In answer to the question – “How does God choose leaders?” – we might review revelation fundamentals about God and how He does stuff. Our Biblical worldview should include the presuppositions of Creation, Redemption, and Restoration; for outside the context of Bible revelation, we usually fail to filter out humanism, animism, and occultism, creeping confusions about identity and destiny.
How God chooses leaders has a lot to do with how He creates people, how Creation infuses them with God’s purpose.
I have long espoused a premise that each of God’s people is a leader. Teaching this clarifies the confusion about personal destiny in cataclysmic ways! People respond violently to this level of clarity! They react from the deepest disappointment with me and God about who they are and what they should do when we discuss created disposition, calling, charismatic gifting because the clarity of Creation requires a radical transformation.
“Be transformed by the renewing of you mind so that you can prove God’s good, acceptable, and perfect will.” [Romans 12:2]
People are bent toward doing what they can to change God more than surrendering so God changing them, so they tend to insist upon everything and everyone else changing rather than repenting, or “changing to be changed.” No one knows who they are until God tells them who they are; each of us requires revelation of what He had in mind when He created us.
So, when I say that each of God’s people is a leader, I am referring to the kingdom reality that God’s people provide leadership to the world, and each of the citizen of the kingdom represents God in the earth as part of a corporate expression of His rule. God is a Leader. He has chosen to express His leadership through a representative people, so each of His children becomes part of that leadership dynamic.
To understand yourself and your destiny, you need a revelation of who He created you to be so you can prepare to do all He has called you to do.
I really jumped into the bottom-line issue here, but I wish to discuss this immediately because we need to countenance this premise in order to properly understand the process: People are bent toward something other than their created identity and destiny by deception, and the adversary works most commonly, with silken, subtle sentience to support his “anything but that” method of destiny deception. The “anything but that” method is simple. The devil says, “’Anything but what God created this person to be’ is acceptable; in this way we can invest his destiny with destruction.”
To understand what is really going on when we disciple leaders, we require constant awareness of these fundamentals. These factors must be reintroduced to modern believers because the basics have suffered a deluge of deception. In the cultural wars, hell moves whole people groups away from purpose, working to erase the principles God invested into culture to provide people the best opportunities to pursue their destinies.
Born to Lead
Each of us is born to lead. At its simplest, this leadership is personal: we learn to lead ourselves so we can learn to surrender to God leadership. That is, we learn personal leadership so we can best allow God to lead us, and not someone else. That is, we are not responsible to lead ourselves but we are responsible to lead ourselves well enough that God can be the Leader of our lives.
In addition, as we learn to make God the Leader of our lives, we function within His kingdom as leaders to the world, representing Him both as individuals and as part of a kingdom culture.
So, everyone is born to lead. Born naturally as His Creation. Born spiritually to enter His Kingdom. Redemption restores us to be the person He created us to be so we can do what He has called us to do. In this way, God has leaders to represent Him personally and corporately in the earth. He has chosen to lead through kingdom leaders.
Our personal leadership measures our kingdom leadership. That is, we can only represent God as kingdom leaders to the extent we represent Him as personal leaders. So, discipling leaders involves the development of personal leadership as a measure of preparing and positioning kingdom leaders. Whatever the level or placement of our kingdom leadership, we can fulfill calling only to the extent we are prepared to fulfill destiny.
We must become the person who can fulfill the call.
Here, a majority of modern believers mess up and mess around. They assume that anointing measures leadership. Anointing measures Anointing. Anointing isn’t human, and anointing doesn’t measure character. Anointing and authority usually flow and function together. We are anointed to do what we are called to do, but we need to be the person God created us to be in order to do what we are called to do. So, anointing measures God’s empowering of purpose, not destiny.
The person God created you to be is destiny. What God called that person to be and do is purpose. And, that purpose is part of a greater Eternal Purpose being accomplished by kingdom and kingdom leaders working together in spiritual consensus, cooperation, and collaboration.
Leaders Who Make Leaders
To prepare and position each of us, God provided kingdom leaders and the process called “discipling.” This process of kingdom fathering focuses upon “the person God created us to be” as prepare, and the “what God has called us to do” as position.
The term translated “equip” in Ephesians 4: “to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry,” speaks to the “prepare and position” mission of kingdom leadership and discipling. This term, katartizo, is a compound of “according to” or “along the lines of” and “render” or “fit” to a specific application, use, or purpose.” When used in the context of fitting the people of God to function in the Body of Christ, we gain the fuller sense of each member being personally prepared so they can more efficiently and effectively produce in their positioned place in the Body.
Each member is positioned. They are “joined.” The joints of the Body at which they are “joined” provide. That is, each member receives and releases at the place of their positioning; properly prepared, they provide and produce where they are positioned.
Kingdom leaders disciple individuals in this way: prepare and position. The individual doesn’t prepare and position himself in a vacuum. He is part of a kingdom strategy in which leaders bestowed upon the Body by Jesus prepare and position members to “do the work of serving.” The context of this “do the work” clarifies individual destiny to be part of kingdom purpose: without any contradiction, a person is created to be someone who can do what he is called to do, and that person best fulfills this destiny when he is prepared and positioned by kingdom leaders.
