Sampson, the great fighter and deliverer of Isreal

Good leaders fight good fight

Dag Heward-Mills Opinion Feb - 08 - 2020 , 12:56

The Bible teaches us to fight the good fight.

To fight means to strive vigorously for something.

A good leader is a fighter but he will not fight a foolish fight.

Some fights are classified as good fights. For instance, it is a good thing to fight the good fight of faith. However, there are many foolish fights a person can get into.

Foolish fight

Are you into a foolish fight or are you into a good fight? In 1942, Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany, invaded Soviet Union for the second time and tried to capture an important city called Stalingrad.

Both Adolf Hitler and Stalin (the leader of Russia) were strong commanders and it seemed that they had met their match in Stalingrad. The German forces were under the command of General Paulus.

Stalin issued an order to his troops, which was: “Not one step back!” Everyone will fight to his death.

This command directed that any commander who allowed retreat without permission from his superiors will be subjected to military tribunal.

The order called for soldiers found guilty to be forced into “penal battalions”.

This means that they were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front lines. The order also directed the Russian soldiers to shoot fleeing panicked troops at the rear.

In the first two months following the order, over 1,000 troops were shot by blocking units and over 130,000 troops were sent to penal battalions.

But Hitler had also forbidden his troops from retreating under any circumstances. Because of this, fighting moved street-by-street and block-by-block until the city was transformed into a ghost town.

The Germans would launch repeated air raids involving 1,000 planes at a time. Troops from both sides took cover in bombed out buildings while Russian and

German snipers hid in the ruins to pick out enemy soldiers.

On January 24, General Paulus requested permission to surrender. He sent a message to Adolf Hitler, “Troops without ammunition or food. Effective command no longer possible.

Eighteen thousand wounded without any supplies or dressings or drugs. Further defence senseless. Collapse inevitable. Army requests immediate permission to surrender in order to save lives of remaining troops.”

Hitler refused to give permission for the German surrender saying they should stand fast to the last man. This refusal by Adolf Hitler to give General Paulus the permission to surrender was basically an instruction to fight a foolish fight. But General Paulus would have none of that.

In spite of Hitler promoting him to Field Marshal, he refused to continue in the nonsense. On January 31, 1943, General Paulus surrendered in spite of Adolf Hitler’s instruction to him to fight a foolish fight.

As Russian infantry men approached the German headquarters in the cellar of a wrecked department store, Field Marshal Paulus and his surviving staff officers simply came out and quietly surrendered.

They completely ignored Hitler’s order to fight a foolish fight to the last man. Thus the Battle of Stalingrad ended with General Paulus refusing to fight on in a foolish fight that made no sense.

After the defeat of Stalingrad, an embittered General Paulus turned against Hitler. He collaborated with the Russians, forming a National Committee for Free Germany and made radio broadcasts from Moscow urging German troops to give up fighting for Hitler.

Good fights

There are good fights that a leader can and should fight. Here are two such fights: fight against the negative aspects of your temperament. Your phlegmatic temperament, your choleric temperament, your melancholic temperament and your sanguine temperament , all have negative aspects.

You will have to fight these tendencies and not allow them to lead you. But remember, you have been given so many chances. Give someone a chance too!

Fighting against the negative aspects of your temperament is a fight to deny yourself of what you tend to do naturally! I find that this is the most difficult fight for many people: the fight to deny yourself!

Fight the good fight to set aside your humanly inherited nature. And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them,

Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.Mark 8:34

Fight against your maleness or femaleness.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.Galatians 3:28

There are great fights you can fight as a leader and there are other fights you must avoid. Let us fight the battles that will yield great results and take us forward.

Let us resolve to fight the good fights and avoid the foolish ones!

Writer’s E-mail: theaol@ymail.com