I’m at Willow Creek today blogging the Global Leadership Summit. Once again, it should be an exciting time with lots of excellent content.
In previous years I basically took notes over each session, writing down everything I thought was interesting. This year, I think I might try to do a 500 word summary after each session with 1-2 application points. We’ll see if I’m able to do that!
I’ll also be posting some core take-aways on twitter.
Most of us immediately recognize that the answer, of course, is yes. But there is no shortage of overspiritualizers out there today who like to rain on the parade of common grace, and sometimes (strangely enough) the quest for competence can be wrongly labeled as idolatry.
Hence, it is important — not to mention interesting — to see the biblical foundation behind truths that are very clear simply from the light of nature alone. Competence is one of them.
One of the most fascinating passages here is Proverbs 2:2-4, where competence is said to be a component of wisdom, and we are exhorted to seek it diligently.
You don’t see this directly in many translations, because they tend to translate the term for “competence” here simply as “understanding” (and, obviously, there’s a relationship). But Tremper Longman brings this out most clearly in his more precise translation of the passage in his commentary on Proverbs
My son, if you grasp my speech and store up my commands within you, bending your ear toward wisdom, extending your heart toward competence — indeed, if you call out for understanding, shout for competence, if you seek it like silver and search for it like hidden treasure…
So, to everyone who has an innate desire to do good work and be effective at what you do: be encouraged. This desire is not unspiritual, but is a reflection of the image of God in you. It is a very spiritual thing to be competent; indeed, God exhorts us to it.
Finding a good iPad case has been quite a challenge for me. I don’t tend to like Apple’s overly minimalistic smart covers. On the other hand, many cases overdo it.
However, I found out the hard way that it is very important to have a good case. Last fall I bought a new case, only to discover a few months later that the thing that holds the iPad into the case was not very durable. As a result, it quickly broke and my iPad would no longer stay in the case.
So I decided to go without a case, at least for a while. Would you believe that shortly thereafter my screen cracked from falling — of all places — off the side of my bed? It hit the bed frame just wrong and cracked right in the corner.
This was frustrating. It is also an example of actually doing good quality work and creating products (in this case, iPad cases) with good design. Sure this was my fault. However, the fact that it is so hard to find a decent iPad case was a major contributor to the situation. If the case I had obtained hadn’t broken so quickly, for example, this likely wouldn’t have happened.
A poor quality product, in other words, caused harm to come to another product. This is annoying.
I’ve finally found an iPad case that I like, and the interior-thing that holds the iPad in place seems to be based upon a new design that looks robust and relatively unobtrusive. I think they may have hit the mark here. Here’s the case:
And, if you prefer a case that is able to hold business cards, this one looks good:
Matt Heerema recently preached an excellent sermon on how the gospel affects our work. This is the first message in a series his church is doing on the doctrine of vocation.
Here’s a great section where Matt summarizes why it is so important to understand God’s design and purpose for our work:
If we don’t get this right then we will sense, as I’m guessing many of us do, a disconnect between our spiritual life and our work life, and we will fall into one of several traps.
If we consider our daily work as eternally meaningless then some of us might put zero thought and effort into a potential career in the marketplace that could very well be one or five or ten of the talents that our Heavenly Master is entrusting into our care!
Or some of us might buy into the World’s system of doing work, according to the world’s philosophies of how to conduct business and treat each-other, and if you are a believer this will likely cause you a great amount of guilt or confusion and distance from God.
Or perhaps you will simply resign yourself to the drudgery of a “meaningless” work life, gritting your teeth against the inherent worldliness and worthlessness of it all.
And in every case we will miss the joy, pleasure, and power we can experience when we realize our daily “mundane” and “secular” tasks can glorify God and expand His kingdom in real and ways. And I’m hoping that as a result of this series, we’ll learn to be encouraged that our daily work matters to Him and will count for something eternal.
And most of all, because of that, we’ll become equipped to live every moment or our life with a constant awareness of His presence, His help, His concern, and His pleasure with and for our work, and let us do all that we do for His Glory!
You can both read and listen to the sermon online.
The Global Leadership Summit is next Thursday and Friday, August 8-9. Speakers this year include Colin Powell, Mark Burnett (executive producer of The Apprentice, Survivor, and the recent Bible series on the History Channel), Patrick Lencioni, Liz Wiseman, and many more.
In case you aren’t familiar with the Summit, here’s a summary:
The Global Leadership Summit is a two-day, world-class leadership event experienced by more than 170,000 leaders around the world, representing more than 14,000 churches. It’s telecast LIVE from Willow’s campus (near Chicago) every August. Throughout the fall, Summit events take place in an additional 300+ cities, 92 countries—and translated into 42 languages. This event is crafted to infuse vision, skill development and inspiration for the sake of local church transformation.
I recommend the Summit for every leader. The on-site campus is sold out, but you can still attend through a host site (and there is likely one in your area).
I’ll also be blogging the Summit again this year, and am looking forward to it!
Here’s the audio from the breakout session I did on productivity and the gospel at the Gospel at Work conference at Covenant Life in January.
I talk about three main things:
And in the midst of this I answer a bunch of questions about motivation, leadership, the world of work, and other things. (Wait — it sounds like the questions are not included; very sorry!)
It was a fantastic conference and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of it. (You can also watch the keynotes and listen to the other breakouts on their site.)
It seems to me that we have, perhaps, inadvertently reversed the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Jesus’ point in the parable is that our neighbor is anyone in need. In order to make this point clear, he tells the story of the Samaritan coming across a man who was beaten and robbed. Even though this man was culturally his enemy, he takes action and helps.
Jesus’ point is: don’t let yourself off the hook of the command to love your neighbor as yourself by limiting it only to a narrow group of people. Love even your enemies, do this sacrificially (as the Samaritan did), and be willing to risk (as it was a dangerous road).
I think precisely because of this parable, few people in the world who are familiar with the teaching of Jesus would be callous enough to walk by a person bleeding on the side of the road. Or, if they did, they would know it was deeply wrong (unlike the religious people in the parable, who apparently didn’t even get that).
But that’s only half the point. In fact, I would suggest if that’s all we get from the parable, we’ve totally missed the point — even if when presented with the exact circumstances of the parable, we would stop to help.
The reason is this: we don’t very often come across people who are bleeding on the side of the road. So how does the parable apply to us the rest of the time?
I think we’ve inadvertently taken the parable and restricted the meaning of our “neighbor” in the other direction, thus doing the very thing Jesus is forbidding. We’ve come to think that our neighbor is only a person in extreme need — the person bleeding on the side of the road.
But what about the person who is not bleeding on the side of the road, but has other, much smaller but still very real needs?
We tend to just pass on by. “He’s not my neighbor — my neighbor is the person bleeding on the side of the road.” And yet it never crosses our mind to say, “Hmm…; isn’t it strange that I’ve never actually come across such a person in my entire life?”
Jesus told this parable to teach us something that is to apply to us every single day of our lives. He gave an extreme example to counter the common notion of the day that limited the scope of who we are to love. But then we’ve strangely seized on the example he gave and limited the meaning of “neighbor” in an entirely different direction, to mean only those in extreme need. That was not Jesus point.
Overlooking seemingly “small,” everyday, and ordinary needs is also a great sin. Your neighbor is not just the person in extreme need, but the person right before you at work, in your neighborhood, in your community. Your client, business partner, employee, co-worker, person who comes off the street into your business asking for directions, or person who attends your church and has a concern. Anyone and everyone who has any need is your neighbor.
If you think you’ve got it together because you don’t pass by people who are beaten up on the side of the road, but overlook issues of everyday need in the people right before you, you are missing it.
And don’t we all need to hear this? I know I do.
So, let’s get with it. Let’s about the world with our eyes and ears open to seek out, identify, and meet all types of needs that the people have whom God brings across our paths. Let’s ditch this notion that our neighbor is only someone in extreme need. Let’s be proactive in meeting less extreme needs as well.
And, as we do that, then we will be truly obeying the point of the parable, even if we never literally come across someone beaten up and bleeding on the side of the road.
And, we just might come to see that this seemingly “small” needs aren’t quite so small after all.
Several weeks ago I had the privilege of being a guest on Loren Pinilis’s very helpful podcast on Christian time management.
Loren is a great interviewer and I really enjoyed talking with him. I think we talked for almost three hours! He has broken up our conversation into several episodes in his podcast. Here’s the first episode. In it, we discuss:
Many thanks to my friend, Matt Heerema, for setting the blog up on a new and much faster, more reliable server. Thank you Matt!
Matt is the founder and owner of Mere Agency, a web agency that offers services in the area of organizational strategy consulting, website information architecture, design, website construction, and website hosting services. (Full disclosure: I do some contract work for Matt.)
Matt and his company do fantastic work , and if you or your organization are looking for help in any of those areas, it would be worth checking them out.
I have some great news. The book I’ve been working on for the past two years (or more) is finally done.
The book, which you’ve probably heard me talk about before, is on the gospel and productivity. It’s called What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done
This is what I’ve needed (as I talk about in the introduction and other parts of the book) and what I’ve found so many others need as I’ve talked and interacted with thousands of Christians around the world for the last several years. The subject of how to be effective in managing our work and lives from a biblical perspective is a huge gap in Christian thinking right now that I hope this book can help fill. It’s filled with biblical reflection, practical tips, and (I hope!) interesting personal stories that show the mistakes I’ve made (sometimes kind of funny) just as much as any accomplishments.
I hope the book helps a lot of people. More details on the book to come.
Now, a bit about the blog.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been blogging much for a while. The book is why. It took up all the time I had (and much more) and was absolutely exhausting.
Writing this book was by far the most challenging, difficult, and painful thing I’ve ever done. The worst thing of all is that it just wouldn’t let up. I’d think I was done, then it turned out I wasn’t. I thought I was done again, but was wrong again. And so it continued.
As far back as a year and a half ago, when I completed the first draft, I tweeted that it was the hardest thing I had ever done, times ten. Little did I know…I still had a long ways to go and it would get way harder.
I’ve been trapped in a canyon, fell flat on my face while running in the Wal-Mart parking lot, had horrible nose surgery, and experienced a whole host of other painful realities, and this book was worse than any of them — by far.
But, the book is finally done, for real, and with the publisher (Zondervan) and on track for release this winter. (I actually finished it in early June, but it’s taken me this long to get back above water after the writing process.) I am grateful to the Lord for sustaining me through the process. Without his support and strength, I would have sunk for good long ago, no question.
Now that I’m getting back to a normal workload, here are some of my immediate and longer-term plans for the blog, Lord willing:
Thanks for sticking with me through this process. I’m excited about the future and, Lord willing, there will be lots of interesting stuff on the blog to come!
