Episode #10: The Cycle of Rebellion and Repentance - Leadership Lessons Learned from Reading Judges

In this episode of the 'Heal the Healers' podcast, host Inga Hofman discusses leadership lessons she learned from the Bible, specifically about the cycle of rebellion and repentance. She advises doctors on the importance of integrating faith into their personal and professional lives. She also emphasizes the importance of realigning oneself when becoming self-reliant and forgetting the need for God. She explores these concepts through the stages of Rebellion, Repression, Repentance, and Restoration. Inga encourages listeners to apply these stages not just to themselves but to understand them in the context of their organization and their leadership. 

00:00 Introduction and Personal Reflections

00:30 Welcome to the Heal the Healers Podcast

01:19 The Cycle of Rebellion and Repentance

03:09 Reading the Scripture and Sharing Personal Insights

07:36 Understanding the Cycle of Rebellion and Repentance

22:02 Applying the Cycle to Personal and Professional Life

24:48 Preview of the Next Episode

26:11 Conclusion and Invitation to Engage

26:36 Final Thoughts and Blessings

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Transcript

0:00

Have you ever read your Bible and you literally wrapped over the pages, perhaps because you realized that you are not that dissimilar from the people in the Bible, and perhaps it was a reflection of their anguish and pain and you could relate, and that happened to me a little while ago. Actually happens all the time, and I want to share that story and the leadership lessons I learned from that. So stay tuned for after the interim, we'll be right back. Welcome to the Heal the Healers podcast, where we explore the intersection of faith and medicine. Discover your God-given potential and experience Christ's healing in the midst of medical burnout. I'm your host, Ingar Hoffman, a pediatric key mock doc, physician, coach, and follow of Jesus. Together we will navigate the challenges of medicine, integrate faith into our personal and professional lives. Experience, spiritual renewal and find restoration in Christ. Welcome to the Heal the Healers, where Christ heals one physician and one patient at a time. Well, welcome back to another episode of Heal the Healers, and today I'm excited to share something that has been on my heart as I was reading the Bible. And I wanna talk about this thing called the cycle of rebellion and repentance. And this really occurred. Me reading through my Bible, especially when I was reading through the Old Testament earlier this year, I often find myself literally weeping over the patient over the pagers. And I was like, oh my God. Like, what are you doing, Israel? But then I realized, wow, oh my goodness, what are you doing, Inga? And I was such an aha moment for me to realize, wow, there's a lot of things that I do that are very much in line with what happened in history over and over and over again, and that's why the Bible is A living and breathing document, it really reads you over time the more you read it and it reflects back to you of what we have to work on. And that's why when I talked about the Bible is sharper than a double H sword or a scalpel that really oftentimes. It just cuts right through us and it reveals things to us. And this is a story of how that happened to me when I was reading judges back earlier in the day. And you might be very familiar with the story, and if you read through the Old Testament, you know there is a cycle of Israel kind of repeating itself in their sin cycle. And they are, you know, obedience to God. They worship him. They have such a relationship with him, and then they kind of fall short again and they get into rebellion and sin and isn't that what we do every day? And thank God for Jesus. Was redeemed us, was forgiven us so that we can have a fresh start over and over again. But lemme just share that story and actually read the scripture and then go through some key leadership lessons that I learned as I reflected on that scripture. And also if you're watching for the first time or if you followed up me before, thank you so much for watching and please share and subscribe the show. This really helps others to find it as well so we can reach more people. I really want this to be A broad reach to other physicians in medicine that, that are people of faith or exploring faith and how to integrate their faith into medicine and their daily lives. So thank you so much for doing that. I really appreciate it. So let's go and read that first chapter. And I'm trying to pull it up here. Actually, I don't have a a note, but I'm gonna pull it up here on my On my phone for now. I don't have my paper bible with me, which is usually what I like to read. So in judges two verses one to six, it says this, the angel of the Lord went up to Gilgal to bo him and said, I brought you. Up out of Egypt and let you into the land. I swore to give your ancestors. I said, I will never break my covenant with you and you shall not make a covenant with the people of this land. But you shall break down the altars yet you have disobeyed me. Why have you done this? And I have set also said. I will not drive them out before you. They will become your traps for you and they are gods will become snares to you. When the angel of the Lord had spoken these things to all the Israelites, the people wept out loud and they called the place baam. They, they offered sacrifices to the Lord. After Joshua had dismissed the Israelites, they went to take possession of the land. Each to their own inheritance. And this is just a snapshot of us thinking about how we. Often ask Christians how in the cycle, just like Israel of obedience and disobedience, rebellion and repentance, and God gave very clear instructions to Israel and he gives them to us too. How we should live our life, what we should do. And often we have trouble following them, but when we do, we are very blessed. But when we don't, oh, it gets a little tricky. And I just want to share how I reflected on this and what I learned from reading those lessons in the Old Testament. I. In fact, when you look at the Old Testament in even the New Testament or at your own life, you will see that there is this cycle that we go through, right? We get closer to God than we walk away. Perhaps that happened to you as you have gone through your medical training and as you have Be in practicing perhaps for decades. There are times when you walk really close with God, and there are times when you get busy and walk away and then you struggle and eventually you feel like, oh my goodness, my life is falling apart. My career's not going as I want to. My marriage is maybe struggling. I'm struggling with my children. Or you have trouble with collaborators if you're a researcher and then you quickly find yourself suddenly back on your knees and praying. And this is just as humans as, as. Falling people, a falling creation that is trying to get back to God and often tries on our own way. And this is not working out so great for us. So there is a real pattern throughout the Bible. If you read it over and over again, you see the patterns and you notice them in your own life. And I'm reading a Bible right now. It's the John Maxwell Leadership Bible. I actually really like it. And one of the things that I noticed that he always relates leadership lessons to the scriptures. We are reading, so, and this is no different and this is actually something I wanna give him credit that he distilled out of these scriptures that I wanted to share with you and sort of relate them to our medical practice as well. So, in human history especially, this is referring to judges, but you can actually look at The entire spectrum of the Bible and your own life, that we are often going through cycles of what I would call cycles of rebellion and stages of rebellion and repentance. That's why entitled this episode like this, the cycle of rebellion and repentance and what that means to us. So let's go through these different cycles and just kind of reflect and see what we can pick up for ourselves. Now the first one is basically the first stage in that cycle. It's rebellion. And rebellion is often a call from independence from God. And oftentimes this happens to us that we want to be independent when we feel like things are going well, right? So. Things are going well for a while. Maybe your medical career is working out. You've got a wonderful new position, perhaps let's say as a faculty member, or you got promoted or you got your top fellowship program, whatever it might be, and you're feeling like you are on cloud nine and you're like, wow, this is. Actually working up for me. I'm so excited. And what happens over time very quickly that then we are like, we are gaining some traction and momentum. Maybe we're getting some good wins in, into our career. And that is a spot where we're very vulnerable to easily fall and rebellion. And why is that actually wanna go back to the scripture. It's in first John. Where the Bible talks about the three types of sins we fall into the Satan uses those over and over, over again. It's the pride of life, the lust of our eyes and the lust of our flesh and pride of life is pretty much like that. I can do it myself. I am successful. Power those kind of things influence, and that is actually probably the number one thing in this, this part in our deca academic career where we fall into the trap of pride of life. I can do it myself. Look how far I come in my medical career. And we quickly become prideful and we become independent of God. And that is when we easily start to fall into the trap then of rebellion. It's because we literally believe we can do it without God because we are self-sufficient. We are productive. We have figured out this medical career and how to be successful in medicine. I don't know about you, but I have been in that stage where I was like, I know exactly what to do. I'm gonna do A, B, C. I'm a personal development coach. I'm a leadership coach. I know how to be productive and I'm gonna do it by my own strength. We all do that. And there's actually nothing inherently wrong with, with doing the work, but when we rely on the work above God and when we rely on us and our wisdom above God, that's where we get into trouble because we are saying we know better than you. And so that's one way to rebel at that stage. The other stage how to rebel is putting other things. Before God, which includes medicine. And I talked about that in another episode. Has medicine become your idol? And this is actually what happened to Israel over and over and over again. They rebelled in two ways. They're either especially talking about what I just read in judges. That didn't clear the land. They left the the people with their idols in their faults worship there, that then had an influence on them and straight them away from God down the line to horrific things of Baal worship and other things of child sacrifice and all these terrible things. And I'm not saying that they were bad and we are so good. No, we are doing the same thing. Our idols or our practice of that might just look different today than it did thousands of years ago, but nothing has changed in our human broken nature. So the other way we were well is that we make an idol of other things. An idol perhaps of your career, of your promotion, of your latest paper that that you worship more your collaborators, your mentors than you worship God. And we have to be very careful. So two ways to rebel. We either put idols in front of God and worship something else that can be your career. Or we think we are self-sufficient. We don't know God that much. We only need them, him when we are desperate and we can figure it out on our own and then become self-reliant and step above God and get out of alignment with his will for our life. So this is key and it happens. Now, what's the next part that happens? The next part is what Joe Maxwell called stage two is repression. In his mercy, God often sends enemies or experience of our consequences. TO show us our rebellion and poor choices. So what do I mean by that? So Israel had real consequences for their rebellion. What often happens that the surrounding enemies that were next to their land invaded their land, that they overcame them, that they later even took them captive in Babylonian captivity to drag them away from their inheritance and promised land. So. In this scenario, oftentimes it was sort of Real warfare in terms of troops and battles, et cetera, because God says, I'm gonna then give you pressure and consequences from outside to not punish you, but to drag bring you back, to make you feel under pressure, Ooh, this is not working out so well for me. The other times, the other way of repression could be. That we have sinned. We have gotten maybe into idol worship. We worshiped other things more than God, where we made poor choices that are not biblical or not good for our lives because of that. And now we experience the consequences and medicines could be very easy. This is a, I'm gonna push some button and I probably need to do another lesson on this. Holding the Shabbat. Having a day of rest is a real challenge for us and have gone through all sorts of cycles myself, when I loved taking the day off and trusted the Lord. And other days when I felt like I don't have time to take Sundays off because I need to catch up on all the work that didn't get done during the week, because we have so many competing interests and commitments and. We eventually get sick, burned out, et cetera. And that is one example of That we break the the kind of the, the theme that God has given us, the trust in him and can have consequences from those actions. I know that's probably a topic I should cover another time. Because I went through all those cycles of do I hold a Sunday's, rest was Shabbat rest or not? And, and, and how I evolved over time and struggled with that. So I think that's a good topic for us, busy physicians. But let's go back. So God, basically in stage two. Sense sense either enemies or lets us succumb to the consequences of our actions to let us really feel what is needed and to basically return back to him. And that leads us to stage three hardships that we experience usually trigger a repentance. And you can see this all throughout the Old Testament. You can see this with Israel for sure. But that is true for ourselves as well, right? We tend to say, oh my goodness, I'm at the end of my rope, and then we start praying again. Oh my goodness, Lord, I, I don't know what to do here. I'm at a fork of the road and I don't know what decision is right. For my next career step. Now help me out. But we were all so self-sufficient for a while, right? So often this will happen that that stage of when we experienced repression, that we then get to repentance and it's really out of God's laugh and mercy. That he doesn't want us to fall astray. I think we have sometimes a wrong perspective. We think we are getting punished when we are actually getting pushed back into his, into his mercy, into his grace, into his fellowship with him that we have abandoned because of our self-sufficiency and God knows what is best for us, even though we often. Honestly don't want to believe that, and we rebel against that. That is our human nature is often rebellion. But God calls us to submit back to him, to come back to him so that he can care for us, and, and he loves us. He wants to direct us. So when we are at the stage of desperation, we get back to repentance and we often say, goodness, what have I done? Why did I ever walk away from what was good and godly and holy? Giving me life and giving me hope and giving me direction from our, my life. And so there we get to repentance. And often after that, God says, then in stage four there is a stage of restoration. Purification meaning getting close to God, getting back into maybe repentance from what we have done. Getting closer to him, getting back on the word stripping away what is no longer serving us. That purification process often then leads to restoration of what is lost, and oftentimes God restores the blessings to us. Not always, I'm not saying this is a guarantee, but there seems to be this pattern in the Bible with Israel. You know, they were built then they were under pressure and repression. Then they repentant and then they had blessings again, and it went through this over and over and over again and. One key part in that step of restoration is really, as I mentioned, getting close to God, repented and being obedient to what he's asking us to do. And I know that is not a popular word, but God calls us to be obedient and that's really something I had to learn over and over and over again when I quit my job earlier this year. It was actually Going through those stages, it was like, okay. For a while I rebelled and I figured this out all by myself and then repression set in and I had known that I should probably do something else for a while. But repression set in in the form of my son having struggles more and more over the years of school. He's really smart, but very behavioral challenges came up with this and so. We ended up in, I ended up in the stage of repression and real despair. It was very, very difficult and painful and traumatizing. Then I had to repent and say, God, I'm sorry. I will do whatever you asked me to do, and I was clear. Is, take care of your family and go do what I told you to do a while back. And then it leads to restoration. Now I'm like, where is the restoration? And none of this happens in an instant. I. We need to be patient with that. So that is really important too. Don't think, okay, I'm gonna say my quick prayer and everything will be kumbaya again. No, it'll need some real work from you to get close to God, to commit, to really sit at Jesus's feed and listen to what he has to say. So that is so important and reminds me of this verse in the Bible. Second Chronicles seven 14. You might be quite familiar with it, but it says this, if my people Who call are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and churn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and I will forgive their sins and heal their land. And actually this fair verse is quite powerful to me. It is a powerful verse to begin with, and it very much illustrates what we talked about in these four stages of repentance, repression I'm sorry, rebellion, repression, repentance and restoration. And it's reflecting what Israel is walked through this actually when Covid hit. A number of years ago I really felt in my spirit to start a prayer group amongst physicians. So we started that three years ago. It was another wonderful doctor that joined me and she picked this verse as our overarching verse in the Facebook group and as we were praying, and it was really a lot about praying for, let's return to the Lord, let's repent. And. God will heal our land. Now we are still in this journey and there is a lot to be praying about, but that is a very personal verse to that journey that we walked through as we are praying early on daily, every night, inter dealing for for the pandemic. And it was wonderful to meet a lot of Christian physicians during that time that I hadn't known. So I hope this served you. I hope you have a little bit of a glimpse of, wow, the Bible is not just a book full of stories, but it speaks to me today. And there are some very valuable leadership lessons, and I wanna take this a step further. Obviously, you can apply this all to yourself. And you should, you should watch out. Am I in a stage of rebellion? Is there repression? I experience perhaps because I have rebelled, is there may be a repentance I need to take. And I. Then is there restoration? And when you are in restoration, be mindful and be careful because we, you very quickly eventually will fall back into rebellion again. That's why it's called a cycle. But I want to caution you and say, not only should you apply this to yourself, also understand that is this a real helpful understanding to help understand people in your organization? For you to really embody these this knowledge, this awareness, and understand it in relationship to your leadership. When you understand these things that we just talked about, you will see them in other people's lives as well. And there might not even be questions, right? So God is calling people and sometimes he's putting them in a pressure cooker, right? When is the best time this sounds bad, when do many people come to faith? Usually not when things are peachy. Usually when they are under pressure, when there is something in their life. And it doesn't have to be terrible, but it might be very weighty and difficult for that individual that They then call out to God. So it's usually not everything is wonderful because then you are in a stage of, Hey, I have everything. I don't need anybody. You are actually in that rebellion. Pretty much everybody is in it, but then God jumps in and puts something on your heart that really leads you to repentance. So realize that the people around you. In your hospital, your colleagues, your friends, your family member, go through these things as well and be mindful of as you observe people and their behavior that this might be at play. And when you understand that from a biblical perspective, then you also have a unique understanding to. Have a bit of a deeper look what's going on and lead people in a better way. And we can talk about leadership and other upcoming lessons, but this is sort of a basic foundation. You need to understand how people behave and why, and even if they have no awareness of God, they have certain behaviors out of their. hUman rebellion and we need to have an understanding. We need to have prayer. We need to have good leadership and direction for them so that we can help people along the way. Now in the next episode something I wanna talk about, which actually goes right into this. Rebellion shows up in medicine as we're having real issues with submitting to authority. There's a lot of rebellion right now going on in the medical field and very understandable. So, because I. Our system is very broken and often we look to our leaders to fix it. And actually, if you are a leader, and chances are you are in some way or another around the people you influence that you should actually show that and lead the way. So, submitting to authority in medicine can be really hard because we are all kind of raffled up, but. Submitting to authority is our ultimate leadership test. Can we actually submit to order that God has placed under us even if we don't always agree? And that doesn't mean you have to agree but you have to. Accept or submit under an authority in an order because God is a God of order. So it's a big topic to unpack and I know there could be a lot of controversy around that. But I'm hopefully gonna help give you some helpful examples as it relates to your medical practice or working in an organization or academic medical center. And so let's chat about that next time. Now. Thank you so much for listening in. Also, make sure you follow us on YouTube, on Facebook, on the favorite podcast platform where this video is placed, as well as as a podcast. So tune in. Don't forget to share and subscribe the show so other people can check it out too, and hopefully we'll be blessing to them. So have a wonderful day. I talk to you soon. See you next week. My prayer is that you were encouraged, strengthened, and perhaps even convicted with this episode today. If this podcast has blessed you, would you help share it with your friends and colleagues and even share it on social media? Also, leave us a review on the podcast platform where you are listening to this content. It would help us a lot. Together we can share the good news of Jesus and transform medicine one physician. And one patient at the time. Have a great day. God bless.