E5: Willard’s Wisdom for Leaders: What If We Obeyed Jesus?
When Obedience to Jesus Becomes Routine
In Episode 5 of Willard’s Wisdom for Leaders, I play a short clip from Dallas Willard and reflect on a simple but foundational question: What if we obeyed Jesus?
Leadership often centers on strategy, systems, and outcomes. But Willard challenges us to consider a deeper reality. What would our schools, churches, and organizations look like if obedience to Jesus became natural and routine?
Grounded in John 14:15, this reflection considers how leadership is shaped not just by what we do, but by who we are becoming. When leaders are formed by Christ and consistently live out His teachings, that formation begins to influence the culture of the entire organization.
May your leadership be a blessing today.
Thank you!
My overall thought on this is that cultural transformation will continue to be difficult at a core level in any Christian organization, until minds can grasp the reality that exhibiting professionalism as individuals, can not be a substitute for embodying Christ-like character. Professionalism is put on like a skill or adaptation. Character transformation is at a soul level..and anything that includes dying to self, is a struggle, is messy, feels internally violent at times and would also become real outside the workplace. Transformation sometimes feels too much like losing control….and it is… losing control of our broken ways of existing...losing control of other people.
Figuring out how to actually "give" Jesus an only way we have known how to exist deep down and trade it for something we have no internal reference point for, can feel quite daunting. The side effects of the process are anything but professional. Hence when children are going through the side effects at school (or home) a fear based response by adults is to “make them” shrink themselves because they are not exhibiting “appropriate” behavior. Thus they learn this way of being professional or appropriate at an early age. Again… not the same as being supported through the transformation of character growth. So it is this …all this is the reality of the rub…and why it makes it so hard to actually embrace in adulthood.