Praying for God to raise up new true leaders

Everywhere you look, you see politics and politicians. News coverage has seldom been as dominated by politics as it has been for the last year or so.

Election fever gripped first the UK, then the US, and just a few months later the whole political landscape is in a state of dramatic flux. Opinion polls are all over the place; it takes a brave person to predict the next few months, let alone the next few years. If, two generations ago, Harold Wilson said that ‘a week is a long time in politics’, in these days of social media, AI bots and multi-billionaire political donors, a week seems like an eternity.

Losing faith

There has been much talk of people losing faith in politics, indeed losing faith in the whole political process. Perhaps there is a whiff of revolution in the air; maybe it’s time for a complete rethink of the dog-eared political systems we have all grown up with? As Christians we should heartily agree that there is such a thing as inflated and misplaced confidence in human leaders. The central verses in the Bible, according to some reckonings, are Psalm 118:8-9: ‘It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man. It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes.’

This is a Biblical truism, but that does not mean that there is no place whatsoever for ‘princes’, whatever form they may take. The New Testament urges us to pray for all those in authority (1 Tim. 2:1-2), to be subject to the powers that be (Rom. 13:1-7) and indeed to ‘honour the emperor’ (1 Peter 2:17), and at the time Peter wrote these words the Roman Emperor was Nero (AD 54–68); I seem to recall reading in a children’s history book that Nero was ‘one of the most disgraceful men to ever sit on any throne at any time’, or words to that effect.

Where are the statesmen?

There may be no shortage of politicians, but there is a desperate lack of statesmen (and stateswomen, if that is a word) at present. So what’s the difference between them? Harry S. Truman, President of the United States immediately after World War II, said that ‘a statesman is a politician who’s been dead for ten or fifteen years.’ I think we can do better than that! You may have heard it said that while a politician plans for the next election, a statesman looks forward to the next generation. Statesmanship is about making tough choices in the present, often at great personal cost, with the aim of securing a better future. Statesmanship shuns a partisan spirit. It is about being captured by a vision which, successfully articulated, will inspire and motivate people of diverse backgrounds to live, work and move together.

As many pundits in the Western world gaze forward into the second half of a troubled decade, they perceive a future which is uncertain and indeed bleak. The situation can look just as unpromising in the church scene – witness the current turmoil in the Church of England – as at the secular level. Who would choose to be either a politician or a statesman at a time like this? The answer from the Bible, and from church history, is that God often raises up leaders when the hour seems to be at its darkest and most despairing. Remember Moses, Samuel, David, Elijah and Daniel, all of them summoned by God to a great work just when circumstances looked completely hopeless. Don’t forget Luther, Tyndale, Knox, Whitefield and Wesley, men of statesmanlike stature raised up and equipped to lead and feed God’s people at a time when corruption and hopelessness had set in.

There may be some people who read these words and experience a ‘lightbulb moment’ which projects them into great usefulness on the national or global stage. Wouldn’t that be great? But more realistically, let’s all pray that God would presently be calling true leaders, men and women of God, who are uniquely prepared to devote themselves to His service in the years ahead.