If we want to live and lead like Jesus, we know this one thing about betrayal: it will show us more about ourselves than any other leadership experience we face.

A time when I experienced two extremes ‒ gratitude and entitlement ‒ through money.

If you’re to teach well, you must first find God for yourself in His Word and in your life. Then, out of that you can teach others. Only then will your teaching be life.

Sometimes we’re not enough … but maybe we were never meant to be.

As J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote to his son, “No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial.” So folks, let’s drop the whole “soul mate” talk, shall we? Marriage can be wonderfully satisfying, but that’s the result of God’s grace, hard work, and self-sacrificial love. And that is the truth.

When we’re not strong, we can notice and appreciate those who are.

What was God doing before the creation of the world? The answer to that question will define the nature of the Christian life!

If you are a leader, you will face turbulence in your ministry or organization. Sometimes the turbulence feels so intense that leading seems impossible. Here are four essentials for leading through the turbulence.

The vast majority of ideas are worse than worthless because they are simply bad ideas. Bad ideas will sometimes work because of luck or effort, but good ideas are much, much more likely to succeed. Life is too short to work on bad ideas. But how can we tell which ideas are “good” ones? Here is a list of characteristics of truly good ideas.

Jesus said that our union with Him is to be the source of everything in our lives and ministries. We are to live by His indwelling life in the same way that He lived and ministered out of the indwelling life of His Father.

Jesus lived in continuous fellowship with His Father, and through that fellowship He drew from, and lived by, His Father's life. Thus, Jesus' leadership came from His union with His Father. And, just as Jesus' continuous inward fellowship with His Father was the source of everything in His life and ministry, so our inward fellowship with God is to be the source of everything in our lives and ministries!

What organization doesn’t want to grow? But let’s imagine one better: What if you could increase your organization’s performance and ministry impact in a way that matched and actually solidified your Christ-centered integrity? I want to let you in on a little secret of how one very humble ministry has done just this by increasing the value and immeasurable worth of its most precious resource ‒ its people.

The effective leader will focus on three time horizons simultaneously: 1. Cultivating current responsibilities, extending and defending the core existing ministries. 2. Tending and nurturing emerging ideas, strategies, and processes. 3. Planting seeds for tomorrow. This pattern encompasses the mature, emergent, and embryonic phases of an organization’s life cycle. The leader is responsible to see that they are all addressed effectively.

Remember the last time you were offended? Did you resolve it or is it lurking somewhere in the shadows of your thinking, still itching like yesterday’s mosquito bite? The more you scratch, the more it itches. Offense is like that. The more we focus on it, the bigger it grows, never losing its sting.

God is able to do awesome and amazing things. Why can’t you and I as believers of Christ look at our vision with so much passion? We have the greatest story to tell because the story points to a greater story of God. We need to rise up because God is great and we need to share His message.

When you hear the term “majority culture,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? What thoughts or feelings arise within you? What images or memories of the past resurface?

What does it mean to be healthy across an entire spiritual organization? And, how do you build such an organization? Dr. Malcolm Webber addresses these questions in his presentation at the 2015 Hope International Leadership Summit. The bottom line: Any organization is only as healthy as its people so we must nurture a culture that serves that purpose.

Jesus has given Himself to you, and He’s called you to know Him. In a manner of speaking, this is all He’s called you to do: to look at Him, to hear Him, to touch Him, to know Him. Everything else – every part of the Christian life and holiness and compassion for the world and vision and ministry work – everything else comes out of this. Everything else comes from Him. This is the core reality of the Christian life and of Christian ministry. And this is the meaning of staff development in a Christian organization.

Today I look at our world and how much the culture has changed to reflect a pervasive attitude of self-focus. Yet, God’s Word has never changed and still instructs us as parents and grandparents to train up our children in Him.

I did not grow up in a Christian family. My whole life changed when I as converted about 10 years ago. As I studied and learned more and more, many things surprised me, but perhaps nothing caught me more off-guard than a strange phenomenon I observed among "church folks." At the time I didn't know what to call it, but since then a couple of researchers have identified and named it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. "What the heck is that?" you ask. It happens to be a preferred religion of Westen culture, which usually (and tragically) goes by the name Christianity.