Hospitable Leaders Create a Better Future
Great leaders must help people uncover their dreams, encourage their dreams, and provide them to dream in line with God’s good dreams for this broken world.
I want to help you birth the futures—yours and others’—that are gestating in you but are yet unborn. Countless lives are waiting to be changed. There are always new futures waiting to live.
Dr. Thomas P. Barnett, former advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense of the United States, was tasked with the burdensome responsibility of studying the future of the world. He wrote about the need “to imagine a future worth creating” and to “actually try to build it.” He said, “I choose to see it as a moral responsibility—a duty to leave our children a better world.”
“If someone has the ability to imagine a better future and holds the power to create it, he or she is morally responsible to do just that.”
We all have facing us incredible potentialities that can cause an entire new reality to exist. When we consider these possibilities, common and moral sense should direct us toward purposeful action.
We must take the actions necessary to bring about the prompting in our hearts. In the New Testament, James talked about the worthlessness of knowing the good we ought to do and not doing it. He said it is a sin (James 4:17). If opportunities lie dormant in our minds and are never actualized, we are living inferior lives. Purposeful inaction is a detriment to the future of our world.
Donald Miller wrote a beautiful book about how to write a better story with our lives. He said, “A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.” Profound. I think living a good story is a loaded proposition. One part of good is “interesting.” We should live interesting stories. The more important part of good is “moral.”
“It is not enough to live an interesting story; there must be a moral to our story.”
What great story does not have a moral conflict?
One of the greatest moral conflicts in American history was the struggle for the abolition of slavery. William Seward was a New York state senator (1831-34), a New York governor (1838-42), a US senator (1849-61), and the leading candidate in the Republican Party for the 1860 presidential nomination. The relatively unknown Abraham Lincoln defeated him. Seward, however, decided to continue serving his country during a time of tremendous moral crisis by accepting President Lincoln’s invitation to become secretary of state.
During his earlier years as a US senator, Seward set a moral momentum toward ending slavery by advocating an allegiance to a “higher law.” He acknowledged that some believed that the US Constitution permitted, or perhaps ignored, slavery. In a famous speech to the Senate, Seward said, “But there is a higher law than the Constitution.” He then made a future-changing argument, based on moral law, against the inglorious institution of slavery.”
President Lincoln was influenced mightily by Seward’s concept of a higher, moral law. He coupled that philosophy with his strong conviction that the basis of American independence—that all men are created equal—came directly from God Himself. The argument against slavery was essentially a moral argument for a better future for a nation and its people. This concept was anchored in God’s mandate for the equality of every human being, a partial motive for the civil War, which won freedom for millions of formerly enslaved people and their progeny.
When Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederate States of America, fell to Union forces on April 3, 1865, Lincoln and his entourage showed up the next day. They walked dangerously through the streets of the city—now golden streets—echoing the voice of freedom as throngs of newly freed slaves flocked the vicinity of the defeated capital. The emancipated surrounded the Great Emancipator with such force and determination that the soldiers guarding him were helpless in keeping them at a safe distance. With deep passion, this group sang the president’s praises, hailing him as their Messiah, shouting, “Glory, hallelujah!”
Lincoln knew better than to accept such acclamation. He responded, “Don’t kneel to me; that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” Although Lincoln was used as an instrument to unfold the preferred futures of people who had never tasted the fruits of freedom, he knew that this better future came from God, the highest law.
So, the future is in us.
And not just any future. It is the future that God has planned for us and our world.
“The future is in us. And not just any future. It is the future that God has planned for us and our world.”
We are responsible to bring this future out of the realm of the unseen and into the world of the seen and lived.
And we can. We can create a better future for ourselves and others. If we really want to.
Leaders best serve people when we engage them in a great moral cause. How is who and what you are leading advancing good in this world? Drop a comment and tell us about it.
Adapted from Live Ten (Thomas Nelson) and The Hospitable Leader (Baker Publishing Group) by Terry A. Smith. All rights reserved.
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