A 31-Day Walk with Wisdom
Movement 5
Day 25
Step 25 · Of Thirty-One
A 7-minute walk
Using Power Well
"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when a wicked man rules, the people groan."
PROVERBS 29:2 · NKJV
Audio for this walk
The audio reading will be added here.
Life Right Now
You get put in charge of the group project. Suddenly people are waiting on your decisions, adjusting their schedules around yours, deferring to what you think is best. It's a small taste of power, but it's real.
You notice how easy it would be to assign yourself the easy part and dump the rest on everyone else, or to shut down an idea just because it wasn't yours. Nobody would even call you out for it. You could get away with a lot right now, and that's exactly the problem.
Wisdom for the Journey
The theme verse establishes that the true test of leadership is not for the leader's own flourishing, but for the condition of the people under their care. Are the people rejoicing or groaning? Leadership that leaves people groaning has failed at the thing leadership is actually for, regardless of what it has achieved by any other measure.
This standard sounds obvious until you try to apply it. Because the temptation for every leader is to measure their leadership by how it feels to be the leader rather than by how it is experienced by the people being led.
Wisdom demonstrates that the foundation on which legitimate leadership rests is not power itself, but the moral quality of the person exercising it (16:12). So, leadership built on fear, on manipulation, on accumulated advantage, on the careful cultivation of dependence, is not established but simply occupied.
Proverbs 20:28 notes two of these moral qualities as mercy and truth. Mercy and truth together, not one at the expense of the other. The leader who is all truth without mercy becomes a tyrant. The leader who is all mercy without truth becomes a pushover.
But the leader who tells the truth consistently and holds people accountable to it, and who does so with genuine care and compassion for the people they're leading is the leader Wisdom describes as preserved and upheld.
Leadership that fears people and makes decisions based on what will maintain its position is compromised at the root because they are managing their reputation rather than serving the people in their care. Meanwhile, the leader who fears God has the freedom to do what's right regardless of whether it is popular, because their security is not in the maintenance of their position but in the God who holds their life, their calling, and their future.
They can tell the truth when truth is expensive. They can make the decision that is right for the community because their sense of authority does not depend on the approval of the people who might be displeased by it. In the end, the land built by justice is established, and everything built on anything less is in the process of being overthrown, even if the process is not yet visible.
So while you may never govern a nation, you will lead (or are already leading). And the quality of your character, the orientation of your heart, and the God you're accountable to will determine whether the people around you will be rejoicing or groaning.
Today's Step
Think of the people who're most directly affected by the decisions you make. Ask yourself honestly: in my current exercise of whatever influence I have, are they flourishing because of my leadership? If the answer is unclear, ask someone you trust who is close enough to see it.
Pause & Listen
One
Where do you currently hold influence over other people's experience, by role or by relationship? In those contexts, are the people closest to you generally rejoicing or groaning? How do you know? When did you last check?
Two
In your exercise of influence, which of these do you more naturally default to — mercy without truth, or truth without mercy? What does the neglected one cost the people you lead?
Three
Where in your leadership is the fear of how you are perceived driving decisions that should be driven by what is actually right? What would it look like to make the next significant decision from the fear of the Lord rather than from the fear of the room?
A Small Prayer
Dear God, I confess that I make decisions that I dress up as being for others but that quietly serve my own desire to be liked and respected. Forgive me. Give me the mercy and truth together that Proverbs says preserves the leader. Free me from the fear of the people I lead, so that I can serve them rather than manage their impression of me. Make me someone whose leadership leaves people rejoicing rather than groaning. Amen.
Continue Exploring
If you'd like to walk this ground a little longer, these passages keep company with today's theme.
- Proverbs 16:12
- Proverbs 20:28
- Proverbs 29:4
- Proverbs 28:16
- Proverbs 25:5
- Proverbs 16:10
- Proverbs 14:35
A whisper for the road
"The test of your leadership is how the people closest to your authority feel when they are honest about it."
Wisdom Corner
YOUNG PROFESSIONAL
The early career is often experienced as a season of being led rather than leading. But influence accumulates quietly, and the habits of leadership you are forming now — in how you treat the intern, how you respond when a project goes badly, how you handle the credit when things go well and the accountability when they don't — these are the habits you will carry into every position of greater authority that follows.
Coming Tomorrow
Day 26
Open Hands Change Lives
Power, rightly held, tends in one direction: outward. It gives rather than hoards, it releases rather than accumulates, it opens rather than closes. Tomorrow Proverbs turns to one of its most consistently surprising themes — the spiritual dynamics of generosity, and why the open hand is not a mark of naivety or weakness but of the most profound kind of wisdom and the most genuine kind of freedom.