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Choosing leaders who walk with god
"by their fruits you will know them." — Matthew 7:20
When choosing leaders, God has always tasked His followers to look at the heart. When Samuel stood ready to anoint a king based on stature and appearance, the Lord stopped him short: "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). It was never about how someone appeared before a crowd, but who they were when no one was watching.
Jesus said that we’d know whether someone’s heart was truly with God or against Him by looking at the fruits of their life and actions. Paul went even further, exalting in the fact that Christians did not depend on tablets of stone and words written in ink, but could know God and those who followed Him through the Spirit of the Living God and its imprint on human hearts and actions.
As Christians, this teaching is as relevant now as it ever was. Now is our time to discern and choose leaders who truly walk with God and strive to follow his Commandments.
What the commandments ask of those who lead us
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
Bearing false witness is more than lying under oath. It's making claims you know to be untrue, or spreading what you can't verify, in order to mislead the public or manipulate the institutions we all depend on. When leaders treat the truth as just another tool for political gain, they corrode the foundations of just government itself.
Thou shalt not steal.
Theft in public life wears many faces: defrauding investors, taking bribes, turning public office into private profit. When leaders enrich themselves at the expense of the very people they were elected to serve, they have stolen from all of us.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Fidelity and personal integrity stop being private matters when they reveal a pattern. A leader who habitually deceives the people closest to them — in ways that are documented and sustained — has already shown us who they are. The fruit of a private life tells us something about the character of a public one.
What faithful leadership looks like
Loving your neighbor as yourself
When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, he gave two: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. A leader's title tells us nothing about whether they've done the second one. Their record does. When someone has already given their time and their labor to their neighbors in need — the poor, the sick, the forgotten — before they had anything to gain from it, that tells us something about their heart.
Caring for the sick and the struggling
The commandments point us toward a God who heals and provides. Some leaders carry their own experience of illness, poverty, or hardship, and they turn that experience into policy that lifts other people up. That's a witness rooted in something real. It shows up in the legislation they've passed to make life better for the sick, the uninsured, and people who can't afford basic medicine.
Living out a christian witness
Anyone can quote scripture on the campaign trail. What matters is whether a leader's faith shows up when the cameras are off, in how they were raised, in how they've served, in whether they've kept growing in their walk with God behind closed doors.