…Josiah read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant… (2 Kings 23:2).
The leader must go first.This is the only way to affect real change.
Josiah did this extremely well. In fact, he did it better than any other king!
Josiah called all the people together and read “in their hearing” God’s word. Then he made it his own and took a public stand to confirm it (v. 3). Josiah went first, and “then all the people pledged themselves to the covenant.”
The rest of Josiah’s reign is punctuated by telltale phrases like:
- in accordance with the Word of the Lord
- as it is written in this book of the covenant
- fulfilled the requirements of the law
Here’s one of the most amazing things to me: Josiah’s wholehearted obedience to God ends up fulfilling perfectly a 300-year-old prophecy that God gave through a prophet of Judah (v. 16; 1 Kings 13:1-3).
A mark of a godly leader is his public alignment with God’s Word.
When the leader goes public and then wholeheartedly follows through on his commitment to God, others will follow his lead. May all of us be that kind of pacesetting leader.
This is part 51 in my series on godly leadership. You can check out all of my posts in this series by clicking here.
September 23, 2020 at 9:31 am
“This passage [2 Kings 23] points to the fact that most of what we need to know about the will of God is contained in the Scriptures. The best place to learn the will of God is from reading the Bible. The only way to do the will of God is to obey the teaching of the Bible. God may have more specific plans for each of us, but His basic plan for all of us is to do what He says as revealed in His written Word.” —Henry Halley
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