From Self-Centered to Servant: Manly Leadership from Jesus

When most people hear “lead like Jesus,” they think servant leadership. But what if that’s only part of the story? In this episode of The Manhood Tribes Show, we break down three powerful leadership traits of Jesus that go far beyond the usual church talk — and show you how they can transform the way you lead at home, at work, and in your community.

You’ll learn:
 - Why servant leadership alone doesn’t capture the full picture of Jesus’ leadership style
 - How Jesus empowered His followers to carry His mission
 - Why His love for people was the secret to lasting loyalty
 - How His sacrificial leadership set the ultimate standard for men to follow

If you’ve ever asked yourself “What does the Bible say about leadership?” or “How can I lead like Jesus in my everyday life?” — this is the practical, straight-talk guide you’ve been looking for.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction: Rethinking “Servant Leadership”
02:01 Why Jesus Didn’t Use the Term
05:12 Leadership Trait #1: Empowering Others
14:55 Leadership Trait #2: Leading with Love
24:19 Leadership Trait #3: Sacrifice in Leadership
34:05 How You Can Lead Like Jesus

💪 Want to know how you measure up as a man? Take our free quiz, called How Manly Are You? and learn how you can get better at being a man. Download for free at manhoodtribes.com/manly. 💪

Transcript

0:01

If you've been to or listened to any kind of leadership talk in the past, I don't know, 30 years, you've probably heard of the idea of servant leadership, that this is really what leadership is supposed to be all about, is that we lead in such a way that we are serving the needs of others. And if you're like me and you've been around the church world for any amount of time, you've probably heard that term as well. You've heard it talked about in terms of the way that Jesus led, that he was really a servant leader and modeled for us what it looked like to serve others in the ways that we lead. So as I open up this. Episode today saying that I want to talk about leadership and I want to talk about Jesus at the same time. You're probably expecting, uh, this is just gonna be one more of those talks about servant leadership, but I wanna say, uh, hold your horses. We're not gonna really go there today because to be honest, I think this whole idea of servant leadership really isn't enough to do justice to the leadership lessons that we can learn from Jesus. Did he talk about being a servant? Absolutely. But do you know what? He never talked about being a servant leader. That actually wasn't his idea. It was really either being a leader or being a servant, and he was calling us to be servants. So when we think about the leadership of Jesus, I think we need to take another look at what leadership actually looks like from his eyes and how we can do those things. So let's talk about that today here on the Manhood Tribes Show. My name's Don. I'm your host here at Manhood Tribes, and I really am on a mission to help us as men be able to find a clear path towards what it means to be strong and masculine in our world today. One of the ways that I'm doing that is through this most recent series where we are talking about Jesus, who is the man most worthy of being followed. Now that might seem kind of like a weird or strange idea to you, but I've tried to lay out over the past several episodes why I really think Jesus is the man that we're kind of all aiming for. We're looking for a definition of masculinity, and Jesus really provides us with a model of one, a model that all of us would really hold up and say, yeah, that's a man worth being like. And so we need to try to strive after him. And I think as men, one of the things that most of us want to try to be in our lives is a leader in some way, shape or form, whether that's a leader in our workplace, a leader in our homes, a leader in our communities. Most of us want to have some level of influence in the world around us. But when we think about how to do that, we don't typically think about. Jesus as our model or our example for how we should lead. I think we need to take another look at him because I think he provides us some really good clues about what solid leadership looks like. I. Now, he didn't term it that because that's not the way that Jesus' culture talked about leading or influencing other people. But he very definitely modeled what we would call leadership today, and in some ways that I think we might be surprised to find out that that's what being a leader actually looks like. So let's push past this kind of initial definition of, oh, to lead like Jesus means to be a servant leader. Yeah. Let's, let's set that aside just for right now.'cause I think we've hashed that one to death and maybe even pushed it too far. But let's talk about some of the other ways that Jesus modeled leadership for us that we really do need to emulate. The first one that I want us to talk about is the idea that Jesus was an empowering leader. Jesus really looked for ways to be able to delegate and hand off his authority so that his followers could take on the mission that he was there to be able to pursue that. It wasn't just his mission, but it became their mission as well. One of my favorite stories to dial into with Jesus comes from the Book of Luke in chapters nine and 10, where we see him sending out his followers two by two, uh, some say in a group of 12, some say as a group of 70 or 72. Just kind of depends on which version of the story that you're reading. In this one, we get the picture of how Jesus sends out his followers to go do the things that he had been doing to teach, to preach, to heal, to cast out demons, to basically carry on the ministry that he had had. Now, this was kind of a. Not really a revolutionary idea, but it was revolutionary in the way that Jesus was doing it. So in his day, it wasn't uncommon for there to be these traveling groups of a rabbi and his students. So Jesus was kind of adopting a common cultural practice of the day where he was sort of the teacher and he had a group of followers who went with him, who learned from him and sought to really kind of teach in the way that he taught. But the point of most of those groups was that the rabbi was really the central figure and everybody kind of gave deference to the rabbi. They were trying to be like the rabbi, but they certainly weren't trying to just take up the rabbi's mantle. He was still really the centerpiece and their job as his followers to was to point everything towards him. Jesus really takes it a step further and says. No, this isn't gonna be about me. This is actually about the people that we are taking this ministry to. We are trying to set them free. So let me empower you to be able to go and do for others what I have been doing all along. So he does, he empowers, literally, he gives power to his disciples so that they can go do what he had been doing to heal the sick, to cast out demons. To teach them about the kind of freedom that was offered to them in the Kingdom of God. And they did miraculous things. They performed the same kind of miracles that Jesus had been doing and they were blown away that they could do that because right. That's not normal. That's not anything what we would expect to be able to do, and yet there they were doing it. Jesus lent them his. Power and then he celebrated them for being able to do the things that he had done and for the impact that they were having on the culture around them. This was a really, really good example of leadership and ministry for Jesus to be able to demonstrate that it really wasn't all about him. That in order for the mission to be accomplished, he needed to lend his power to others who would then take it and do what he had been doing Now as a leader. I wanna ask you if that's the kind of way that you lead. Do you empower the people around you? Literally, do you hand them some of your power? Do you give them the ability to make decisions as if they were making the decisions the way that you would? Or in your stead, can they make some of those decisions for you without you having to sign off on it or make sure that your ideas were noted and paid attention to? Or can you give them your power, trusting that they're going to act in the ways that you have shown them and taught them and demonstrated for them. Maybe you can't trust that because you haven't done enough of the showing and the teaching and the trusting. You've gotta be able to do those kinds of things in order to then give your power over to them so that they will use it rightly. But if you don't ever hand off your power, you don't have any ability of hoping that the mission is gonna spread beyond you. It still just rests entirely on your shoulders, and you become the kind of leader who's limited to reaching and serving only the people that you can reach. You might have a group of staff around you who are helping you do those things, but they're not able to do the kinds of things that you do, and so therefore, the reach of your mission and your leadership doesn't continue to grow the way that Jesus modeled that it could. Okay. The second thing that I want to talk about is that Jesus was a loving leader. He was a loving leader. And this seems like kind of a given, right? I mean, when we talk about Jesus, we know like Jesus is God, so God is love. And so of course we're talking about the idea that Jesus was loving. I mean this, it kind of almost sounds like redundant or maybe even like overdone, maybe even overly simplified, right? Is it? What does it mean to just really even kind of throw that out there, that Jesus is a loving leader. But I think the point of that is to look at the way that people followed him. People followed Jesus because of his immense love for them. Yeah. He did some amazing things. He would heal them or feed them or rescue them, or, you know, take care of them in ways that they weren't able to take care of themselves. He did amazing things in people's lives and sometimes that. To cause those people to turn their life around and follow him, but sometimes it didn't. Sometimes the people that he did those miracles for just, you know, didn't even bother thanking him, and they went on their way doing their own thing. So it wasn't a given that just because Jesus did something incredible for someone else, that they followed him. What was really more of the issue there was that Jesus loved the people who followed him. The people who were most in touch with, Jesus's love for them were the people who were the most faithful, the most loyal, the most willing to follow him even into the hard things. They knew they were loved, and his love was better than any kind of love they had ever experienced before. Now, I wanna ask you about that, especially as it relates to maybe a team that you lead. Do you love. The people on your team, especially in a workplace that seems like maybe even an inappropriate question at times, let alone just kind of being out of place. I mean, the common response would be, well, like, no, I don't love my coworkers, because that's not really what my job is, right? We're just there to do a job and to, uh, earn a paycheck and to get results as best we can. But love isn't really part of the bargain. And that's probably what most people in Jesus' culture thought as well. Other rabbis who led their disciples around didn't necessarily think it was their job to love their disciples. It was their job to teach and to train their disciples. Love wasn't really part of the bargain. I. But Jesus modeled it differently. He loved the people who were in his midst. He cared for them deeply. He got involved in their personal lives. He knew what they were about and cared for their immense needs. He paid attention to their hearts and what was going on under the surface in their lives. He loved them. And because of that, they were incredibly devoted to him, and their commitment to his leadership was unmatched. His closest disciples all went to their deaths later on in life, for Jesus's sake, for the mission that he had given to them'cause of their deep love for him. Now, I'm not saying that the people on your team need to love you so much that they're gonna go to their deaths for what you're asking them to do. Okay. That might be extreme, but I am asking do the people on your team know that you love them? Do you love them? Do you actually care about them? Do you know what their needs are, what their concerns are? Do you know anything about their day-to-day lives apart from what kind of. Role you see them in at work, what is going on with them? Where you could actually show up in their lives in a way that communicates not just colleague, not just friend, but as someone who genuinely loves them, cares about them, wants their best no matter what. This is a different kind of leadership, but it is the kind of leadership that Jesus is calling us to. It's riskier. It puts us into some places where we might be really uncomfortable. It probably causes us to have some conversations with our coworkers that we aren't used to having, and maybe even might be a little uncomfortable, but. It's the style of leadership that Jesus calls us into to be a loving leader. Now, we would expect this in a place like the home, right? If you're a husband or a dad, your leadership with your family obviously needs to look like love. But don't forget that Jesus modeled that for everyone, not just for family. And so the way that we do that with our coworkers needs to reflect love as well. All right. Last thing I want to talk about how Jesus was a sacrificial leader. Jesus was a sacrificial leader. He said to his followers, greater love has no man than this, that he laid down his life for his friends. Now, that's the ultimate price, right? And we know Jesus's story, that he did pay the ultimate price for his friends. He sacrificed himself for the mission and for his friends to be able to carry it on in his name. He wanted to see the kingdom of God spread to the whole world so that all of us could be freed and capable of being in a right relationship with him and with one another. His glory was meant to spread everywhere, but the only way for that to happen was for him to sacrifice himself, and he did it. He went through with it. He laid down his life for the sake of those that he loved. I. Now, I'm not calling you to that standard. You don't literally have to give up your life for the sake of the people around you, but do the people around you see you as a sacrificial leader? Do they see you as someone who is willing to lay down your own priorities, your own agenda, your own commitments for their sake? And that doesn't necessarily mean letting them win or get a decision pushed through the way that they want would want to do it if you think it's a bad idea. But it does mean that they see you as somebody who has their best interest at heart and that you are willing to sacrifice sometimes even your own time, your own resources, maybe your own reputation for their betterment. Now that is a kind of leadership that we rarely ever see in the American workplace. We don't see the kind of leaders who are out for other people's bests. We see the kind of leaders who are out for their bests, and if we're honest, most of us as men lead that way too. My career is about my paycheck and my paycheck translates into what I'm able to do for my family. So I want to be able to advance in my career because that means that I'm able to do better things for my family. But part of being the kind of leader that Jesus was is being able to say, every other person that I work with wants that same thing as well, and I bet they would love it if they had somebody who was willing to sacra sacrifice a little bit of themselves so that they could get ahead as well, so that they would feel like they're making progress, so that they're moving further towards being able to do more of what they want to accomplish, provide more for their family, meet other goals in their life as well. Yeah, that's the kind of leader that everyone hungers for and wishes that they had, and that's the kind of leader that people are willing to follow. A leader who puts the interest of others ahead of his own interest is a sacrificial leader. And just like Jesus, he becomes a man that people are willing to follow. Okay. I hope these ideas have challenged you a little bit. Not only about what it looks like, that Jesus was a leader, but the way that you can be a leader like Jesus, that it's causing you to think some more about the way that you lead the people around you. Jesus empowered people. He loved people, and he sacrificed himself for people. Can you lead like that? If you've enjoyed this kind of content, I would love for you to like this video and to subscribe to the channel. I would also love for you to consider joining our Manhood Tribes community as a way of being able to connect with other men who like this kind of content, who are interested in doing the kinds of things that you are interested in, who want to get better at being a man and who want to get better at following Jesus as well. If you go to manhood tribes.com/community, you can put your name on the list for the next time that our doors open to our membership community, and I would love to see you as a part of it. But for right now, I would love for you to continue engaging with this video by posting a comment below. Let me know what about Jesus' style of leadership inspires you, and what's one way that you want to try to lead the way that Jesus led? Put that down in the comments and I look forward to engaging with your feedback, and I will see you again next time here on the Manhood Tribe Show. Talk to you then.