Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Leadership in church is one of the biggest challenges that the Church is facing because without strong leadership, the church rarely lives out its redemptive potentials.
Personally, I've never understood inactivity. Why a person would sit when he could soar, be a spectator when he could play, or atrophy when he could develop...is beyond me!
The Christian life is one of faith, where we find ourselves routinely overdriving our headlights but knowing it's okay because God is in control and has a purpose behind it.
Visionary people face the same problems everyone else faces; but rather than get paralyzed by their problems, visionaries immediately commit themselves to finding a solution.
People will not follow a leader with moral incongruities for long. Every time you compromise character you compromise leadership. The foundation of firm leadership is character.
If you lower the ambient noise of your life and listen expectantly for those whispers of God, your ears will hear them. And when you follow their lead, your world will be rocked.
Wise leaders understand that the single greatest determinant of whether followers will ever own a vision deeply is the extent to which whose followers believe the leader will own it.
One of the greatest thrills in all of life is to feel the hand of God working through you and to be a part of the working reality of the church engaged in a movement larger than self.
Whenever you see something going well - whenever light begins to chase back the darkness that threatens to engulf our world - look closely. There stands a leader who is holding that candle.
You don't have to be any more talented, any richer, any slimmer, any smarter, any more or less of anything to partner with God. All you have to be is willing to be used by him in everyday way
You're a leader. It's your job to keep your passion hot. Do whatever you have to do, read whatever you have to read, go wherever you have to go to stay fired up. And don't apologize to anybody.
If the request is wrong, God says, No. If the timing is wrong, God says, Slow. If you are wrong, God says, Grow. But if the request is right, the timing is right and you are right, God says, Go!
This is the only leadership life I get, my one and only shot at following God the way I feel him prompting me to do so. This isn't some pre-game warm-up. It's the game, and the clock is ticking!
One thing is that life's great moments evolve from simple acts of cooperation with God's mysterious promptings-nudges that always lean toward finding what's been lost and freeing what's been enslaved .
Life is too short and the world too compassion-starved for you to keep subsisting in situations that drag you down and curtail your potential to help advance the Kingdom. There's just too much at stake.
If you are anything like me you'll have to fight tooth-and-nail to stay in the game (evangelism). Because although the home runs have been invigorating, my batting average over the years is abysmally low.
Our minds, like the needle in that compass, can focus on a variety of subjects throughout the day. But in the end, when they're left alone to settle, they'll focus on the objects of our greatest affection.
How do you pray a prayer so filled with faith that it can move a mountain? By shifting your focus from the size of your mountain to the sufficiency of the Mountain Mover and then stepping forward in obedience.
Ten years ago, 15 years ago, I think the church would have been asleep at the switch. This level of activism and engagement with the needs of society by local churches I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime.
He's dangerous because when God talks to him Bob will do whatever God asks him to do at great cost, even if no one agrees, if it's contrary to the way the stream is going, if Bob feels God is in it he will do it.
I can write about prayer, you can read about prayer, but sooner or later you have to fall to your knees and just plain pray. Then, and only then, will you begin to operate in the vein of God's miracle-working ways.
I can usually sense that a leading is from the Holy Spirit when it calls me to humble myself, serve somebody, encourage somebody or give something away. Very rarely will the evil one lead us to do those kinds of things.
Effective leaders do not fear passion. They welcome it. But from time to time passionate discussions digress into personal attacks, and real people get really hurt. In my view, leaders must head that off before it happens.
For a marriage relationship to flourish, there must be intimacy. It takes an enormous amount of courage to say to your spouse, 'This is me. I'm not proud of it - in fact, I'm a little embarrassed by it - but this is who I am.
The Lord's Prayer is an excellent model, but it was never intended to be a magical incantation to get God's attention. Jesus gave this prayer as a pattern to suggest the variety of elements that should be included when we pray.
Prayerless people cut themselves off from God's prevailing power, and the frequent result is the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed, overrun, beaten down, pushed around, defeated. Surprising numbers of people are willing to settle for lives like that.
More than anything, people want the reality of the discussion at hand. If what is going on in that building is the real thing, if the transforming love and power of Jesus Christ is being experienced, you can sit on a metal folding chair or in a plush theater seat.
Authentic Christians are persons who stand apart from others. Their character seems deeper, their ideas fresher, their spirit softer, their courage greater, their leadership stronger, their concerns wider, their compassion more genuine and their convictions more concrete.
If you’re a serious minded leader, you will read. You will read all you can. You will read when you feel like it, and you will read when you don’t. You will do whatever you have to do to increase your leadership input, because you know as well as I do that it will make you better.
If we were to boil down Christianity to its core, we'd be left with simply this: relationship with God. The living, loving God of the universe has spoken throughout history, and still speaks today - not just to pastors or priests, but to anyone who will listen. God will speak to you.
It’s the great temptation for small groups of people to slide into a state where they’re not quite telling each other the truth and they’re not quite celebrating each other. Instead, they tolerate each other, they accommodate each other, and they settle for sitting on the unspoken matters that separate them.
Obeying the Spirit instead of your own self-centered whims will lead you to places you've never been, challenge you in ways you have never been challenged, and invite levels of sacrifice you never dreamed you could make. This is the power and the promise of full-throttle faith, of living a life fueled solely by God.
Leaders, your God-given job is not merely to preside over something, not to pontificate to your underlings how smart you are, not merely to preserve something from its gradual demise; it's to figure out what God wants to get done in this world, figure out what role you play in that, and then to move something or someone from here to there.
It helps certain church leaders identify the fact that they have the spiritual gift of leadership that the Bible talks about in Romans 12:8. Once you understand that God has given a gift, then training becomes more seriously. When you receive better training, you become more effective in the leadership position that God has assigned to you.
Nothing on earth has greater potential to change lives and carry out His kingdom work in your community, than your local church.There's nothing like the local church when it's working right. Its beauty is indescribable. Its power is breathtaking. Its potential is unlimited. No other organization on earth is like the church. Nothing even comes close.
When God transforms the life of just one leader, that leader can transform a church. When one church is transformed, you can transform a community. And when enough churches are thriving, you can affect a region, a country, and eventually the entire world with the positive, life-changing power of Jesus Christ and the redeeming and restoring work of his people.
Most unmarried people have no idea what it takes to make a marriage work; they grossly underestimate the price people have to pay to build long-term, mutually satisfying relationships. And they fail to understand that the only people with the strength to pay that price are those who have plumbed the depths of their relationship with God, and have dealt with their own brokenness.
We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become 'self feeders.' We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.
God is looking for women and men who are full on for Him... people who have abandoned their own program and are just looking for how they can use their unique talents and abilities to further God's activities and programs in this world. These are the people God will tap on the shoulder and say, “Come with me and we're going to do something great in your lifetime. Come, we're going to do this together.
The rest of the story from Acts 1:8 explains that Christ-followers have a mission while here on earth. They are to be Christ’s witnesses all over this planet. It’s as if Christ said, “Think you’re missing the book smarts, the street smarts, the looks, the talent, or the speaking ability to accomplish this mission? Don’t be concerned with those things, because you have my mountain-moving, life-transforming, death-defying power on your side.”
Religion is spelled 'D-O', because it consists of the things people do try to somehow gain God's forgiveness and favor. But the problem is that you never know when you've done enough. But thankfully, Christianity is spelled differently. It's spelled 'D-O-N-E', which means that what we could never for ourselves, Christ has already done for us. To become a real Christian is to humbly receive God's gift of forgiveness and to commit to following His leadership.
I'm praying to the Creator of the world, the King of the universe, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-faithful God. I'm praying to the God who made the mountains and who can move them if necessary. I'm praying to the God who has always been faithful to me, who has never let me down no matter how frightened I was or how difficult the situation looked. I'm praying to a God who wants to bear fruit through me, and I am going to trust that he is going to use me tonight. Not because of who I am, but because of who he is. He is faithful.
If you're living a yielded life, and if you have the preaching and teaching gift, and you're yielding that to God on a continual basis, that's one of the signs that you're in the right place doing the right thing for the right reasons. If you're doing something in the kingdom, and you rarely feel that, that's a red flag. Something needs to be looked at. Are you using the right gift? Are you using it in the right way? For the right reasons? At the right time? In the right context? If I didn't feel it consistently, that would be quite troubling to me.