Leadership Communication

UV 1618/10000 Leadership Communication
For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist.
Luke 21 v 15
The true sword is not a weapon of destruction and death but it is life giving, life fulfilling and life enabling. The true sword is a spiritual word that penetrates the soul, the spirit, the inner being, that releases power and hope wherever it touches. The Lord promised His followers to anoint their lips and mouth so that they would speak with wisdom and knowledge. They were filled with the power of the Holy Spirit who gave them the boldness and utterance. The disciples though they were uneducated and simple people by the standards of the time were given such wisdom and knowledge that made even the rulers of the day marvel. The adversaries or those who opposed them could not resist or counter what they spoke with such conviction and force of persuasion. The uni-verse states that “all your adversaries” : it includes the chief foe or enemy of our souls. We will be able to take a stand on the truth of the Word against the temptations and snares of the enemy even as Jesus denied and contradicted effectively the suggestions of satan while He was being tempted in the wilderness.
The Lord uses the mouths of men to speak the truth and bear testimony of His grace and glory. He knows that our tongues left to itself is an instrument of folly, poison and death. It is a veritable sword that can cut off our own head but it can also be a fountain of eternal life once surrendered to the Lord. When He touches it with a coal of fire of the Holy Spirit, the human tongue becomes a powerful instrument of delivering godly wisdom and knowledge. The gifts of the Spirit include the word of knowledge and the word of wisdom to be able to speak the apt word at the apt time.
Spiritual leadership does not rely on human learning and wisdom but on God-given wisdom and knowledge. Paul after his remarkable encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus could not speak for a period of time. This time was the interval in which the Lord was touching His tongue to give him divine utterance that was released once Ananias prayed over him. The apostles when they spoke to the Greeks used allusions to their own literature and religion like when Paul spoke in Athens about a statue they raised to an unknown god. He said that he had come to speak of that very unknown God to make Him known to them. When they spoke to the Jews, they quoted from the Books of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms to corroborate that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, the Son of God, the One sent to deliver them from the yoke of sin and death. When we spend time in the presence of the Lord, our tongues will be touched by the Spirit of God and our hearts and minds will be filled with His wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom is needed to know the timing and type of words to use while knowledge is needed to highlight the facts of the matter. The words “earth” and “heart” can be broken into “ear-th” and “hear-t”: when we hear the Word with our spiritual or inner ear and think deeply on it, our hearts are transformed from within. The Word becomes a sword within us to trim and shape our character and heart from within. The ingested Word becomes food that not only nourishes us but helps us navigate the course of life and expression. It will inform us what word we should speak and to whom and when.

Prateep V Philip