The Mandate by Pastor Poju Oyemade: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Leadership Is a Skill You Learn, Not Just an Anointing

You can be gifted, anointed, and carry real vision, and still be a poor leader. Leadership is not a function of anointing; it is a skill you learn and cultivate like a science. Where leadership skill is undeveloped, you can end up hurting the very people your gift or grace attracted.

Moses was a powerful, anointed man who parted the Red Sea and did mighty things in Egypt, yet his father-in-law, Jethro, had to step into his life to teach him how to structure his ministry, so that neither Moses nor the people around him would be destroyed by the very success God had given them.

Never use a person's personal success to judge whether what they are telling you is right or wrong. Jethro himself had not done anything comparable to Moses, yet he was qualified to correct him. Moses could receive it because he had suffered for forty years and had learned how to listen. When you have genuinely suffered, you learn to listen, and you stop forgetting the conversations that matter.

Recognizing Plateaus and Making Transitions

Nobody grows in a straight line. Healthy growth looks like a staircase: a person rises, plateaus for a season, then steps up again, because they have learned how to make the transition. An unhealthy pattern is a sudden surge followed by a plateau that quietly turns into decline, because the person never understood what actually produced the growth in the first place. One of the hardest things in this world is to reverse a decline.

You can kill Goliath, and the same Saul who promoted you can suddenly start throwing a spear at you. In leadership, you must notice a plateau before other people notice it, and begin to make adjustments, because when a plateau lasts too long, people start whispering that God has left you.

Grace, Hustle, and Laziness

1 Corinthians 15:10: Paul said he labored more abundantly than all the others, yet not he, but the grace of God that was with him, and that grace was not given to him in vain.

Christians often say "I'll be there by the grace of God" as an excuse for lateness, but that is not what grace means. To truly say it is to say that by the power of the One who made the heavens and the earth, you will be there, and so you must be. A person operating in true grace does significant work while remaining in a position of rest; it looks effortless from the outside, but it is not laziness.

Ecclesiastes 10:15 says the labor of the foolish wearies him, because he does not even know how to get to the city. Working hard without grace is laboring without seeing the door. When grace comes, it shows you the door, and then your labor is carried by that grace rather than by sheer hustle. This is the difference between grace-work, hustle, and laziness.

Eyes That See

Being prophetic is not only standing up to predict outcomes. Daniel operated with a prophetic anointing inside the civil service; Moses, before he became known as a leader, operated prophetically to bring his people out of economic slavery. A prophet is fundamentally a seer, someone who sees what others do not see, and opportunity is available to people who are positioned to see it, not only to those with the most resources.

In Genesis 21, when Hagar and Ishmael were sent away with only bread and water, Hagar sat at a distance and wept, believing her son would die. But it was the boy's own cry that God heard, and the angel called to her not with a replacement for what was gone but with new instruction. When God opened her eyes, she saw a well of water that had been there all along; she had simply not seen it. When you reach a place of apparent stagnation, the answer is rarely another bottle of what you had before. It is God opening your eyes to see what has been there the whole time.

From Sole Contributor to Leader

David killed the lion and the bear alone, and he faced Goliath alone, but he did not become king as a sole contributor. To scale, the very skill that got him through the door as a lone hero could not carry him into the palace. God moved him to the cave, where the people who gathered to him were, by every outward measure, the worst of people, yet leadership is precisely the ability to arrange people, whoever they are, toward a shared purpose.

The vision God shows you alone is usually meant to become the vision that carries many people into their own destiny. Growing your leadership capacity often means deliberately learning outside your own field, from captains of industry, military strategists, and other leaders, rather than only benchmarking yourself against people exactly like you.

Loyalty Is the Currency of Influence

You do not have to be president or governor to influence a nation; people simply have to trust you. A cameraman once told a South African president, off camera, that a small African museum was not befitting of the continent's history, and years later that same conversation led South Africa to fund the museum's rebuilding. Influence often comes through unlikely access, not through insisting on the top seat.

One church leader in America explained that after forty years of pushing an agenda without success, their community realized it is not who is president that matters most, but who sees the president first in the morning and who he talks to last at night. They positioned trusted people accordingly, and a sixty-year battle over a major policy was eventually turned around.