What exactly does a "people leader" do?

I happened across something called the 'People Strengths Quiz' online. As the title implies, it's supposed to tell you about your biggest strength as a person. The possibilities were people pleaser, people leader, people guru, and people persuader.

This was a test I couldn't "psyche out" the way you can with some instruments like Myers-Briggs, where one can figure out what they're going for and, if you were so inclined, push the test toward the outcome you want. So, whatever the result of this simple instrument, I was going to be a bit surprised, I guess.

The test told me that I'm a "people leader." Fortunately for me, that's what the work I've been called to do entails.

But the result got me to thinking about leadership, my experiences with it, and my reflections on it.

Some people misunderstand leadership, I think. It's not about being the BMOC (or BWOC), the person who barks orders out to others.

A leader is, above all, a servant, who strives to help people move from today's point A to a better and preferred point B and beyond.

Leaders are also persuaders. Persuasion isn't manipulation from afar. It is, in fact, intensely personal and collaborative.

[Clockwise: Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln]

This is true even when the leader has coercive power over those being led. Years ago, I heard Pastor Bill Hybels tell the story of a new member of his church, a retired colonel. The colonel told Hybels that pastors' claims to be leaders were laughable. "When I gave an order," he told Hybels, "people did what I told them to do." Hybels answered, "That may be. But when people don't do what I tell them, I can't order them to get down and give me 150 pushups."

There's something to that, of course. But when I told the story to Curtis "Mike" Scaparrotti, now the commander of NATO forces and a son of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, where I formerly was pastor, he smiled and pointed out: "You still have to be able to persuade." (That's probably why Scap is a general!) He understands something I first heard said by Pastor John Maxwell about leadership: "First people have to buy into you. Then they will buy into where you want to lead them." Once trust is earned, leaders can be persuasive.

Another way of describing persuasion is teaching. Franklin Roosevelt said that one of the primary tasks of a president is to be a teacher. Presidents (and all leaders) have to take the information they have, distill it, weave it into a vision, and communicate it in accessible ways.

The most challenging lesson FDR had to teach the country during his presidency was about its need to prepare for the possibility of war in light of the rise of fascist Germany and Italy and Imperial Japan.

[Franklin Roosevelt]

This wasn't an easy lesson for the country to accept. After World War I, the country wanted "a return to normalcy" and isolationism was the rule of the day. Roosevelt slowly taught the country the need for preparedness. Miraculously, during this period, he convinced Congress and the country to adopt the Lend-Lease Program, which helped the British fend off a German invasion of their nation.

While the country's military preparedness wasn't where it needed to be when Japan attacked the country on December 7, 1941 and Germany quickly thereafter declared war on the United States, America's teaching president had moved the country closer to being ready for the fight than it would have been had he remained passive.

One of the things I learned from my student teaching experience and have continued to learn from my thirty-two years as an educator of all ages in the Church is that the teacher only has to be one lesson plan or two ahead of the students. Leaders have to try to think one to four steps ahead, far enough ahead to cast a vision, but not so far ahead as to lose people.

All of which means that leadership is a collaborative process. Leaders who don't vision with those they lead and leaders who don't recruit other leaders to help them implement that vision will soon find that they're leading nobody.

Finally, a "people leader" who wants to have a lasting positive impact on others really needs to be in constant touch with God. I think that's true whatever one's field. I try to begin my day five days a week in Quiet Time with God, seeking what God wants to show me, teach me, and call me to do and be that day by digging into His Word. I also pray for guidance. What I've learned is that when we rely on God, He helps us to do what we are incapable of doing in our own power.

I'm not sure I entirely understand or agree with the "people leader" categorization in this test, but it caused me to reflect a bit on my role as a leader in Christ's Church and, occasionally, in other contexts.

One thing I know for sure is that I've failed many times as a people leader. Some of my mistakes have cost me the trust of people I loved and trusted. I try to learn from my failures and mistakes, seeking God's forgiveness and help to do better tomorrow than I did today.

This lifestyle is what Martin Luther (a great leader) called "daily repentance and renewal," turning in trust to the God we meet in Jesus Christ in order to own our sins, receive God's forgiveness, and be reshaped by the Holy Spirit. It's a way of life that can help any of us: people pleasers, people gurus, people persuaders, or people leaders. And everybody else.

[Martin Luther making his defense before emperor and church officials at the Diet of Wurms]

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The World Needs the Church and the Church Needs Lots of Leaders

Management, though a valuable and essential commodity for any organization--from the nation-state all the way up to the local church, is not the same thing as leadership. As John Kotter, professor emeritus of Leadership at Harvard University's Business School, writes:

...management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.

Organizations need managers. But they die without leaders, lots of leaders who can shepherd ideas from vision to reality.

In my experience, the best leaders are first of all, servants. They're not people who bark out orders or, as the Brits say, "put a bit of stick about." Leaders know that even if they have the power of coercion over the people they've been called to lead, coercion is, at best, management. Leaders persuade, convince, inspire.

They're people who put their hearts on the line, have a passion for moving in a certain direction, and accept the probability of rejection and ridicule. (After all, it's always easier to be a lemming who goes with the flow than a leader who dares to call a halt to most organizations' suicide marches.)

And, in my estimation, anyone who tries to lead in the power of their own personality is crazy. I have come to understand the truth of what Jesus says to His followers "apart from Me you can do nothing" (John 15:8) and of what Saint Paul writes, "I can do all things through [Christ] Who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:13). The very best leaders I have ever known, like my internship supervisor, Pastor Jim Petteys, and my colleague and friend, Pastor Steve Sjogren, have also been humble servants of Christ who have relied on Him above all.

I have jettisoned the idea that only certain types of people are meant to be leaders. Jim and Steve, for example, are very different in personality and temperament. But both, in their own ways, showed me what a leader looks like.

Here's the thing: Everyone is called upon to be a leader sometimes.

But most people shirk from leadership and here's why: It's a lot easier to master the techniques of management or, worse yet, to pretend that we have nothing to offer others, than it is to take the grief of leading the charge for a vision, especially if we believe that vision has been planted in our minds and hearts by God.

If you feel God has called you to lead, I share this simple imperative from Paul directed at those God has given the spiritual gift of leadership, given, as all the gifts are, not for the benefit of the recipient of the gift, but for the ministry of the Church and the strengthening of fellow believers. He says if you are a leader, then lead "in diligence" (Romans 12:8).

Everyone has different leadership styles. Few leaders are the flashy charming types who wow people. Some are plodders. But whatever your style, if you have been gifted by God to lead, whether you're a pastor or a layperson, if you have a passion for a ministry that will help the Church do its one and only mission in the world--make disciples--and you feel called by God to spark the ministry in your Church, then lead.

In his phenomenal book, Courageous Leadership, Bill Hybels wrote:

...the church has an utterly unique mission to fulfill on planet Earth, and...the future of our society depends, largely, on whether or not church leaders understand that mission and mobilize their congregation accordingly.

I believe that's true!

5 Thoughts on Prayer for the New Year

The beginning of a new year is often a time when people resolve to have a more active prayer life. But through the years, I've seen people who make this resolution with sincerity find it tough to pursue. So, here are a few thoughts on prayer to help you have a fulfilling prayer life.

1. Remember that prayer is a lot simpler than you may think. "What should I say?" people have asked me.

Jesus says that He calls those who follow Him and obey Him by trusting in Him for their salvation are His friends (John 15:5; John 6:29).

So, ask yourself, "How do I talk with my friends?" Before you get together with your friends, do you sit down and put together an agenda?

Formal, public prayer may sometimes require more forethought and planning. But if the God made known to all the world in Jesus Christ is your friend, just talk with Him.

2. Remember that prayer is a lot more complicated than you may think.

I love something C.S. Lewis writes in his classic, Mere Christianity:

An ordinary Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him [God the Holy Spirit, Who comes to us in Holy Baptism]. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God--that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying--the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on--the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being [the Holy Trinity, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit] is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. 

Every prayer we offer is an instance of God empowering us to militate against our inborn impulse to self-sufficiency and self-will. And that is a complicated miracle of grace. Never lose your wonder at that!

3. Remember that it's likely your most genuine, authentic praying will happen when you are so overwhelmed by your circumstances that you don't know what to pray. 

The Bible teaches that God's power is brought to bear perfectly in our lives when we are strong enough to admit our vulnerability and weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

This is why Ole Hallesby, a great Lutheran pastor and teacher of the last century, said that there are two elements that must be present in order for prayer to actually be prayer:

• faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ and 
• helplessness, the realization that only God and not we ourselves can make happen the things for which we pray.

Don't put off praying if life has you so overwhelmed that you don't know what to say to God! Romans 8:26 in the New Testament says:

...we do not know how to pray as we ought, but...[the Holy] Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words...

Go to God. God will take care of the rest.

4. Nothing you pray about, no request you make, is stupid.

As you continue to submit to God, He may show you through His Word, the Bible, and through counsel consistent with the Bible that you hear or learn in other ways, that some of your requests as ill-advised or even contrary to the will of God.

But never be afraid to speak your mind and heart to God!

Someone, Bill Hybels among others, has said that, as Jesus promises, God always answers prayer offered in Jesus' Name. But God may answer our prayers in four different ways:

• God may say, "No"
• God may say, "Maybe"
• God may say, "Wait"
• God may say, "Yes"

Maturity as a Christian is, in some ways, measured by the grace with which we accept God's answers to our prayers. Our spiritual maturity is maybe most challenged when God says, "Yes" to our prayers. (More on that some other time.)

5. It's good to keep God's priorities for prayer in mind. When God in the flesh, Jesus, was asked by His disciples how to pray, He gave as a model what we call, "the Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father."

The prayer is divisible into sections and prayer petitions, as Martin Luther does in The Small Catechism:

• The introduction: Our Father, Who art in heaven
• The first petition: Hallowed be Thy Name
• The second petition: Thy kingdom come
• The third petition: Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
• The fourth petition: Give us this day our daily bread
• The fifth petition: And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
• The sixth petition: And lead us not into temptation
• The seventh petition: But deliver us from evil
• The conclusion (added by the Church, based on Scripture): For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen

Among the sins from which Jesus came to free those who believe in Him is the tyranny of self. He wants to free us from our penchant for allowing our own sin-tinged desires and inherent selfishness to dictate what we ask from God.

The Lord's Prayer represents a way we can ask God to move us away from selfishness to holiness in our praying.

The introduction and the first three petitions are all about God's Name and will being honored by the world and us. It isn't until the fourth petition that Jesus teaches us to pray for something for ourselves and even then, He doesn't tell us to pray for a iPad or a Mercedes-Benz, but what we need this day to live.

Seeking to have our prayer lives reflect the kind of concern for God and for others that Jesus models in the Lord's Prayer is a good goal.

I'm still working on that myself and, because I'm a sinner saved only by the grace God grants to those who surrender to Jesus, I no doubt will have to continue working on it until the moment I draw my last breath on earth.But some goals are worth pursuing no matter how outrageous the odds!

Peace with God

[This was the sermon prepared for today's 10:15 worship service with the people and friends of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio. Today was Friend Day at Saint Matthew.]

I once heard a man named Bill Hybels say that every human being, without exception, is looking for the same thing. Hybels called the thing we’re all looking for, “it.”

The ways human beings look for “it” vary.

Some think they can find “it” by living a life in which they stock up pleasure, committing themselves to, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness.” But “it” can’t be found by that route.

Some people look for “it” by working hard for money or power or knowledge.

Others are sure that the way to “it” is by being a good person, giving to charities, or living a lifestyle of love.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with happiness, knowledge, hard work, giving, success, money, or even love. These are all good things in themselves.

But if we look to them as the means by which we find “it,” we will be disappointed.

And if we aren’t disappointed, then we are settling for much less than we were made for as human beings.

None of us should do that!

So, what is this “it”?

A man named Augustine, who lived in the fourth century, was the preeminent scholar of his day, at a time when scholars were treated like rock stars. Augustine partook of every sinful pleasure the world had to offer.

But it wasn’t enough.

In the summer of 386, deeply unhappy, Augustine threw himself down under a fig tree in desperation. There he sensed a voice, like that of a child, repeating to him over and over, “Pick up and read. Pick up and read.”

The voice was so real to Augustine that, at first, he thought it was that of a real nearby child playing some game. Then he understood that the voice had some other source.

At that time, Augustine was staying with some monks on a retreat where he hoped he could get things together. He wasn’t interested in being a Christian, mind you. His mother was a Christian and he had no interest in becoming a religious kook!

But, weeping under the fig tree, Augustine kept hearing that voice: “Pick up and read. Pick up and read.”

He later said that he could only interpret the repeated phrase to mean that he had to run into the house where he was staying, pick up a Bible from a shelf there, and read the first words he laid eyes on. He followed his instructions.

The first passage he read was in the book of Romans, chapter 13, verses 13 to 14: “Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ...”

It was then that Augustine, to that point no believer in God, surrendered his life and will to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

He later said in a prayer, “Almighty God, You have made us for  Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.”

Not by any effort of His own, but solely by the effort of the God Who reached out to him and Who still reaches out to you and me today, Augustine received “it": peace with God.

You may say, “We might as well close up shop right now, preacher. I’m not at war with God. I may not pay much attention to God, but I’m not at war with God.”

Look! We are born at war with God!

We’re born wanting our own ways.

In the Old Testament, King David, a man the Bible later describes as “a man after God’s own heart,” had to admit, “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”

Sin is in the human gene pool. We inherit it from our parents and grandparents.

Sin is the condition of enmity toward God and of willfulness to do our own thing that caused me, when I wasn’t yet three years old, to ignore my mother when she told me not to pick up my baby sister and with Mom no more than five steps away, to pick her up and promptly drop her on her head, my very first childhood memory. Nobody had to teach me how to sin; I came equipped with that knowledge!

The condition of sin is a wall between God and us, between God and others.

It’s what makes it impossible for us, by our own reason or strength or effort, to love God or to love others as we love ourselves, even though the law of God written on our hearts tells us that living like that is what it means to be human!

Even people who have never heard of God have a sense that they were made to experience "it," what we know to be the peace of God, whether they can articulate that or not.

And some people are so desperate for peace with God that they fall for humanly-created religions like Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology.

U2 gave expression to our common desire for “it,” when they sang, “But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

I want to be honest with you. I don’t always live in the peace of God. I let “it” slip out of my hands.

Usually without realizing it, I go on the warpath against God.

Feelings of bitterness toward those who have hurt me get my attention. Instead of asking God to bless others, I find myself praying that God would “fix them” and make them over in an image more convenient and convivial to me.

The desire to do what I want to do instead of what God wants me to do takes first place in my life.

My sinful self, along with the sin of the world and the sinful things that Satan tempts us all to do, conspire to take over my life and rob me of peace with God.

So I come to God many times a day, to ask God to tear down the wall of sin, to help me live in peace with Him, with others, and with myself, to remember that there is no peace when we’re looking out for ourselves.

But how does peace with God come to us?

I want to share with you what’s called “the Roman road,” the way peace comes to us as described in the New Testament book of Romans, the book of the Bible from which Augustine read on that summer day when he found his rest in God. I’ll also mention a few other passages in other parts of the Bible.

How do we have peace with God? First: To have peace with God, we must realize that God loves us and He wants to have everlasting peace with Him, along with a life made new by Him, a life He wants to give to us for all eternity.

When we have bad things come into our lives, as they do in all lives, we’re tempted to think that God has it in for us. A month or so ago, when I learned I had Celiac Disease, two years after I had a heart attack that took out 40% of my heart and one year after I'd learned that my heart was so weak I needed a pacemaker and defibrillator and also had to have a small melanoma cancer removed from my leg, I confess to you that I asked God why He was piling things on.

I'm ashamed of those feelings, frankly, because the Bible teaches us that, in this fallen world, bad things happen to everyone, no exceptions.

But we can have peace with God even in hard times. Romans 5:1 says: “...having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

What does this mean? Just this: The rightful fate for everyone who has sin is death. Another passage of Romans puts it this way: “the wages of sin is death.”

Think of it like this: We are all guilty of sin. If we were tried for our sin, the evidence would be overwhelming. To be justified though, is to have the verdict of “not guilty” declared over our lives.

Anyone who is declared “not guilty” of sin is at peace with God.

It was this “not guilty” verdict that changed Augustine’s life.

God wants us all to experience that.

God loves us and wants us to enjoy peace with Him. That’s why God in the flesh, Jesus, said, “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God wants to give us:

• Peace with God now in this imperfect world
• Peace with God forever in a perfect eternity.

Second: To have peace with God, we need to understand, as we mentioned earlier, that, in our natural state of being, we are separated from God. We’re at war with God. Romans 3:23 says: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

You and I aren’t machines. God didn’t program us to do whatever He wanted. God gives us the power to make choices in our lives. We can choose to return His love to Him or not.

The problem, of course, is that the condition of sin has us bound so tightly that even if we resolve to return God’s love or to be at peace with God, we can’t make the decision stick.

We’re like kids peering into a shop filled with candy that’s off-limits to us because our hands and feet are manacled, in this case by our sin.

We can’t get to peace with God by our own efforts, no matter how hard we try. As Romans 7:19 says, “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.” That's why we Lutherans say in the Order for Confession and Forgiveness: "We are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves." Even when we want to choose peace with God and obedience to His commands, we are incapable of making that choice.

Third: To have peace with God, we need to know that God intervenes on our behalf. Romans 5:8 says: “...God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

The Old Testament sacrificial law held that an unblemished lamb could represent people on the altar in the temple in Jerusalem. There, the lamb was sacrificed and the repentant believers were spattered with the blood of the lamb. The lamb took the sinners‘ rightful wages, death, and the repentant were forgiven, for that moment.

But as our second lesson for today, from Hebrews, reminds us, Jesus, the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, bears the sins of all the world, once and for all. 

Fourth: We must receive, by faith, Christ, the One Who has died and risen for us. Romans 10:9 says: “...if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” What an incredible promise!

Because of God's charitable love for us, what the Bible calls "grace," all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ are saved from the condition of sin and its consequence--death and futility.

When you entrust your life to Jesus Christ, you will have forgiveness, life, purpose, and peace with God.

Now, I don’t want to simplify things. Having peace and eternity with God are free gifts God grants to all who turn from sin and trust in Jesus Christ. But they are gifts we find it easy to let go of.

Faith itself, the Bible teaches, isn’t something we can talk ourselves into, but only receive just as we receive any other gift.

And as long as we live in this world, our genetic predisposition to sin will haunt us.

Jesus was and is God in the flesh, perfect and sinless, conceived not by a sinful man and a sinful woman, but by the Holy Spirit. But if Jesus was tempted and tested, we can expect to be tempted and tested too!

Jesus says though, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."

Jesus also promises that “the one who endures to the end” in surrender to Him “will be saved.” They will have a peace that only the God Who became one of us, died for us, and then rose from death for all eternity can guarantee.

The God we know in Jesus Christ can be your very best friend. He can give you a peace that passes all understanding.

If you would like to claim that peace for the first time or claim it again this morning, I want to invite you to pray with me right now:

Lord Jesus, I am a sinner in need of the forgiveness only You can give. I believe that You died for my sins. I believe that You rose from the dead to open up eternity to all who will turn from their sins and let You be their God and King. I ask You to come into my life. Rule over me today and forever. Send Your Holy Spirit to me daily so that I can trust and follow You and live in Your peace. In Your Name I pray. Amen 

If you're like me, you may find yourself needing to pray that prayer about twenty-five times a day.

That's okay: As Martin Luther said, the problem with some "born-again Christians" is that they're not born again enough. We need to keep coming back to Christ so that our old sinful self can be crucified and the new child of God can keep rising from the ashes of our sin!

But if you prayed that prayer with sincerity, know this: The war is over!

You have the "it" you’ve wanted your whole life: Peace with God!

Amen

[The four points of "the Roman Road," found in many places, and the version of "the sinner's prayer" as presented here, are based on a helpful book that has helped me share my faith many times over the past decade: Steps to Peace with God, published by the publications arm of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, World Wide Publications. I don't know if it's still in print. A link to it at Amazon.com can be found above.]

[These passages of Scripture are mentioned in the sermon (most are hyperlinked above): Acts 13:22, Psalm 51:5, Romans 2:14-15, Matthew 22:36-40, Romans 5:1, Romans 6:23, John 3:16, John 1:1-14, Romans 3:23, Romans 7:19, Hebrews 9:24-28, John 1:29, Romans 10:9, 2 Corinthians 5:21, Matthew 1:18, Hebrews 4:15, and Mark 1:12-13]

Curious About God's Will for Your Life?

"The more devoted you become to learning and living God's Word, the more you'll sense his divine voice in your life...You and I must be so saturated with the Word of God [here meaning the Bible] that when we're caught off-guard by life's circumstances, we reflexively hear his wisdom, his nudges, his whispers through his words that dwell within us." Bill Hybels, The Power of a Whisper: Hearing God. Having the Guts to Respond, 2010. (p.118 & pp.135-136)

God will never impart advice through a friend or give you a feeling that is inconsistent with His character and will as revealed on the pages of the Bible.

Trusting God

"Trusting God," or maybe more imperatively, "Trust God!," is the theme that emerges from several inspiring things I've read over the past week or so.

First, there's today's installment from Our Daily Bread, called The Penny Syndrome. Never underestimate what God can and will do through you when you trust Him!

My colleague and friend, Pastor Glen VanderKloot, in his daily devotional, shared thoughts from John Ortberg's fantastic book, The Me I Want to Be. You can find them here. God has an adventure planned for you; live it!

Also, inspired by the Bible, Bill Hybels' book The Power of a Whisper, the experiences of many faithful Christians, and his own walk with Christ, Glen has been sharing a sermon series on the power of God's communication with His people. I've linked to previous installments. Here is the link to the sermon of April 3. 


And here is Glen's sermon from yesterday, April 10. As you read it, put aside your skepticism and world-weary wariness. Glen is an intelligent, knowledgeable man who trusts in Jesus Christ with every fiber of his being. I'm excited by the vision for his congregation that Glen here shares! As many of us  were reminded by the first Bible lesson for worship yesterday, Ezekiel 37:1-14, by the power of His Word, God can give new life to dead, dry bones. Pray for Glen and for Faith Lutheran Church of Springfield, Illinois as God brings the vision of renewal into being! 

'The Power of a Whisper'

I picked up this book, which inspired my colleague Glen VanderKloot's current sermon series at Faith Lutheran Church in Springfield, Illinois, last Thursday.

I've found it so gripping, challenging, disturbing, joyful, and inspiring, that, careting my reading of it into a busy schedule, I'm about to plunge into the final chapter. (And I'm an extremely slow reader!)

The book is about paying attention to the "whispers" of guidance which followers of Jesus receive from God--whether from reading God's Word or knowing God through it, or the counsel of trusted Christian friends, or circumstances. I have long been convinced that God has never stopped communicating with His children. This is one of the Holy Spirit's prime activity among us, I think. But in our worlds crowded with noise and activity, even committed Christians have increasingly closed our minds to God.

If this book does nothing but incite you to carve time out of your daily schedule to read God's Word, pray in Jesus' Name, and listen for God's "still, small voice," it will have done a great thing in your life...and through you, in the lives of others.

I don't agree with everything in this book. But as usual, its author, Pastor Bill Hybels, has written a book worthy of consideration from every Christian wanting to live for Christ in the everyday places of life. The chapter on justice is especially challenging and worth the price of the book, whether you agree with everything he writes there or not.