LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Are You Following the Best Leader?
CLED 700
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Ministry Department of Christian Leadership and Church Ministries
By
Henry Edwin Shikuku
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Are You Following the Best Leader?
We live in a culture that is fascinated with identifying “the best.” New parents jump
through hoops to get on long waiting lists at the “best” preschools. If we’re traveling, we might
search reviews to find the best burger, best pizza, or some other best food a city is known for.
And radio and TV personalities engage in intense debates over who should be considered the
best athlete, actor, musician, president, or world leader of all time. The writer of Hebrews
recognized this same tendency in the people of his day. It was hard to follow Jesus. Following
Jesus’s leadership required personal sacrifice. So they considered other leaders and wondered
if following Jesus was the best option.
After all, Moses was a good leader, too. Moses had given them the Law. If they struggled to
follow the rules Moses had helped to establish, there was a high priest to pick up the slack.
Moses and the high priest had been considered their “best” leaders for centuries. But Hebrews
was written to assure them that living their spiritual lives vicariously through the leadership of
Moses, the high priest, or any other person—no matter how faithful—was inferior and
insufficient.
There is no better leader than Jesus. Not Moses or a high priest. Not Gandhi or Buddha or
Confucius or Joseph Smith. Not the best business leader. Not your family. Not your pastor or
favorite author. That’s not to say these people can’t teach or lead us. They can. But, ultimately,
their leadership is only effective to the extent that they point us to Jesus. If it weren’t for the
phrase, “holy brothers and sisters,” you might think these words were written to people who
don’t know Jesus. “Holy brothers and sisters” have already considered Jesus — considering
Jesus is what led them to follow Him in the first place.
But even people who follow Jesus get distracted.
We are prone to get sidetracked by momentary interests. Our eyes drift from Jesus and fix
themselves on other leaders. We look back to the past and remember leaders from history and
believe those people had it better back then. And so Hebrews asks us to consider Jesus again
and again.
No matter how long you’ve followed Jesus, you need to consider Him again.
Hebrews directs that consideration by way of comparison. Moses was seen as the pinnacle
of faithfulness in the Old Testament. He heard from God, served God well, and led others to do
the same. But the point of Moses’s faithfulness was to point to the superior faithfulness of
Jesus Christ. No leader, however gifted, can outmatch what Jesus accomplished. Moses was a
godly man, but Jesus is God in human flesh. Moses was a servant, but Jesus is the Son. He owns
the house and provides everything needed in it — that is, everything needed for us, who stand
as God’s household servants alongside Moses. Considering Jesus in the way the author of
Hebrews is encouraging us to do will guide us to see that nothing and no one is worth
comparing to Jesus.
We might get distracted along the way. We all have people and leaders we look to, but
when we consider Jesus for who He really is, our eyes will quickly shift back to Him. Jesus is
beyond comparison. He is uniquely qualified to lead us to God.
