John Maxwell, leadership guru, is attributed with the quote "Everything rises and falls on leadership."
We may not say it that way, but intuitively, we know and live as though that is true.
We want our sports teams to hire and retain the best leaders as coaches. The men and women who don't just win, but build people and culture.
We become completely unlike ourselves during election cycles as we attempt to identify the best leaders to lead our country.
We leave or take jobs based on who our boss is going to be and the character he or she leads with.
Leadership matters. Not just in general, but in your life. We need a king. A leader who has our best interest at heart.
We need a king who knows the desires of our heart that often go unspoken.
We need a king who wants more for us (not from us) than we often want for ourselves.
We need a king that will lovingly call us back to the truth.
We need a king who will lead us well.
In the grand story of Scripture, we remember how God promised his people the land of Canaan, only to then read about their enslavement in Egypt. God brought them out of Egypt, and then under Joshua's watch and with God's power, they began to take the land God had promised to his people.
That's the setting of the book of Judges. It's also the beginning of a realization the Israelites would come to: We need a king. The only problem is, they didn't realize that they already had a king - the best king - whom they were unwilling to follow with all their heart. Instead, everyone did as he or she saw fit. It was a recipe for disaster time and time again.
Over the next several weeks, join us at Christ Community as we consider our own need for a king. As we read and remember the stories of the judges, we'll see how we often work without the help of the king we already have, how harmful that can be, and how we need a king who will graciously reveal our blind spots and rescue us when we search for leadership in other things.
At the end, let's hope our cry is the same as the Israelites: "We need a king!"
But at the end of our series in Judges, may the difference be that our hearts are settled on following a good king, the best king. King Jesus.