“My God will supply every need of mine according to His riches in Glory in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:19
How does the whole asking, believing, and acting part work in this relationship with God? That’s a fair question, and one that every leader needs to wrestle with. Not just theologically, but practically. Because the way you approach God with your needs directly shapes the way you lead through uncertainty, make decisions under pressure, and steward the vision He’s entrusted to you.
Maybe this is a good way to understand it: walk, ask, listen, obey, and trust.
Five words. Five steps. And a sequence that will change the way you lead if you take it seriously.
Walk
Do you desire to walk faithfully with the Lord?
This requires a great deal of time in the Word, in prayer, meditation, fellowship with other believers, and in worship, both individually and corporately. It means allowing His thoughts to permeate your own. It’s laying your own desires and wishes aside daily, willingly, constantly. This is the first step in following and walking with Christ (Matthew 16:24).
For leaders, this is where the foundation is either built or neglected. And here’s the tension: the busier your leadership gets, the easier it is to let this step erode. You trade time in the Word for time in meetings. You replace prayer with planning. You swap intimacy with God for information about God. And before you know it, you’re leading from a deficit, making decisions without the one resource that actually matters.
I’ve seen this pattern play out more times than I can count. A leader starts strong, deeply connected, spiritually sharp. Then the demands increase and the walk gets shorter. Not because they stopped believing, but because they stopped prioritizing. Walking with God isn’t a pre-leadership devotional exercise. It is leadership. Everything that follows in this process depends on it.
Ask
As you walk with Him and spend time with Him in His Word, ask according to what is in His nature and according to His will, which you can only know by walking in His Word. He tells you to ask, and that He will give you the desires of your heart. So you can only ask according to what has been revealed to you. If you are walking in His will, you will ask according to His will.
This is where a lot of leaders get tripped up. We ask God for things that are really just our own ambitions wrapped in spiritual language. Bless this initiative. Open this door. Give me favor with this person. And those prayers aren’t necessarily wrong, but if they’re disconnected from a genuine walk with God, they’re just wish lists. Not requests rooted in relationship.
The leaders who actually receive from God are the ones who’ve been close enough to know what He cares about. Their asks aren’t random. They flow from alignment, from spending enough time in His presence to know the difference between what they want and what He’s actually up to.
Listen
If I ask for something, I need to listen for an answer. Or at least for clarification of what I have already sensed leading up to the asking. God’s Word deals with depth and breadth about listening.
One of the ways you can listen is in reading the Bible. Another way is seeking out the wisdom and insight of others you trust and have allowed to speak into your life. Listen to them!
This is a discipline most leaders undervalue. We’re trained to talk, to cast vision, to make the call, to set the direction. Listening, truly listening, requires a posture that doesn’t come naturally to people in charge. But some of the most important guidance God gives doesn’t come through dramatic revelation. It comes through the quiet confirmation of Scripture. It comes through the honest words of a trusted friend or mentor. It comes through that still, small voice that you’ll only hear if you’ve actually stopped long enough to pay attention.
If you’ve been asking God for wisdom on something and feel like you’re getting radio silence, consider this: maybe the issue isn’t that He’s not speaking. Maybe the issue is that you haven’t created the space to hear Him. Leaders who fill every moment with output rarely have room for input, especially the kind that comes from the Holy Spirit.
Obey
Author and pastor Henry Blackaby said it well: “Delayed obedience is disobedience.”
James 1:22–25 deals with this even more sternly. James tells us that if we hear from God and don’t act on it in obedience, we are deceivers. And here’s the part that should make every leader pause: the only thing worse than deceiving yourself is deceiving the people around you.
Leaders carry influence. When you hear from God and don’t act, you’re not just stalling your own growth. You’re withholding something from the people who are counting on you to lead faithfully. Every time you know what God is asking of you and choose comfort over obedience, you create a gap between what you say you believe and how you actually lead. Your team may not be able to name it, but they can feel it. That gap erodes trust slowly, quietly, and completely.
Obedience isn’t just a spiritual discipline. For leaders, it’s a credibility issue. The most reliable messengers aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones who actually do what God tells them to do, even when it’s inconvenient, uncomfortable, or costly.
Trust
Why in the world would God give you one thing if you ask and don’t plan and respond accordingly? You must act on what you have believed, asked, listened for, and heard. If you do not respond with trust to the wisdom you have asked for and believed to have received, then you come face to face with the chink in your character described in James 1:5–8: the double-minded person, unstable in all their ways.
Leaders know this instability well. You ask God for direction, and then you hedge. You sense His leading, and then you build a backup plan that doesn’t require any faith at all. You pray for provision, and then you operate as if it all depends on you. That’s not strategy. That’s double-mindedness. And it will undermine your leadership from the inside out.
If you believe that God has His very best for you, then believe that He will also make the necessary provisions along the way. He will not leave you alone to figure it out yourself. Knowing this truth allows you to proceed with confidence. Not confidence in your own ability, but confidence in the character of the God who called you and equipped you for the assignment.
The Whole Process
Walk. Ask. Listen. Obey. Trust.
It’s sequential, and it’s cyclical. You don’t graduate from it. You deepen in it. The longer you walk with God, the more aligned your asking becomes. The more you listen, the clearer His direction gets. The more you obey, the more natural trust becomes. And the more you trust, the more freely you walk.
This is the engine underneath everything else we talk about in leadership development. The process of engaging, equipping, empowering, and encouraging your people only works if you’re first walking this process yourself. You can’t equip others with wisdom you haven’t received. You can’t empower people with a faith you haven’t exercised. And you can’t encourage anyone toward trust in God if your own leadership is built on backup plans and self-reliance.
The leaders who receive from God are the leaders who walk with God. It really is that simple. And it really is that demanding.
Next Steps for the Leader Who Wants to Walk This Out
Evaluate your walk honestly. When was the last time you spent unhurried, unstructured time with God? Not preparing a sermon, not studying for a lesson, not solving a problem. Just being with Him. If that’s hard to remember, that’s your first next step. Block time this week with no agenda except presence. Everything else in this process flows from here.
Refine your asking. Look at what you’ve been asking God for recently. Is it rooted in His will or your ambition? Is it flowing from time in His Word or from your own anxiety? Write down your top three requests and hold them up against what you know of His character and His Word. Ask Him to realign what needs realigning.
Create space to listen. Identify one practice this week that creates room for God’s voice. A morning walk without a podcast. A prayer time where you spend more time silent than talking. A conversation with a trusted mentor where you ask for honest input and actually receive it. Leaders who don’t listen to God will eventually stop hearing from Him. Not because He stops speaking, but because they’ve filled every space where His voice could land.
Close the obedience gap. Is there something God has already shown you that you haven’t acted on? A conversation you need to have? A decision you’ve been delaying? A change you’ve been resisting? Don’t ask for new direction while you’re still sitting on old instruction. Close the gap. Move on what He’s already said, and watch what opens next.
Trust publicly. One of the most powerful things a leader can do is let their team see them trust God. Not in a performative way, but in the real, honest, I-don’t-have-this-figured-out way. Share what you’re trusting God for. Let your people see a leader who asks, listens, obeys, and proceeds with confidence not because the plan is bulletproof, but because the God behind it is faithful.
You can say with confidence today: My God will supply every need of mine according to His riches in Glory in Christ Jesus.
Now walk like you believe it. Ask like you mean it. Listen like it matters. Obey like it’s urgent. And trust like He’s never failed you… because He hasn’t.