and steal their affection.11 He understood the depth of Christ’s sacrifice and his ambition ‘to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless’.12 He saw the church as his joy and crown and gave himself to its leadership.13 Given that his eye was on his future accountability, Paul’s leadership was anything but coolly dispassionate, or indifferently professional, or clinically contractual. He gave himself to them and to the task of the gospel, as good Christian leaders always should do.

So leadership means accepting the responsibility in terms of embracing accountability.

Responsibility means adopting today’s agenda

By twice mentioning that Moses was dead, the opening words of Joshua make it abundantly clear that he was called to lead the people into the post-Moses era and forwards to their long-promised destination. ‘Leadership,’ as Ken Blanchard rightly notes, ‘is about going somewhere. If you and your people don’t know where you are going, your leadership doesn’t matter.’14 For Israel, this was a new day. Joshua was called to undertake a new task. They had a new mandate. No longer was it enough to have escaped Egypt; it was time to enter Canaan. However much he had learned from Moses, and however great his admiration for him, Joshua was not to be his clone. Neither Moses nor his memory would be honoured if Joshua simply repeated what he had done, or led in the way he had led. He was a different person, chosen and equipped, just as Moses had been in his day, to lead in the light of what lay ahead. Rather than repeating the battles Moses had fought, Joshua faced new ones. His enemy was no longer the Egyptians, but the Canaanites and all the other ‘ites’ who already occupied the land God had marked out for them.

If Joshua had kept the children of Israel wandering around the Desert of Sinai out of false loyalty to Moses’ memory, he would have betrayed the commission God had given him and failed the people. His task was to lead them to occupy the Promised Land, by the use of military force rather than relying on miraculous intervention alone, and then to settle the tribes in their allocated territories. Wandering was to be replaced by settling. The rural environment was to give way to the urban. Tents were to be replaced by towns. Leading the people forwards was what would honour Moses, not falsely maintaining or preserving what he had done. But never mind the fear of betraying Moses’ memory, if Joshua had not led the people forwards, he would have been betraying God’s commission, and that would have been far more serious.

So Joshua’s first task was to prepare the people to enter Canaan, via the back door, to the east of the land, and to surmount the barrier of the River Jordan. From then on he was to serve, first as their military leader, and subsequently to exercise astute administrative and governmental skills. By comparison, Moses had never been a military leader, although he had exercised effective governance over the disparate tribes, as Joshua was eventually to do.

As David Firth points out,

. . . the nature of leadership roles will vary. Moses’ leadership is clearly distinct from that of Joshua . . . [who] never takes on all the roles Moses had fulfilled . . . different phases in the life of God’s people require different leadership structures. Moses would not be completely replaced because of his unique role, though neither would Joshua. God continues to raise up and empower leaders, but their giftings and roles relate to the particular needs that God’s people then face.15

The lessons for today’s church leaders are obvious. They are called to lead the church in its mission in the contemporary context, making and developing disciples and communicating the gospel in ways that match today and its challenges, not yesterday. Sadly, too many are fighting the battles of yesteryear – whether those of the Reformation, the Victorian era or of more recent years. Too many seek to freeze the church as it was and preserve its practices and culture in aspic, as if it were a museum piece full of treasures from the past that don’t quite fit in the present day. Yet leaders, as we have seen, are accountable before God and have to take responsibility for communicating and living the gospel in the contemporary culture.

We should not, however, overemphasize the discontinuity between Moses and Joshua. Some leaders are naively eager to move people on from their present, somewhat settled position, and think the only way to do so is to write off the past, reject completely what’s gone before and eradicate previous leaders from the story they want to create. Radicalism sometimes unwisely rejects inherited wisdom, and the continuity of the story, at its peril.16

In Joshua’s case, the continuity is seen in two particular respects. First, it is seen in the promise of God to give Israel the land: ‘as I promised Moses’ (verse 3). God was to prove faithful to his plan and true to his word. The promise may have been made years before in a different time, to a different leader and to a different generation. But God had not forgotten it and would not go back on the specific pledge he had given, including the details of the size and shape of the territory they were to possess. That promise was about to become a reality. Joshua’s leadership was not, in that sense, doing anything new, but simply bringing to fruition the undertaking God had given to his great predecessor.

Second, the continuity is seen in the presence of God, which remained with Joshua: ‘As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you’ (verse 5). That was just as well, since neither Joshua nor his armies...

Table of contents

• Preface
• IntroductionJoshua ‘in whom is the spirit of leadership’
• 1. Assume responsibility (Joshua 1:1–6)
• 2. Build foundations (Joshua 1:7–9)
• 3. Make decisions (Joshua 1:10–17)
• 4. Gather intelligence (Joshua 2:1–22)
• 5. Prepare thoroughly (Joshua 3:1–5)
• 6. Take risks (Joshua 3:6–17)
• 7. Recall history (Joshua 4:1 – 5:12)
• 8. Gain respect (Joshua 4:14)
• 9. Surrender status (Joshua 5:13–15)
• 10. Trust God (Joshua 6:1–27)
• 11. Face failure (Joshua 7:1–9)
• 12. Confront sin (Joshua 7:10–26)
• 13. Re-energize people (Joshua 8:1–29)
• 14. Renew vision (Joshua 8:30–35)
• 15. Correct mistakes (Joshua 9:1–27)
• 16. Fight battles (Joshua 10:1 – 12:24)
• 17. Demonstrate perseverance (Joshua 13:1–33)
• 18. Manage administration (Joshua 13:8 – 19:51)
• 19. Honour others (Joshua 14:6–14)
• 20. Display compassion (Joshua 20:1 – 21:45)
• 21. Guard unity (Joshua 22:1–34)
• 22. Mentor others (Joshua 23:1–16)
• 23. Keep focus (Joshua 24:1–28)
• Notes
• Select bibliography