Exodus 18:17-18 Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone.”

We can learn several things from this incident. The first is that, as we saw yesterday, even someone like Moses needs to grow and improve, because they don’t get everything right; no one does. The second is that God will use people around us to correct us and give us His advice. We do need to be careful about this point, because not everyone speaks wisdom, but we definitely need to have the humility to listen, and submit advice to God for Him to tell us what is of Him. The third thing is a common issue with leaders of all sorts: no one can do it all. Moses’ father-in-law was right on in saying that over-centralization wasn’t good for anyone. Moses had to learn to delegate, and that’s a hard lesson for many. In Moses’ case, the numbers were so big that I feel sure he just chose the next tier of leaders below him, and let them in turn choose those below them. You couldn’t deal with over a million people any other way! A very current example of this would be Elon Musk. He is a genius about a number of things, but he couldn’t begin to run all his companies by himself. He has various trusted people, like Gwen Shotwell at SpaceX, to run things on a more granular level, and he sticks to the big issues. There is risk to doing things that way, but there is risk to every facet of life, and delegation brings far more potential for growth than any other way. And the forth thing is that God doesn’t always gift us as we might like for the tasks He has for us to do. Moses was not gifted as an administrator, so he had to listen to his father-in-law to get wisdom from that perspective. If God gifted us perfectly for every task, we would depend on our gifting, and not stay humbly dependent on God!

This is an area where I have made a lot of mistakes. I am very broadly gifted, and much of the time it seems easier to do things myself than to ask someone else to do them, or even help me do them. That has been a brake on this church from the beginning, but it is slowly improving. Advancing age is finally showing me I can’t do it all myself, and some of the people around me are probably thinking, “It’s about time!” I don’t want to ask anyone to do something I’m not willing to do, but that shouldn’t keep me from turning things over to them to do them. Pride is still very much an issue, because I tend to think they couldn’t do things as well as I could. That has been a major trap! I’ve got to keep it in focus that God is the only One who can do things perfectly, and He can use someone else as easily, or more easily, than He can use me to get things done. Delegation is still a major “study area” for me.

Father, thank You for this reminder. It fits in perfectly with what You have been saying to Cathy and me, that You are making various changes in what You have for me to be doing. I ask for wisdom in delegation, so that people will rise to the occasion and not feel dumped on when I turn things over to them. I don’t feel like I have a very big pool to draw from, so I ask You to show me whom You are raising up, for their blessing and the good of the Body of Christ. Thank You. Praise God!