Called to Lead: Calling

Resilience & Soul Care

With this course the question shifts. The Character course asked who a leader is; the Competency course asked what a leader does. Now: where is a leader sent, and will they last long enough to get there? Leadership is a long obedience. Many gifted leaders do not finish, not because they fell, but because they burned out or dried up. This session is about enduring: drawing strength from God rather than self, embracing rest as faith, and finding treasure in the hard places. Not by gritting your teeth, but because the One who sends also sustains. The goal is not to lead intensely for a season. It is to lead faithfully for a lifetime.

Opening Reflection

If you kept your current pace, with no change, for the next ten years, describe honestly where you would be: in your body, your family, your walk with God, your ministry. Write it down before you read what Isaiah says.

Strength Renewed by Waiting on God

²⁷Why do you complain, Jacob? Why do you say, Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord ; my cause is disregarded by my God”? ²⁸Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. ²⁹He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. ³⁰Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; ³¹but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.Isaiah 40:27-31 · NIV

Isaiah starts with the complaint, and it is worth noticing that Scripture lets the complaint be said out loud: “My way is hidden from the LORD; my cause is disregarded by my God.” That is what a depleted leader actually thinks, even if they would never preach it. The answer is not a rebuke. It is a reminder of who God is: the everlasting God, Creator of the ends of the earth, who does not grow tired or weary. And then a promise that reverses the leader’s whole strategy. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength.

The key to renewed strength is not more grit. It is hope in the Lord, which is to say, waiting on Him, looking to Him, drawing from Him. Leadership strength is borrowed. It is drawn continually from God, not manufactured from within. The leader who tries to generate it from within will run out, because the well is finite. The leader who draws it from God will find that the source does not tire. Soaring, running, walking: the verse ends not with a sprint but with the ability to keep walking without fainting, which is exactly what a long obedience requires.

Notice how God answers the complaint in verse 28. Not with comfort first, but with a question: “Do you not know? Have you not heard?” The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth; He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom. Depletion has a way of making a leader forget their theology. Nothing in the complaint of verse 27 is new information to God, and nothing in the answer of verse 28 is new information to the leader. It is what they already knew, said back to them when they had stopped believing it. That is often what the renewal of strength looks like in practice: not a new feeling, but an old truth remembered.

²⁸ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”Matthew 11:28-30 · NIV

Jesus offers the same invitation to the weary and burdened: come to me, take my yoke, learn from me, and you will find rest for your souls. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Notice that He does not offer to remove the yoke. Leaders carry loads; that is the nature of the work. He offers His yoke in place of the one we built for ourselves, and His is fitted, shared, and carried alongside Him. A great deal of leadership exhaustion is the weight of a yoke Jesus never asked us to wear.

Treasure in Jars of Clay

⁷But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. ⁸We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. ¹¹For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. ¹²So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.2 Corinthians 4:7-12 · NIV

Paul does not pretend leadership is easy. He is hard pressed on every side, perplexed, persecuted, struck down. And yet: not crushed, not in despair, not abandoned, not destroyed. Why? Because the treasure is in jars of clay, “to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” The fragility is not an unfortunate feature of the design. It is the design. God put the treasure in clay so that nobody, including the leader, would mistake the power for the pot.

The jar of clay is the point, not the problem. Our weakness makes it clear that the surpassing power belongs to God. Resilient leaders are not those who feel strong. They are those who keep showing up, cracked and pressed and perplexed, leaning on a strength that is not their own. The leader who hides every weakness in order to look strong is hiding the very thing God intends to display His power through.

¹⁶Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.2 Corinthians 4:16-18 · NIV

So, Paul says, we do not lose heart. Outwardly wasting away, inwardly renewed day by day. The troubles are light and momentary compared with the eternal glory they are achieving. Resilience in Scripture is not stoicism; it is perspective. The leader who can see the unseen, who knows that what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal, can carry a heavy season without being crushed by it, because they know how the story ends and how long the hard part is compared with the rest.

Rest Is an Act of Faith

²⁷Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.Mark 2:27 · NIV

Jesus says the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Rest is a gift, built into creation before there was any fall to recover from, and given to people who were not yet tired. God rested on the seventh day not because He was weary but to establish a pattern for creatures who would be. When a leader refuses that gift, they are not being more devoted than God. They are refusing something He made for them.

More than that, rest is a confession. To stop working while the work is unfinished is to say, with your calendar, that God is God and you are not. The world will keep turning. The ministry will survive your absence for a day. The people you shepherd are His before they are yours. Leaders who cannot stop are usually carrying a savior complex they would deny if you named it, and the only cure is to actually stop and discover that the sky did not fall. Build the rhythm now, while you can choose it. Exhaustion will build one for you otherwise, and it will not be a gift.

²By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. ³Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.Genesis 2:2-3 · NIV

The pattern goes back further than the commandment. On the seventh day God finished His work and rested, and He blessed the seventh day and made it holy. When the command comes at Sinai, it reaches back to this: “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth… but he rested on the seventh day” (Exodus 20:11). Rest is woven into the order of creation before there is any weariness to recover from. A leader who keeps a day is not observing a rule; they are living in step with how the world was made, and confessing every week that they did not make it.