Repost: Anoint Your Face
Sparks:
The God-chosen leader is a “cannot” man in two ways.
Firstly, like Moses and Jeremiah, he will genuinely feel and confess, “I cannot”. But on the other hand, he will know that he cannot do otherwise, it is a divine compulsion, a fire in his bones, an urge and energy not of himself.
While he is on his job he may give the impression of personal strength, perhaps of efficiency, or even self-assurance, but he and God know the depth of his secret history, the overwhelming consciousness of need and dependence, the awareness of limitation, and the desolating realization of failure and weakness.
Leaders know deeper depths than any others and their battle with self-despair is more acute. Yet it is a part of their leadership and responsibility that they hide their own personal sufferings and sorrows. Like Ezekiel and Hosea they have to anoint their face and in the hour of deepest sorrow, go before the people “as at other times”. The troubles must not get into their voice or manner. If they do, their influence has gone, for, if people are going on to the greater fulnesses of Christ, the supreme virtue is courage, and it is this that a leader must inspire. His boldest times before men may be his times of deepest suffering before God. Leaders know that they are involved in the “impossible”, but — in spite of themselves — they are committed, and for them compromise is unthinkable.
