Called to Lead: 26 Leadership Lessons from the Life of the Apostle Paul

by John F. MacArthur Jr.

Paul was the epitome of a leader with a servant’s heart. He perfectly fulfilled what the apostle Peter said every pastor should be: shepherds of “the flock of God which is among you, serving as overseers, not by compulsion but willingly, not for dishonest gain but eagerly; nor as being lords over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock” (1

“a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his

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That is the price of leadership. It is a costly, lonely, and often thankless calling.

don’t miss the fact that Satan often aims his most ferocious attacks at key leaders.

To defy a leader who is called by God and faithful to the truth is a peculiarly satanic sin.

Paul said, “Our sufficiency is from God” (3:5). That statement is the key to this brief passage and a summary of Paul’s whole self-defense.

He was not about to abandon these people whom he loved to evil, false, spiritually incompetent leaders.

A leader doesn’t abdicate his role in the face of opposition.

He preferred to be thought of as a low-level galley slave at the bottom of a ship, pulling an oar. He despised boasting about himself, rather than Christ. But he had to answer the assault or give up the church to false teachers.

That’s because the fallen human heart is bent toward rebellion (cf. Deuteronomy 31:27; Acts 7:51).

written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart. And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God.

Clearly, Paul had no agenda to commend himself. That is not what he was trying to do. He was not setting himself forth as a perfect leader. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 15:9–10 he had said, “I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am.”

Thus Paul left the question with them. He did not boast of his own virtue. He had no need to do so.

Paul’s epistle of commendation was better than any letter the false teachers could pull out of their satchels.

Paul’s was a flesh-and-blood, living, walking testimony. His credentials as a leader were written in the lives of the Corinthians themselves. The influence of his ministry on their lives was ample proof of the legitimacy and the effectiveness of his leadership.

the effectiveness of leadership is measured in terms of influence. When you see someone’s influence reflected so profoundly in the lives of other people, you have identified someone who is by definition a leader.

By the way, this letter wasn’t stuffed into a satchel. It wasn’t folded up and hidden in a pocket. It was everywhere to be seen. It could be read by anyone, at any time, and in any language

Anyone can write a letter with ink. Only Christ can write a letter such as Paul had. The Corinthians themselves were his letter, kept in his heart, composed by Christ, and written down by the Holy Spirit. What purer proof of his authentic influence was there?

His calling was a stewardship received from God. After all, “it is required in stewards that one be found faithful”

so Paul had no choice but to answer this attack on his authority.

Again, Paul was not defending himself for his own sake. He did not desire the Corinthians’ affirmation for selfish reasons. And he certainly did not need to convince himself. But God was the One who called him to the role of leadership, and Paul never vacillated about his calling. This is ano...

Paul never wavered in his confidence that God had called him to be an apostle. Others questioned him all the time.

Therefore, while he considered himself “less than the least of all the saints” (Ephesians 3:8), he also knew that he was “not at all inferior to the most eminent apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:5; cf. 12:11).

This was not arrogance on his part; God had well and truly called him to such an office.

No leader can be truly successful who considers the present task a stepping-stone. You can’t be distracted by the future and effective in the present.

I have never met an effective leader who wasn’t competitive. Real leaders desperately want to win. Or, rather, they expect to win—to achieve the objective. That passion to attain the prize is what Paul himself described in Philippians 3:14, and notice that it stemmed from his calling: “I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Paul knew that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). He believed in the gifts God had given him. He trusted the power of God in his life. He knew beyond any doubt that God had set him apart for leadership, even from birth (Galatians 1:15). So he could set his eyes firmly on the prize.

The apostles’ extraordinary confidence did not come from formal training. It came from the fact that Christ had chosen them, trained them, and empowered them with His Spirit. Even in the face of death, their confidence remained unshaken.

Although Paul was supremely confident of his calling and quite sure of his own giftedness, he also remembered where those gifts had come from, and he knew they were not from within himself. The source of his adequacy was God. Paul did not for a moment imagine that he was adequate for the apostolic office in and of himself. On the contrary, he knew he was inadequate on his own. About that, his critics were right.

“Without Me you can do nothing,” Jesus said (John 15:5). The converse is equally true. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” Paul wrote in Philippians 4:13. Both sides of that truth are equally important. “I labored more abundantly than they all,” Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:10, “yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (emphasis added); “By the grace of God I am what I am” (v. 10). In no way did Paul imagine himself intrinsically adequate for the task to which God had called him. And that realization kept him dependent on divine grace in every aspect of his leadership. Thus he exemplifies another basic principle of all wise leadership: A leader knows his own limitations.

Those whom the world holds up as leaders often exude arrogance, cockiness, egotism, and conceit. Those things are not qualities of true leadership; they are actually hindrances to it. The leade...

When he came to the end of his human resources, that was when the power of God flowed through him. God, and God alone, was Paul’s only true source of sufficiency.

For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

The heart of his message was always Christ, proclaimed with clarity and directness, and he trusted the power of the gospel itself—not his own cleverness—to penetrate hearts and influence people. That’s something many church leaders today would do well to remember.

Leaders who are truly able are qualified because of their character. They are easily identified, not by letters of commendation, but because of the influence they have on others. They are people who are confident of their calling, and yet at the same time, they know they are utterly dependent on God as the source of their true power.

It was, quite frankly, a matter of constant amazement to Paul himself that he was ever called to leadership to begin with. He told Timothy, “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord who has enabled me, because He counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry, although I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man”

Everything they said about his human weaknesses was true. He wasn’t attractive. He wasn’t anything special.

But after all, he reminded the Corinthians, “we do not preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your bondservants for Jesus’ sake”

In other words, it wasn’t about Paul in the first place. He was only a bondservant and a messenger whose role was to proclaim the grandeur, the majesty, and the wonder of the new covenant message—“...

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And what a humble vessel he was! Not a fancy, engraved censer made of precious metals and inlaid with fine jewels, but an average, everyday clay pot.

Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the LORD. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel!”

Even the finished clay pots have no virtue or power of their own. They are simply instruments in the Potter’s hands, fashioned by Him according to His own good pleasure.

All leaders are at best clay pots. Some may be better-looking pots than others. But no true leader can boast of having attained his position merely because of superior talents, physical attributes, communication skills, or whatever. If God did not use homely, ordinary clay pots, there wouldn’t be any spiritual leaders at all, because there aren’t any people who aren’t beset with blemishes and human weaknesses.

The more feeble the vessel, the more evident it is that the power is God’s.

“But,” he said (paraphrasing Jeremiah 9:23) “‘he who glories, let him glory in the LORD.’ For not he who commends himself is approved, but whom the Lord commends”

God knows that is what we all are—though we have a tendency to forget. “He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). He said to Adam, “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).

Paul said, in effect, “That’s all I am: kiln-dried mud.”

But Paul was describing a treasure meant to be put on display, not hidden.

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence.