Want to spend a little time in a lab?
Forget the white coat, safety glasses, and things that smell like they’d melt your skin if they ever touched it. This is a different kind of experiment.
In four days I’m going to post a new article about a yet-to-be determined subject. Today and two days from now, I’d like to show you how I get there.
The article will be an outgrowth of something that is a passion of mine: taking truth from God’s word and applying it in a practical, relevant, way – first to my life, then to the lives of others.
There’s a lot of talk in Christian circles about revelation of God’s truth. What’s often missing is relevation – making that truth relevant to specific life issues and dimensions. That’s what I want to show you today – how I apply God’s truth to the power bill, or my relationships with friends or students, or my goals or time management or weaknesses or any other issue that presents itself. [click to continue…]
You never knew Lillie Edwards. I hardly did either, except for a brief two-week period years ago. But Lillie will always be a significant figure in my life and memory.
When I met Lillie Edwards, she was dying. I was green-green-green as a young pastor, serving in my first church in a senior role.
Lillie Edwards would be my first funeral service. But she taught me some things about living, and about dying, before our paths parted. [click to continue…]
I had a head-on collision with the facts this week. Must not have been wearing a seat belt. Brain belt, either. The sad truth is, I took in the sights and the sounds, the data and the details, and accepted them at fake value. (Hmmm. If I keep this up, maybe I should get a job in journalism. But I digress….)
Make no mistake about it – facts are important. If your baby has a 102-degree fever, you’re $68.32 in the hole at the bank, or Congress is about to mortgage your great-grandchildren, that is meaningful information. The problem isn’t a shortage of information, and the solution isn’t to bury our heads in the sand. What matters is what we do with the information we have.
Still in something akin to panic mode, I got a gentle news flash from the Lord: [click to continue…]
Tense Truth: God gives you desires you can never satisfy and makes demands you can never fulfill. He then goes about bridging the gap, doing for you what you can never do for yourself. Your primary responsibility is to trust Him to be Himself – to rest in His faithfulness.
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Have you ever felt like God was somehow playing a joke on you? You hear people talking about being forgiven, and you feel guilty for, well, feeling guilty. You read the stories about miracle-working power, and wonder why you got left at the station. You learn more and are less happy; work harder, but feel weaker. You’ve learned to speak “Christianese” and go through the motions, but sometimes you just feel like a fraud.
What if I were to tell you that God has a glorious answer? Something more liberating than a self-improvement project or yet another string of self-disappointments?
David’s Truth Discovery
For nearly a year, David had played the role. The psalmist of Israel, the beloved king, had gone through the motions, mouthed the words, and tipped his hat to the man he once was. Very few knew people the real story: David was just a shell of the man he once had been. [click to continue…]
This is about the difference between creeds and deeds. Action and diction. Your words and your walk.
I’m assuming if you’re reading this that you want to be known and respected as a man or woman of truth. That may be a big assumption, of course, since it’s possible that you went to bed last night with the happy memory of somebody you conned.
But if you’re a believer, God has placed a desire in your heart to please Him, and truth is one of the things that does that. So is love. So it’s no surprise that the Bible describes spiritual maturity as the fine art of “speaking the truth in love.”
And it is a fine art. What do you do when words and wishes collide? What do you say when your honest thoughts and feelings aren’t very loving?
Years ago I was sitting in a therapy group, where a couple of people were talking about their “inner child” and their “inner adolescent.” It was a poignant discussion by some people who were sincerely seeking healing and growth. But I couldn’t help but think, “My problem isn’t my inner child, or my inner adolescent. My problem is with my inner jackass.”
I figured it would be better to stay quiet. Love? Maybe. Self-protection? No doubt about it. I said it best when I said nothing at all.
The greatest love tends to show up in the fewest words. [click to continue…]
“Who is the leader?” Dad wanted to know. His son was watching cartoons, and Erwin McManus was asking him to explain the characters and tell him what was going on.
The boy, with great delight, began to tell all about his cartoon heroes.
Erwin thought he’d ask him a simple question about who the leader was, and his son gave him an astonishing explanation. Pointing to one of the characters, he said, “Well, that’s the leader.”
“How do you know?”
He said, “The leader always stays in the back and only gets involved when everyone else is about to die.”
There you have it: what McManus describes as the Marvel Comics Theory of Leadership (more here).
True, leaders are often perceived that way. But that’s not how leaders emerge, or how they last in the world where characters actually breathe. If you’re looking to:
- Hire/elect/promote a person to a place of leadership,
- Strengthen your own leadership abilities,
- Identify the extent to which you or someone else are actually leading people, or
- “Find the parade and get in front of it,”
then consider leadership from the front. Here, from followers’ perspectives, are seven ways to tell who the leader is.
[click to continue…]
Want to spend a little time in a lab?