‘Love never fails.’
1 Corinthians 13:8
The Bible says, ‘Love never fails.’ Think about it: money doesn’t bring happiness, fame doesn’t bring self-worth, and revenge doesn’t bring satisfaction. The only thing that never fails is love.
When Mother Teresa addressed world leaders at the United Nations, she was asked, ‘How can we have world peace?’ She replied, ‘Go home and love your family.’ If we all did that, ‘Paradise Lost’ would become ‘Paradise Found’!
Napoleon Bonaparte’s intellectual greatness and intense egotism make his alleged tribute to the supremacy of leadership by love, all the more striking. He said, ‘Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I myself founded great empires: but upon what did the creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this day millions would die for Him.’
Sometimes leaders are just power-holders. Because you can’t love others without making yourself vulnerable, they see expressing love as a weakness. But the fact is you can’t love and ‘keep all your options open’. To truly love - whether it’s your spouse, your children, or the people you lead - you must give yourself unreservedly in such a way that you can be hurt and even rejected.
The fundamental principle on which power-holders operate is to protect themselves and everything they have. Whereas the fundamental principle of true leadership is to give of yourself with no holds barred.
Love as an intrinsic characteristic of leadership seems outmoded, yet according to Scripture it’s still the winning strategy.
The Bible says, ‘God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind’ (2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV). That’s why love is the winning strategy.
2 King 24-35, Acts 13:26-52
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