Servant-Leadership - KNOW Yourself: Purpose

On your journey to becoming a better leader, especially moving along the path to mastering servant-leadership, understanding your purpose is vital and demands of you some powerful introspection. The fundamental question is: how can you lead anyone if you don’t really know where you are going?

Do you know why you are here on earth? Is your life, like all lives, ultimately an expression of random chance? Or were you created for meaning and purpose?

Where are you headed – ultimately? When you’re dead, you are just dead, right? Or do your choices in this life have a meaning that has eternal implications?

Does your life have meaning that is not just self-centered? Is it all about you? Are you just a mass of chemicals that evolution somehow connected that give birth to your body, mind and spirit? Do you believe that God created humans in His image and made humans “living spirits” – beings that are eternal?

What is your understanding about God? Is He the great “watch-maker” who wound it all up and has just “walked away” and let the watch run its course? Do you think that evolution really did happen but God interrupted it (in some mysterious way) to make humans special? Is God’s revelation accurate – does He exercise sovereign control over his revelation to humans (the Holy Bible) or is he playing with us, fooling us, and ultimately deceiving us? Did the Creator God make us in his image, came to us as human, died for our sin, conquered death for us so that we can be born one more time, this time in righteousness allowing us to live in the presence of a perfect God?

Is your chief purpose to glorify God and enjoy Him forever? Or is that just some religious point of view that is OK for some, but not for everybody?

How you answer these questions lays the foundation for your leadership style. Do be confused by the Zen approach to purpose – sure, humans can conquer fears, find meaning, even in suffering, and choose to be positive in the face of ugly circumstances. Good stuff – all of it. The question still remains, “so what?” What does it all matter if you gain the whole world – conquer fear, display sadness, give yourself to the poor and needy - but lose your soul?

Does your purpose have eternity in mind?


Copyright © 2009 by P. Griffith Lindell