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Scripture
Then Gideon asked [the two kings], “The men you killed…what were they like?” “Like you,” they replied. “They all had the look of a king’s son.” Judges 8:18

Observation
If you were to put all of the heroes of the book of Judges in a lineup, who would you pick as the most likely to be elected king by the people? Would eyes fix on Samson and his biceps? How about Samuel and his insight? Surprisingly the one judge most likely to become king was Gideon the scardeycat. The people mobbed him and offered him a throne. It was a good thing that Gideon declined because he was a one percent short leader. Two kings flattered Gideon and said that had the “look of a king’s son” but he was no king.

What kind of leader almost makes it, but does not quite get there? It is the leader who is 99% pure, but there is just a little something that contaminates his leadership. These are just trace elements that few would notice. But God notices and disqualifies that man from leading.

What was Gideon lacking in his missing 1%?

For starters, he looked like a king but he acted like a terrorist. Those who did not support his cause, he thrashed with thorns, pulled down their public buildings and killed their menfolk. Compare that with King David a few decades later just before he became king. When 200 men would not fight with him, he left them beside the road, went on, fought the battle and then let them share in the spoils when he returned. Gideon didn’t have the magnanimous heart of a true king.

Gideon looked like a king, but he could not clean up his own villains. Two enemy kings needed to be dealt with, but Gideon turned to his boy to do a man’s job. Gideon was a coward who recoiled from dirty jobs. A king is a king because he alone will do what a king must do. A leader must deal with his own issues. Some things a leader cannot delegate and still remain a leader. A true leader deals with his own villains.

Lost of all, Gideon looked like a king, but he was greedy with the public purse. He should have left the gold alone, but instead Gideon asked for a small thing…just an earring from each man. Behind that small corruption was a fear that he would have nothing for the years ahead. Gideon was not a king, therefore, he had no right to taxation. But he taxed the people, and so cursed his future and that of his sons. Greed need not be large. Even the desire for daily financial survival can be greed if there is no trust in God to supply.

What was the crack that let this impurity seep into Gideon’s soul? The door ajar was Gideon’s pride. Gideon looked fearful, but his real issue was pride. He was a self-made man, and for that reason he never felt big enough to get the job done. That fear led to pride to puff himself up bigger than he really was. The fear did not mutate into pride until after the victory was won.

Application
How then can a leader lead if he is one percent short? Most leaders know that in fact they fall far more short of capability than just one percent. We all have many insecurities, especially leaders. The answer is in something we can call not self-confidence but Christ-confidence.

Christ-confidence begins when a leader refuses to pretend to be what he is not, but instead becomes comfortable with honesty about his shortcomings in the presence of God. When a leader is honest with his fears, he is set free with pretending. He is set free to find a new depth of confidence in Christ. The Lord has chosen each of us knowing our inadequacies with x-ray perception. We are inadequate, and yet he chose each of us imperfect as we are. He chose us one percent (or more) short to give himself room to reveal himself through our imperfections.

All leaders fall short in some way. What makes the difference between the good leaders and the bad ones is what they do with their insecurities. Wayne Cordeiro leads a church of 14,000, speaks at the Willow Creek Summit and is a sought after mentor and speaker. I spent seven years with him, close enough to see unguarded moments. I remember in one difficult season, Wayne sat in an ordinary kitchen chair and pressed his confused head against the wall and said, “Phil, I cannot always lead with confidence, so I will serve with confidence.” That is the mark of an effective leader who knows how to handle the missing one percent.

Prayer
Father, even if my life were True Gold at 99.9%, I would still be one tenth of one percent short. There is still much dross in me. Yet you chose me knowing all that is in me, even what I don’t know about myself. So here are my inadequacies. Glorify yourself through them. Help me to brush past those who would want me to lead based on self-confidence. Instead, help me to serve out of confidence in Christ. I don’t want to depend on the “look” of a leader; I want to depend on the Lord. Amen.

Leslie and I pose for a shot in one of the world’s great cities…Sydney, Australia.

Scripture

Babylon is fallen—that great city is fallen!

She will be completely consumed by fire, for the Lord God who judges her is mighty. And the kings of the world who committed adultery with her and enjoyed her great luxury will mourn for her as they see the smoke rising from her charred remains.

O Babylon, you great city! In a single moment God’s judgment came on you.

Then a mighty angel picked up a boulder the size of a huge millstone. He threw it into the ocean and shouted, “Just like this, the great city Babylon will be thrown down with violence and will never be found again.”

Come away from her, my people
Do not take part in her sins,
Or you will be punished with her. Revelation 18 selected verses

Observation

A city obliterated in one day.

A skyline reduced to smoke.

A mushroom cloud like a boulder thrown into the sea.

Are these snippets from a doomsday report on terrorism? No, they are summaries from the Bible. Tucked in the last pages of Revelation is a staggering prophecy about a city called “Babylon” that is destroyed in just one day and left in charred ashes. The merchants and rulers of the world mourn because they can no longer do trade with that great city.

Before 1945 this was unthinkable. Then came the atomic bomb.
Before 2001 it was unconceivable. Then came 9/11.
Today the thought of a nuclear terrorist strike on a US city is bouncing somewhere between probable and likely.

The chairman of the 9/11 Commission has stated he expects to see a nuclear attack on an American city in his lifetime. (60 Minutes, CBS News January 29, 2006).

Al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith has stated al-Qaeda’s objective: “to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.” (Graham T. Allison, Council on Foreign Relations, April 20, 2007.)

In the 2004 Presidential debate, George Bush agreed with Al Gore when he said, “I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network.” (Graham T. Allison, Council on Foreign Relations, April 20, 2007.)

One month after September 11 only a handful of US leaders knew that a 10 kiloton bomb stolen from Russia’s stockpile was in the hands of terrorists in New York City. No one was told lest total panic would ensue. (Time, February 2002).

But before the media started waking up to the potential, a strangely familiar scenario was first recorded in the Bible for believers. Why would God foreshadow the destruction of a major world city in one single day? For one reason: He wants us to consider and to know how we must live long before it happens.

Where is Babylon? Babylon was a city that only archaeologists know today. But the seeds of Babylon are growing in every skyline of any city in the world. The principles learned about establishing urban civilization were first trialed in Babylon and then exported to the world. So Babylon is more than a place it is a system. In the global economy Babylon is everywhere as world cities meld into a multinational sameness.

Why is God so angry with Babylon? Because that city has exported the sludge of immorality to the entire world. It has pursued extravagant luxury by stepping on many people in the process. That could be Hollywood, The Strip, the Boardwalk or Wall Street.

Application

How should Christians live in a world of terrorist threat not just against one person but an entire city? The answer is to live detached. John says,

Come away from her, my people
Do not take part in her sins,
Or you will be punished with her.

As we edge and lurch closer to the second coming Christians should distance themselves further and further from the social attitudes that obscure the glory of God like the lights of Vegas. We should own goods without being owned by them. We should treasure sexuality as a gift and not a right. We should keep tender instead of sporting an urban chic callous.

There is a message of hope in Revelation 18. A world city will not be destroyed until God says so. Such a profound act will not be meaningless it will bear a message from heaven. Should any of us see such terrible thing we will know that it bears a word from God himself. This future destruction is his timing and doing alone.

What lays in our lap today is our attitude about the attractions of Babylon. We should feel ourselves more detached from it as the days go by. Our lives must be simpler, humbler, and more tender to escape.

Prayer

Father, honestly I don’t want to think about this, but in reality it is irresponsible not to. Help me to live detached today so that I may not be tempted to look back. Amen.

Lesie and I went to Bryce Canyon, Utah, one of the prettiest places God has made on planet earth.

Let the tree of no other nation
proudly exult in its own prosperity,
though it be higher than the clouds
and it be watered from the depths.
For all are doomed to die,
to go down to the depths of the earth. Ezekiel 31:14

Why are the crumbling pyramids still standing in Egypt? The Bible says that God has a reason for leaving the relics of Egyptology scattered in the African Sahara.

I just did a quick internet search of the ruins of Egypt. One comprehensive site gave no fewer than 13 pages of single spaced, bullet point place names of archaeological sites to visit. On the list are pyramids, tombs, temples, palaces, obelisks and towns. Tomb robbers with crowbars and archaeologists with toothbrushes have scoured the desert and still are finding more. Egypt was one of the world’s superpowers, an the dry climate has preserved much to see.

Why?

God says that he has kept Egypt’s ruins alive for one reason: that nations will live in humility. An empire has dehydrated before, another can dry up again. One day tourists may be visiting the ruins of the Capitol Mall in Washington, or the strip in Las Vegas, the rusted hands of Big Ben or the crumpled steel of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Egypt’s ruins keep us humble.

The pages of history are in hot pursuit of every nation to swallow them up into the yellow pages of memory. Nations have a life span but most rage on as if empires are eternal.

Each year I plow through Ezekiel and Revelation in the Bible reading plan that I follow. Those are two heavy books to bench press together. But I just told my wife that I’m glad of reading them for they help me to keep from getting too attached to what the good life has to offer. The only thing permanent is not in this world. Only as my life is connected to the Lord do I have any hope to make any long lasting impact with my life.

I was speaking to a friend moaning about his mother-in-law. She is a shopaholic who has a penchant to snap up exquisite bargains and then leave them with her children as heirlooms. He showed me boxes of beautiful stuff he and his wife are never allowed to sell. Each piece is to be passed down through generations from her. He said, “She has this driving passion to be remembered.” Like many she is trying to lasso her significance to the shifting stuff around her.

How then should we live? I don’t think the answer is to sell up and put up a pup tent. Remember Jeremiah in the middle of his doomsday prophesies bought a block of land and told the refugees to build houses. But I do think it calls for an inner sense of detachment from the things around me. Reading Revelation and Ezekiel reminds me that life is not forever and not all the good things of life are in this life.

Father, help me today to live loosely holding onto your unseen hand. Amen.