“Now listen to me; I will give you some advice, and God be with you. You be the one to represent the people before God and bring their cases to him. Instruct them about the statutes and laws, and teach them the way to live and what they must do. But you should select from all the people able men, God-fearing, trustworthy, and hating dishonest profit. Place them over the people as commanders of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. They should judge the people at all times. Then they can bring you every major case but judge every minor case themselves. In this way you will lighten your load, and they will bear it with you. If you do this, and God so directs you, you will be able to endure, and also all these people will be able to go home satisfied.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The commands of the Old Testament aren’t for us who follow Jesus today. I’ve been making that point nearly every chance I get for a couple of years now. The idea isn’t original to me by any stretch, but it is one I’ve been confirmed in thinking a number of times, most notably from the author of Hebrews. One prominent pastor makes the same point using the now infamous argument that we need to “unhitch” our faith from the Old Testament. He’s pretty widely and wildly misunderstood in this, causing him, I suspect, no small amount of grief, but the point is nonetheless valid. Yet while the Old Testament doesn’t offer direct application for our lives, it does offer plenty of wisdom worth heeding. What we see here is one of those times. Let’s talk about the advice Moses got when he was wearing himself out trying to lead Israel all on his own, and what it might mean for us.

Moses was a high-capacity leader. He had to be. He was responsible for leading an entire nation of people. High-capacity leaders are pretty incredible people to be around. The amount of activity they can sustain goes well beyond what the rest of us can even fathom. They typically have a clear sense of both where they are going and how to get the people they are leading there. Most leaders are good at one or the other of those things and have to work really hard to make up for the lack they have in the other. But high-capacity leaders can do both effectively. But high-capacity leaders often suffer from a fatal flaw. Because they are so capable, and because the people around them generally don’t operate at the same level they do, they start trying to do more and more of the work they know needs to be done by themselves.

There are some advantages to this. Most importantly, it allows them to get it done on their own time and at a level of quality they are satisfied with achieving. It also boosts up their reputation and image in the hearts and minds of the people they are leading. The more they do, the more their people become enamored with them. Their level of trust in the leader soars, and they will follow him just about anywhere.

For all the benefits of this kind of an approach to leadership, though, the drawbacks pretty heavily outweigh them. For starters, this approach is a recipe for burnout. Even high-capacity leaders have limits. When they reach those, if they have not been preparing for that point, the entire structure they built can collapse in a remarkably short time. What looks like a strong tower turns out to have been built on nothing but a pillar. Once the pillar crumbles, the tower will come crashing down after it.

Moses was on track to burn himself out. Quickly. He was able to accomplish a remarkable amount, but he was on a collision course with his limits. Unfortunately, none of the people around him either recognized this or felt sufficiently empowered to make the observation to him. It took his father-in-law, someone who was not impressed with his position because he knew him long before he got there, and who didn’t care two cents about impressing Moses himself to finally push the truth into his face. If Moses kept on the track he was riding, he was going to crash and burn, and the whole nation would come tumbling down after him.

What he needed to do, if in fact God was leading him this way, was to create and empower a leadership structure operating underneath his position on the top of the organizational chart. This would allow him to continue doing what only he could do while allowing people who could do other parts of the job to do what God was calling them to do. This way the people’s need for vision clarity would be satisfied without his having to be the one to satisfy it every single time.

There are several lessons here worth learning. The first is perhaps the least obvious and comes not from the advice itself, but how it was given. Jethro was right in what he had to say to Moses. He knew he was right too. He could see what Moses couldn’t yet see (but perhaps what he was just beginning to know experientially). He was also the one person in the world who was in a position of authority over Moses; the one person to whom Moses may have looked as a mentor. He could have leveraged all of this power and position and berated Moses for being such a foolish leader. He could have spoken down to Moses. He could have commanded him like an underling. He could have done a lot of different things that would have gotten his point across a bit more harshly than he did.

But he didn’t take any of those paths. Instead, he spoke with gentleness and humility. He told Moses what he needed to do, but he left himself open to being corrected by God. And he left the final decision on what to do with his advice to Moses. He made it clear that if Moses chose not to heed his advice, while he would suffer the consequences of such a decision, he was not going to look at Moses any differently for it.

When you are in a position of giving advice to another person, how you deliver that advice matters a great deal. In fact, the approach may matter as much as the advice itself. You may have the best counsel in the entire world, but if you deliver it in such a way that the person on the other end is going to be unwilling to receive it, it won’t make a bit of difference. Being gracious and gentle and humble and kind will always be the way to go.

On the advice itself, the lessons here are fairly obvious. You can’t do everything. I can’t either. If we try, we’ll wear ourselves out and limit our productive capacity rather severely. Now, this doesn’t mean we should hand everything off to the people around us. There are burdens we need to carry ourselves. But we there are many we don’t. There are some we need to share with the people around us. Not only do we need to share with them for our sake, but they need us to share with them for theirs. By our refusing to share the load, we are taking from them the opportunity to grow more fully into who God has called them to be.

This idea applies in so many different areas of life. Speaking as a pastor, it certainly applies in the church. Many, many pastors have burnt themselves out and hampered the spiritual growth and development of their people because of an unwillingness to share the load of leadership. This is a lesson the disciples seem to have learned by the time they got the church up and running. When the church came to them with a problem that fell outside the purview of what they knew they needed to be doing, they refused to get involved in it. Instead, they directed the people to raise up their own leaders and to find a solution for themselves. They would bless their efforts and make sure they stayed on the right track, but otherwise the people were on their own to solve this one.

This kind of thing applies at any other job you might work. If you are a leader, you need to work to the point that you are doing only the things that only you can do. To the extent you are able, you need to empower those around you to help with the rest.

Let me suggest one more area this wisdom applies: home. Running a household takes a lot of work. There are all kinds of things that need to be done in order to keep things humming along smoothly. If you are a busy mom and are trying to do all the things that only you can do and also do all the things involved in operating a household by yourself, you are going to burn out. Maybe you’ve experienced this. The same goes for busy dads (although, let’s be honest: busy moms are typically quicker to take the lead on getting things done at home than anybody else). The solution is for the two of you to share the load together. But that’s not the whole solution. You need to empower your kids to take ownership of the parts of keeping up the household they can do. This way you not only avoid burnout and all the ugly things that come from that, you also teach your kids how to manage a household for when the day arrives they are having to do that on their own.

Life is hard. Don’t do it by yourself. Empower others to be a part of doing it with you so that when the day comes for them to take on more of the operation or to start their own operation, they’ll have a better understanding of what it takes. You’ll most certainly be glad that you did.