Ever heard the line above, a threat in the movies? God came to Moses and said, “Go up to Mt. Abarim and see the Promised Land. After you have seen it, you will be gathered to your people” Numbers 27:12-13.
How would you feel about that? Even at 120, it’s got to be jarring to be told of your death.
But Moses did not beg or cry or plead for his life. Nor did he ask to enter the Promised Land.
“Moses spoke to the Lord, saying, ‘Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation, which may go out before them, and which may go in before them, and may lead them out and bring them in, that the congregation of the Lord be not sheep without a shepherd.’” Num.27:15-17.
When God told Moses he was about to die, Moses’s first thought was for the people. They would need a leader. And he immediately prayed for the people, asking God to raise up a leader to take Moses’s place.
THAT is true leadership. Moses was not worried about himself or afraid of death or whining about entering the Promised Land. Instead, he was thinking like a true leader: ‘When I am gone, what will become of my people?’
May God give us leaders like that! Men and women who don’t think of themselves first, leaders more concerned with people than their own deaths. May God make us selfless, mature leaders like Moses. May he fill us with peace and confidence in the face of death, both our own death and deaths of those around us.
God, make us more like Moses. Make us leaders who think first of those in our care, not of ourselves. And help us to follow selfless, Godly leaders.
ΑΩ