Leadership Lessons: Part 2

I recently read about an undercover exploration gone bad. It was when the Israelites were on the verge of taking Canaan and they sent out a team of spies to check things out. Moses sends twelve men into Canaan to scout out the land and the people. What they see over the course of forty days intimidates the majority. Ten of the twelve spies come back with a pessimistic attitude. Not only do they tell Moses things look bad, they spread that negativity among the people. Not good!

Caleb and Joshua, however, believed the Lord could bring victory and wanted to push forward.

The sad result...God forces the Israelites to wander the desert for forty years and most of the group would die without ever seeing the Promised Land.

The lessons I take from this story:

1. The majority is not always right. If there had been a board meeting before leaving Canaan, and the topic was, "Do we go for it?", Joshua and Caleb would have out-voted when they shouted, "Certainly!" If when they returned home, they called a community meeting and talked it over with the people, the resulting vote would have found them in the minority; but they would have been right.
   
   
2. You better have the right people in decision making positions. The problem I see is that the team had too many weak links, spiritually speaking. What impressed God about Caleb (and for that matter, Joshua) is that he had a different spirit about him and he served God wholeheartedly. I couldn't help but to wonder how things would have been different had all twelve selected spies had this same devotion to the Lord? Could they have avoided forty years of desert living?
   
   If the church is observant, we learn the value of placing people in positions of leadership who are wholehearted in their devotion to the Lord; people who will make decisions and lead in the Spirit and not the flesh.