Abraham Lincoln: The Anguish of Leadership
Leadership Briefing
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky
September 18, 2025
Well, good afternoon. It’s wonderful to be here with all of you, and I’m very thankful you came to this event, and I always look forward to it. We get to talk about things that matter with people who are leading. I want to thank Dr. Alan Brumback for being here, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Naples, who preached in chapel so faithfully for us this morning, very glad that he is here. And Attorney General Russell Coleman, very glad that you are here, and there are leaders all over this room, and leaders naturally want to think about leadership and talk about leadership. We understand that we’re learning all the time, and we also understand we’re learning from other leaders all the time. And a large part of the project of my life, thinking about leadership, has been trying to understand leadership in an historical perspective, and looking at leaders that unquestionably changed history to see what we can learn from them.
And there is a temptation in that, and I want to describe the temptation by making a distinction to you. There are those who lead in light tones and those who lead in dark times. Much of what we know about leadership comes from the crucible of difficulty and conflict and war. But even in those contexts, sometimes the figures that loom large in history are more associated with light than dark. There is no one in our history who better represents that than George Washington. It comes right down to portraiture. Portraiture of George Washington is often light in the capitol rotunda. There is, of course, the famous piece of art, the apotheosis of George Washington, showing almost a divinization of George Washington. It’s brilliant light. Washington’s face often shines in the paintings. Others who represent the leadership of light, it’s not to say they had no dark times and no dark tasks; it is to say they are remembered basically as the leaders of light: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, “the Gipper”, dark times, dark issues, but light. Compare that with the dark. I would suggest to you that two of the leaders indispensable to our consideration are almost always painted in darker tones, even in representational art the tones are darker: Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.
My consideration today is “Abraham Lincoln: The Anguish of Leadership.” Now, in the field of leadership studies, the bestselling books are the books about light, not dark, and the bestselling books even try to take dark and make it light. It is our Christian responsibility to see the light and dark for what they are and to understand that at times we will learn some of the most important lessons out of the dark, out of the crucible of human experience at its worst. And that is exactly what made Winston Churchill Winston Churchill. when the rest of Britain’s intellectual and political class refused to see Nazism for what it was, he called it out for what it was and made it clear. It was darker than the elites would admit or imagine. And, sadly, he was proved right. William Manchester, in that great biography The Last Lion, says, and when the time of England’s greatest, greatest peril came, in all the annals of its history, there was only one man who had seen the evil for what it was and had the resources to tell the truth. And then he went down that list of if England were to survive, it would take a man who, who, who, who, who. And that great line, in London, there was such a man. But when you think about Winston Churchill, you do think of a boy born in Blenheim Palace, the first son of the second son of the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace. Some of you have been there. It’s one of the most magnificent palaces in the world. It’s the only building in all of Britain designated legally as a palace that is not a royal residence. It tells you something. Winston Churchill wasn’t born nowhere to nobody. He was a somebody of some kind the moment he was born, not so for Abraham Lincoln.
You know the facts of his life: born in Hodgenville, Kentucky, February 12th, 1809, died by assassination, Washington, DC, April 15th, 1865. I mean, just to say that, we realize we’re in dark territory. There’s a fascination with leadership, and we all know it as a part of what compels us to this kind of consideration. And there are leadership books, books on leadership with historical profiles. These things come out quite regularly. There are four leaders who tend to be particularly captivating when you think of, say, publications on leadership. Since 1945, there has not been a month that a major biography of Winston Churchill has not been released. Winston Churchill, as a world figure, is reckoned very near the top in terms of biographical attention. Who would rival him on the world stage? There are actually two. Rivaling Churchill on the world stage: Napoleon and Hitler. So, as was true for all these times and years since World War II, there’s also not been a month since the end of World War II that there’s not been a major biography published, and often far more than one, or historical study of Adolf Hitler. And ever since the death of Napoleon, now with a bit less frequency, but with far larger books, the war over Napoleon continues, including the war of biography.
In the United States, who ranks in those numbers? Interestingly, not George Washington. George Washington, the father of the nation. There are thousands of biographical materials written on George Washington and hundreds of biographies. They’re vastly outnumbered by works on Abraham Lincoln, and not just by a factor of, say, one or two, but a factor of several. One of the leading biographies of George Washington is entitled All Cloudless Glory. And you see the brilliant two volumes, brilliant portraits of George Washington surrounded in light. But it turns out we are not so drawn to cloudless glory as we are to leadership in a cloud, ominous clouds. That was Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln, the man, a most unlikely figure: frontier boyhood, broken family, poverty. He was self-taught. He had a small experience in a classroom. It did not go well. He continued to read, continued to study. You can see some things now that might not have been evident to those who knew him. At some point, Abraham Lincoln’s interest turned to the law. It seems that his turn to the law may have come out of an interest in rhetoric, and we can understand this, someone who has this very deep intellectual hunger on the frontier where the few orators who exist are preachers and lawyers. He begins to understand what the practice of the law is. He’s also drawn into the inner logic of the law and to the complexities of putting law and rhetoric together. And all that you can see is on full display in his public leadership. But this starts when he’s a boy, and unlike Winston Churchill, he’s self-taught almost in entirety.
We know him for his brilliance in debate. You know him as the defender of the Union and the enemy of slavery. But the closer you look, every part of Abraham Lincoln is complicated. Part of it is because Abraham Lincoln is by no means as self-disclosive as most other leaders. You ask, what is Winston Churchill thinking, at any moment, Winston Churchill has already told you. Winston Churchill’s face revealed what he was going to say before he said it. The famous photograph by Yousuf Karsh, taken of Churchill in the middle of the war, right after he had sparred with Mackenzie King before the Canadian Parliament. He was in a very, very bad mood. He was mad at Mackenzie King. He was angry at the events of the war that had just been reported to him. He charged out of the parliament chambers and into a room where a very young photographer named Yousuf Karsh had set up the opportunity for a photograph. Churchill did not want the photograph. He didn’t have time for such things. Yousuf Karsh, is a very young age, who Churchill recognized is much invested in this. So Churchill stands right where Yousuf wanted him to stand, cigar in his mouth, clenched hard.
That photograph you have not seen; the photograph you saw is because of the brilliance of Yousuf Karsh reaching over to Churchill and, at the last minute, with the bulb trigger in his hand, he plucked the cigar out of Churchill’s mouth. The grimace of war, you see, is the grimace of an irritated man whose cigar had just been plucked out of his mouth. It became the most famous photograph, arguably, of the 20th century, but it was that. The second photograph, which Karsh also took, is a beaming Winston Churchill, who responded to the young man after that act with, “Well played, young man, well played.”
You can’t see that happening with Abraham Lincoln. With Abraham Lincoln, even though he had an incredible sense of humor like Churchill, you understand that this incredible sense of humor is a standout precisely because of the darkness of the personality and the darkness of the times. I’ll also say, in terms of leadership, there’s another person to throw into this mix, and that is Charles Spurgeon, the great preacher in London, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, also very similar. People think of Charles Spurgeon as this great lion of the pulpit, and he was, but the honest truth is that Winston Churchill and Charles Spurgeon and Abraham Lincoln all struggled with the great enemy of depression.
Every one of them found the joy in the midst of the darkness. And, of course, Spurgeon is so sweet about that. His joy is in Christ. His joy is in the gospel. His joy is in the scripture. But when you see someone like Charles Spurgeon talk about joy, it is not just joy in some kind of poetic sense. It’s the joy that kept Charles Spurgeon alive. We need to look at the leadership of dark and leadership of anguish. That’s a stronger word than just dark. When I’m talking about Abraham Lincoln, I am talking about heartbreaking, bone-crushing anguish, and let’s remind ourselves the story of Abraham Lincoln on this earth does not end with an alleviation of the darkness and the anguish. Even though the end of the war was known.
On the greatest moral issue of the day, slavery, Lincoln made his thoughts and developing convictions quite clear and then confused them over and over again, only to clarify them again at the end. If you’re thinking about Lincoln’s leadership, you need to understand he came to certain convictions. Those convictions were human dignity, reverence for the law, constitutional order, and the perpetuation of the Union. Lincoln came to see those, however, backwards. He came honestly to believe and to stake his entire leadership on the fact that the single most important act of his time would be to perpetuate the Union established in the Declaration of Independence and codified and extended through the Constitution of the United States of America. He worked backwards from what he saw as the supreme, most necessary task he saw on the planet at the time, which was the perpetuation of the Union that would require an affirmation and preservation of constitutional order that would be based on reverence for the law, that would be based on human dignity. But in his leadership, especially in the crucible of war, Lincoln would have to reverse his intended sequence because the preservation and perpetuation of the Union was the issue first at hand, and if that were not settled, nothing else would be settled.
How can I make this claim? Well, it’s because Lincoln said this. As I say, he’s working backwards from the perpetuation of the Union to the other goods he wants to preserve, and remember that the perpetuation of the Union is by no means assured. The secession of the southern states is, in the minds of the southern states, a permanent reality, and there were those in the North who saw that it might be to the gain of the North, particularly given the dawn of industrialization and some of the other things, to allow the separation of the Union, which the North also, just in making judgments, saw the South as an economic problem, no longer as an economic asset. It was Lincoln who saw the entirety of the Union as necessary for the Union. It was Lincoln who saw the uniting of North and the South once again, which, by the way, he never would’ve put that way. It was the return of the rebellious states to the Union. He never, by the way, admitted that they had seceded. They had claimed to have seceded.
Abraham Lincoln made an astounding claim, far beyond the legal basis of his time, when he claimed that there was no right of secession; therefore, it was a legal fiction. And so the Civil War was to defeat illegal fiction, not to different nations at war, but I said he reversed it even with human dignity being his foundational concern, I truly believe. in his famous letter to Horace Greeley, August 22nd, 1862, he makes this statement:
“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union it was. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do that. And if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I believe doing more will help the cause.I shall try to correct errors when they’re shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”
By the way, that is nearly perfect logical sequence. That is a lawyer trained in not only the doctrines of the law but also the cadence of the law. And it is a radical statement: if I could save the Union this way, I would do it. If I could save the Union that way, I would do it. If I could save it by going halfway either way, I would do it. It wasn’t because Lincoln was abandoning his convictions; it was because he believed those convictions would be meaningless if the Union were destroyed.
Luther worked out so many of his doctrines in the crucible of a reformation, and he did so disputation by disputation. So, if you want to understand Martin Luther’s theology, you’ve got to walk with him from place to place where he is in an argument because he’s working it out as he goes. The same thing was true with Abraham Lincoln, especially in his war leadership. His argument changed significantly because the events changed significantly. He would be here, and he would be there, and he would be another place, but one thing was always consistent: the preservation and perpetuation of the Union.
You know the story. This young, self-taught lawyer becomes very well-known on that frontier area as a lawyer. He is a success; as a lawyer, that doesn’t bring him great joy. He enjoys the work of the law, but there’s a greater calling. He’s elected to the Illinois Senate, serves there for years. He’s elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1846. He serves only one term. He ran for the United States Senate, famously against Stephen Douglas, in 1850. The seven debates that represented such an epic moment in American history. Luther, working out his mature views, debate by debate, argument by argument, disputation by disputation, is the same thing we see in the case of Abraham Lincoln. He is working out. You look at those seven debates; no less than Winston Churchill recognized that those seven debates—now consider this, this is the boy born in Blenheim Palace, twice Prime Minister of Great Britain, an Anglophile of all Anglophiles, who said the greatest political debates of memory are the debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln over a United States Senate seat. Of course, it ended up being about far more than that.
Lincoln wins the Republican nomination in 1860, and all these events unfolding, it’s important. We recognize that the turning points are often articulated with Abraham Lincoln, the Cooper Union speech, 27th of February, 1860, in New York. You see his lawyerly approach. He asks himself questions. He cross-examines himself in this speech in order to articulate some of the things he wants to say. He asks himself the question, “what is the frame of government under which we live?” His answer is, he says, “It must be the Constitution of the United States.” That Constitution, he says, consists of the original, framed in 1787, and under which the present government first went into operation, and 12 subsequently framed amendments, the first 10 of which were named in 1789. So, in one sense, the speech was over. Now, he did go far further than that, and one of the things he wanted to argue in that Cooper Union address is that those who had framed the Constitution had left no mechanism for secession.
It was created as a perpetual union. Lincoln, the lawyer, went back to some of the deliberations prior to the Declaration in order to make that argument. Now here’s something really, really interesting. As you look at debates in American constitutional law today, if you look at the great divide between the right and the left on constitutional interpretation, one of the key issues is the context in which the Constitution itself is to be interpreted. One of the great divides right now between liberals and conservatives in the United States has to do with whether or not the Constitution is to be read in light of the Declaration of Independence. Since the 1940s that has been a distinctive principle of conservative assertion. It’s interesting that it really emerges again at that point, the conservative assertion is that the Constitution is not de novo. It is an act subsequent to the declaration which is prior.
Now, you’ll forgive me for a moment of personal pleasure. Some of you know that just a couple of weeks ago in the United States Senate and the Committee in Foreign Relations Senator Tim Kane, the Democrat of Virginia, went at a nominee in a confirmation hearing. The nominee had made the statement that our rights are endowed by the Creator. The phrase he had used is given by God and in so doing, he was citing the current Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio. Senator Kane went into full allergy, to put it charitably, he lost his ever loving mind. And he went at the nominee saying, “That’s a theocracy, that sounds like Iran.” He said, “You deny because it was in the text. You deny that rights fundamentally come from law and government. You’re a theocrat. This is dangerous. This is scary language.”
The nominee was not given an opportunity to respond. So he asked the chairman of the committee for an opportunity to respond and the chairman of the committee gave him the opportunity to respond and he responded by saying, “First of all, that was a quotation from Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and he was paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence.” Now, I just want to be very proud, Mary and I are very proud, that nominee was our son-in-law and I had the opportunity to be in the room and I can just tell you it was a very proud moment. It was a very humiliating moment too. I mean a United States Senator to say something that stupid and then to double down on it.
I’ll tell you another little footnote on that. Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz had just walked in. They had unfortunately parallel committee meetings and the senators sit on several committees and so they come in when they need to. And so I’m going to speak a little out of school here. One of the nominees was a diplomatic ambassadorial nominee and who evidently was a major funder of Republican politics in Texas. Therefore Senator John Cornyn and Senator Ted Cruz came in to sing her praises loudly. Ted Cruz came in, sat down, predictably an aid hands him a folder, and I can see this as it’s happening, and he’s looking at the folder because he’s getting ready to give a speech and I think almost assuredly he’s going to do as his colleague had done, he’s going to spend most of his time because this is one of his constituents. One of his constituents is a nominee. And when Senator Kane, who was before him, just went off on this rant about God not giving us our rights, and this is the doctrine of positive rights, by the way, in a very kind of primitive form. And he just said, “If our rights don’t come from law and government, where do they come from?”
Okay, so I kind of knew what was happening because Senator Cruz takes the folder he had been given and had been reading and he folds it, hands it back to the aid and you can just kind of see what’s coming. And he turned and said, “Senator Kane, my distinguished colleague, a Democrat” he wasn’t going to leave that out, “a colleague from Virginia, I’d like to introduce you to an even more esteemed Virginian: Thomas Jefferson.” And it appeared that Senator Cruz had memorized the Declaration of Independence. And you say, well, we all kind of memorized it. No, you’ve memorized the preamble. The Constitution is a page long document. He did not recite at all, but quite enough to make the point that this is very much where Abraham Lincoln was.
This is the argument. Here’s what we need to recognize. When Abraham Lincoln makes this argument, no one had made it for decades. It’s not clear that it was made well enough at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. It’s Abraham Lincoln to make his case for the preservation of the Union. He has to go prior to the Constitution because so far as Lincoln is concerned, the Union doesn’t begin with the Constitution. Here’s what’s fascinating. He doesn’t believe that the Union is constituted by the Constitution. It is rather brought into existence by the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution is the elaborated argument to preserve that was created in 1776. Okay, I just want to remind you, this is a self-taught prairie lawyer who dares to teach the American political establishment. What the Constitution means and what its own history means.
Alright, the onset of Civil War comes so quickly. April the 12th, 1861, Lincoln saw it as a revolt and a dagger at the heart of the Union he could conceive of and allow for no national divorce. He actually uses the metaphor of a husband and wife and divorce and says that’s possible, you can imagine that they can live in the same town, divorced, but the states cannot live on the same landmass, divorced. It is impossible. They will be united or one will destroy the other quickly.
The Civil war comes, we see brother against brother. The agony of the war is reflected in the anguish of Lincoln’s leadership. This is borne personally in his body. Lincoln in the middle of the night would go down to the War Department and sit alone waiting for telegraphs. Lincoln redefined what it meant for the President to be Commander in Chief, and he did so because he had to, especially until the appointment of Ulysses S. Grant at the head of the Union armies. And he took all of the bad news of the war bodily and visibly he wore it on his face.
Now, there are other aspects of Lincoln that are fascinating. Doris Kearns Goodwin of course wrote a bestselling book, Team of Rivals about the fact that he put together a team of rivals, people who disagreed with him, some of his competitors for the Republican nomination, Salmon Chase, and especially William H. Seward. He appointed them to key roles inside the cabinet, and of course they became absolutely devoted to Abraham Lincoln. But there’s more to it than that. We need to talk about the light and the dark, quite honestly, Abraham Lincoln sought to preserve the Union. Now remember the order in which I tried to present this human dignity, constitutional order and the perpetuation of the Union. I said he reversed course in the actual conduct of his presidency. Constitutional order was in the middle. I think a fair assessment is that Abraham Lincoln violated constitutional order in order to preserve the Union.
I think that’s just an honest statement. I think he knew that he was doing so at the time. Similar actions would be taken I think with less justification by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. And a similar action would be taken in domestic and foreign policy by Franklin Delano Roosevelt up to and including World War II. But I must say that one of the great testimonies to the endurance of the American experiment and constitution of self-government is that even after there had been, I’ll just say distortions of the Constitution or even violations of the Constitution in time of urgency, the United States has returned to constitutional order. And even those who were doing it had to say as even a tyrant would say, he is doing this in order to preserve the Constitution. It just so happens that that has been a sincere motivation, certainly in the case of Abraham Lincoln.
His moral certitude prevailed. Lincoln believed in natural law and natural right. This is a phenomenally important issue. He didn’t believe that his policies were right. He did believe his policies were right, but he saw that as questionable. He believed that his convictions were sure because his convictions were not based on personal preference. They were based upon what he actually believed were cosmic principles. And I have to put it that way because it’s difficult to know theologically exactly what Abraham Lincoln believed. It would not be fair to describe him as a conventional Christian in any normal sense. It is also clear that some theological understanding that is at the very heart of Abraham Lincoln developed in the crucible of the war such that by the end of the war, he has turned from a largely secular argument into an argument made clear in his second inaugural address that is perhaps the most theological document ever, ever submitted in the context of American history. I’ll say that again. His second inaugural address is the most explicitly theological statement that I believe is part of our national canon.
Alright? The crucible of war, the anguish of leadership. It comes out of course in his address at Gettysburg. “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing, whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living in dead who struggled here have consecrated it for above our poor power to add or detract. The world will a little note, nor long, remember what we say here.” That turned out not to be true, but he said, “It is for us, the living who cannot forget what they did here rather to be dedicated here, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. That from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion that we here rightly resolve. That these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
We come to the end of the war and we understand we’re coming to the end of Lincoln’s life. Lincoln thought in 1864 that he was coming to the end of his political career without going into all the details for the sake of time, there was good reason to believe that Abraham Lincoln would not be reelected president of the United States. He begins in late 1863 and into 1864 to take actions to seek to preserve the Union. Even if indeed someone with different political sympathies should be elected. President Lincoln is reelected and by that time, the future of the war is really not so much in doubt, but this leads to a bigger problem for the nation. What is the future after the war? What is the possibility of a Union that will endure after the trauma of civil war? Lincoln’s second inaugural address, as I mentioned, is his classic statement and just hear the theology in what he said. “Neither party for the war, neither party expected for the war, the magnitude of the duration, which it already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease each looked.” And that’s slavery, so the presenting issue, slavery and that he’s referring to the emancipation proclamation. The emancipation proclamations explained by many things in terms of its timing. But for one thing, Lincoln had to have it done in case he did not have a second term. “Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in ringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. But let us judge, not that we not be judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. Woe unto the world because of the offenses for which it mustn’t be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come. But having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe do to those by whom the offense came. Shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?”
Now just notice this is the richest theological language I would argue in any American document. But he doesn’t use I. There’s no first person. He’s referring very clearly to the God of the Bible that the vast majority of Americans believe in who the vast majority of Americans believe in. “Fondly do we hope. Fervently do we pray.” So Lincoln, whose theological profile is, I think impossible for us fully to discern. He does pray and he does clearly believe in divine providence. “Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bonds men’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another, drawn with the sword, as was said 3000 years ago. So still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
And then of course you know what happens. Lincoln is assassinated. That assassination comes April 15th, 1865 and then the nation is faced with a greater challenge than the Civil War itself. What in the world shall follow? Lincoln had a plan. A part of the darkness and the anguish of thinking about Abraham Lincoln is to know that Abraham Lincoln did have a plan. He wanted to be the father of a reunited nation. He saw himself in that light, but he understood the war must be won. If any possibility of that is to come. The assassination ended that possibility. We see in Abraham Lincoln the anguish of leadership and it is in anguish all the way through, but it was a job he saw all the way through. We see in Lincoln, personal tragedy, family tragedy, national tragedy, horrifying pain, deep depression.
Many people who do not lead and never are called upon for leadership assume that it is all glory and light. Anyone who truly leads knows that is far from the case. As a matter of fact, it’s very difficult for many leaders not to be surrounded by memories of darkness that loom large and seem overpowering. Think of our own national history. Lincoln was the first president, assassinated thereafter would come James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, attempted assassinations against Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Donald Trump. Assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and more recently Charlie Kirk. We are a nation drenched in blood.
All this brings an instant clarification of the reality of evil and it unfolds yet a Christian understanding of leadership. Must be honest, there is glory, there is responsibility, but there is also agony and anguish. Theologically, this is a deeply Augustinian reality. Going back to Augustine in the 4th century and the reality that he saw even with the fall of Rome, but the eternal nature of the church. There are in these days in the city of man, there are moments and indeed millennia of deep darkness. But the light comes and the light shineth. We work as leaders so that our grandchildren may know less tragedy and more good. Leadership is not as glorious as the bestsellers will tell you. Not a single Christian leader, not a single human leader, gets to see things through. Charles de Gaulle when told he was indispensable immediately retorted, “The cemeteries are filled with indispensable men.”
We just don’t get to see this through. So, why do we do it? It is because we’re called to it. Every leader to a different context, to a different stewardship. That many common experiences, there’s much for us to learn from Abraham Lincoln. We just scratched the surface, but we never get to see this through. But our model is not Abraham Lincoln. Our model isn’t George Washington. It’s not Winston Churchill. As Christians, our model is the Lord Jesus Christ. And remember how he is described, “A man of sorrows acquainted with grief.” Also our savior, Christ, the Lord. In John 16:33, Jesus says to his disciples, “I have said these things to you that in me, you may have peace in the world, you will have tribulation. But take heart, I have overcome the world.” What we cannot see through Christ does. That’s enough. God bless you all. Thank you.