People that know me, know that I’m a huge Braves fan.  In all honesty, I love baseball more than any other sport.  A lot of that is because of all the sports available to play, I was probably the best at playing baseball.  Not that I was great, mind you.  But I was decent and enjoyed playing.  When I was playing youth ball, I was fortunate enough to have the same set of coaches for about three seasons.  They were good men, good leaders and as a result, we were a good team.  Always in contention, we won far more games than we lost.  I’ll never forget the third year I was on the team, one of the coaches, Mr. Halberstadt, came over to me with a serious look on his face.  “Son,” he said, “we’re going to need you to play catcher this year.”  I was crestfallen.  I’d been playing third base ever since I started playing baseball and I didn’t want to change now.  Worse, catchers were still thought of as being weak players overall.  That was a relic of t-ball and machine pitch where catchers didn’t really do that much.  Long story short, I didn’t want to play catcher.  But it was the third year of being coached by these guys.  I trusted them.  Moreover, I wanted the team to win and figured that the coaches knew best.  So, I played catcher.  Loved it as it would turn out.  It was the position I was playing when I played my last game of youth sports.  And it would’ve never happened had it not been for a group of coaches who were good leaders.

Good leadership is an important thing, is it not?  After all, there are entire courses, books, seminars and other things, all purporting on how to train the best leaders.  But what makes a good leader?  Better still, what are the signs of bad leaders and how do they make tasks unbearable.

I’m a big fan of a miniseries that ran on HBO over a decade ago called, “Band of Brothers.”  In Band of Brothers, you’re brought face-to-face with an army airborne unit that would have a decisive impact on World War II.  Their commanding officer for most of the adventures is a man by the name of Lieutenant Winters.  Winters is a great leader.  Firm but empathetic.  Direct but not a jerk about it.  Just a good guy that is put in charge of a larger group.  One of the things that he does best, which is really talked about more in the book than on the show, is that he leads from the front.  That is, he doesn’t just send others to be at the very front lines but, instead, leads from that position himself.

It can really bond someone to a leader when they know that the leader isn’t all about looking out for themselves and is willing to participate in the activities, they’re asking their underlings to perform.  Lieutenant Winters is just such a guy.  Winters had a good model for leadership himself in real life.  In real life, Lieutenant Winters was a very Godly man.  Grew up in a church and attended one all the days of his life.  And the example of leadership he encountered in Jesus Christ was stellar.

Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of a leader, leading from the front.  Not content to watch us in the misery of sin from outside of creation, in the fullness of time, Jesus Christ takes on flesh through the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and becomes human.  Fully and completely human so that he can rectify what we’ve gotten wrong.  What we’ve gotten wrong is that we are mired in sin.  When we should be glorifying God, we instead choose darker paths, ones that lead us not only away from Him but, in the process, from goodness and from decency as well.

The Biblical declaration is that we are all sinners.  Romans 3:23 is the verse that gets us there directly – “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  Which means in a way that we’re all bozos on the same bus.  No matter how much we like to differentiate ourselves from everyone else, there is one unifying factor in our lives.  We are all sinners.  We choose what’s wrong over what’s right.  We leave behind good works in favor of charting our own course in this thing called life.  And it kills us.  “For the wages of sin is death” that also in Romans.  Death and sin go hand in hand.  And it makes sense for death is the opposite of life and our life flows from God.  As such, we are supposed to be children of the light.  But all too often, we find ourselves trading in darkness as opposed to light.  Too often we choose sin when a righteous choice is before us.

But Jesus Christ came to change the calculus and the great good news is that we are programmed, in a way, to hear His voice.  That’s one of the biggest concerns people have sometime.  Am I following God, they wonder?  They’re trying as best they can in this world darkened by sin to just do the right thing.  But isn’t it good to know that we are His sheep?