Depending on your age, Russia may conjure up images of Rocky IV, Red Dawn, the Evil Empire, or the Mueller Report. But amidst all the cultural caricatures, God is doing something beautiful today in this sprawling country that covers 11 different time zones. Our...
“We have a surprise for you.” Our hosts were almost giddy with excitement as they shared a secret I was asked to keep to myself for the next four days. After nearly 30 hours of travel and two nights of sleeping on an airplane, we had finally arrived at our...
Your work matters to God. Twelve years ago, I explored platforms that would embrace the biblical truth of faith and work. I reset my career and came to North Central University to engage in these Scriptures with a new generation who needs to know that they can...
“This could be our biggest offering ever.” That phrase ended up being prophetic. As we stood in a gathering of local women caught in the sex trade at what is known as the Red Light District Church in Southeast Asia, the emotions literally drained us. But we all felt...
The older I get, the more emotional I become. Lump in the throat, watery eyes, sheepishly blaming it on seasonal allergies (all year long) kind of moments. Maybe I’ve always been this sappy, maybe my three kids are just morphing into daily reminders of time’s fleeting...
This is a story of a Business as Mission (BAM) practitioner on the field using business as a mechanism for planting the church in areas of the world you can’t go with traditional missionary methods. In order to protect the work being done there, we will not share the...
This article was originally published at LiveDead.org and was reposted here with their permission. Our friends and partners at LiveDead give their lives to take the Gospel to the unreached people of the earth, often utilizing business and the marketplace to engage the...
Because of our global missions engagement, I’ve had to do a fair bit of international travel over the last 5 years. Long hours on airplanes is not easy, but I won’t lie, interacting with so many missionaries around the world is worth the countless stiff necks,...
Your job is a beautiful platform for the Gospel. I’m not just talking about putting a Bible on your desk, wearing a cross necklace to a business meeting, or displaying a 365 days of Scripture calendar in your office. All those things are fine and dandy, but I’m...
This article was originally published at LiveDead.org and was reposted here with their permission. Our friends and partners at LiveDead give their lives to take the Gospel to the unreached people of the earth, often utilizing business and the marketplace to engage the...
You know when we talk about the gospel, we often think about something kind of ethereal and in over here. It deals with our spiritual life and so, when we go to work every day, when we engage in the realities of our everyday life, it’s like we know those two things go together but kind of you know the gospel is more spiritual. It’s over in this realm and you know then I gotta deal with my business, I gotta deal with my work and strategy and marketing and finance and all of those different kinds of things. And we don’t really connect to those things, but I was reading in Romans one this morning. In Romans one there’s this famous verse says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. For it is the power of God.” The gospel is the power of God. I just got to thinking about that within the context of our everyday lives, including our everyday work. You know the gospel is not just some other good moral philosophy, it’s not just another interesting religious story. The gospel is literally power. The gospel is power. The gospel actually does something in us and around us and through us. The gospel is intended to be fuel for everyday living, our faith, our work, our home lives, our finances. The gospel is power; the gospel is not just another interesting moral philosophy. The gospel is power. So, I just want to encourage you with that this week, to think about how you can tap into the gospel. The power of God. It is there as a gift for you, it is not just some spiritual aspect of your life to be relegated to the spiritual or ethereal realm. It is the power of God for real everyday living. You can tap into it; your work can tap into it. It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.
One of the most powerful tools you can add to your business arsenal this year is prayer. Prayer changes everything. Prayer aligns our hearts with the heart of God and makes us a safe place for Him to deposit His creativity and His ideas and His blessing. There’s this great scene from the Magicians Nephew in The Chronicles of Narnia series that I think illustrates why prayer is so vital. And I’m just going to read it to you, I’m just going to read right out of, right out of this great book. If you haven’t read The Chronicles of Narnia series, I highly recommend it, but the Magicians Nephew, there’s this great scene when Aslan has sent young Digory on a journey to accomplish something for him with one of his friends and they’ve gone on a flying horse together.
A mentor once told me that the two most vulnerable moments for any leader are after a great failure or after a great success. And it’s those moments of success that I want to talk about today. I think it’s when God has breathed on something that we are involved in; When God has done something more than we could have ever asked or expected. We tend to want to take more ownership of those things than we should. And it’s not that we don’t have a role to play, but I think in those moments of success when God has just multiplied something beyond our wildest imaginations, we can tend to pat ourselves on the back. Maybe begin to arrogantly think we were more of the causation for that than we actually were. And there’s going to be moments in any leadership journey of failure, but there’s also gonna be these moments where things just work. Where you look back and you realized, “Oh my gosh, look what has happened in and around me.” And it’s in those moments that we need to humbly fall on our knees and remember that we have a role to play. We are stewards. We function in obedience and response to God but the work, and ultimately the glory, for any success, in any endeavor, goes to God alone. And so, I want to encourage you, in those moments of success, to stay close to the heart of God. Cause there’s gonna be moments where God just miraculously breathes on something and it’s in those moments, we should be grateful that He allowed us to be a part of that journey.