Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast. My name is Pete Scazzarrel.

And today our theme is when it's time to say no to leading. When it's time to say no to leading, actually it's part one of two.

Now there's so much leadership content out there right now and actually I'm part of it, contributing to it.

That's why it says in First Timothy

3, verse 1, he that desires to be an overseer or elder desires a beautiful thing or a good

thing, a noble thing. And yet then Paul goes right into, but here's the requirements of being

elder, at least all these lists of requirements. And his basic principle is this, you know, whether it's the requirements of being elderly, all these lists of requirements.

And his basic principle is this, you know, whether it being above reproach, sober, self-controlled,

etc. The higher up the ladder you go in leadership, the less freedom you have. In other words,

the more power you have, people are watching you. And thus you can't say to yourself,

well, I don't want to be under that yoke where everything is so visible when people are making judgments on.

I just want to be myself.

Well, my answer to you, I think, would be Paul's answer.

Well, then you don't want to be in leadership because leadership is to be able to say to people, hey, imitate me as I imitate Christ, follow me as I follow Christ.

Now, God said no to me in exercising

leadership for the first 15 years or 14 years of me leading. I was immature. I was dangerous.

I thought God had me serving under leaders that were less gifted than I was. As you hear

or there, it's probably not true, but more importantly, they had better character than I did.

I was like a 12 or, you know, a 450 horsepower engine in a small car. I just wanted, I was like

exploding on the inside. The problem

was, I had lots of vision, but weak on wisdom and character. I thought I was way further along

that I was, I was what the Bible would call a fool. And so whether it was, I think, of my early

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