Leadership and Convictions

I'm reading Leadership Mosaic: 5 Leadership Principles for Ministry and Everyday Life by Daniel Montgomery and Jared Kennedy. As I read, I'm doing a series of blog posts of short, tweet-length quotes. If you want to join me in reading it, you can get it here and send me some of your favorite quotes.  These quotes are from the chapter 1, "The Convictional Leader: Embodying What You Believe.

• Wisdom for leadership begins with the conviction that God speaks. God makes himself known through his world, Word, and works.
• Methodological pragmatism focuses churches and missionary enterprises on “what works”…rather than on faithfulness to God’s Word.
• A value is something to which you will commit, but conviction is a belief you’ll sacrifice for.
• We long to know because we’ve been created to know God and his world. 
• Have you noticed how defensive Christian leaders can be? Have you noticed how we often choose sides before we understand an issue? 
• Before we begin to explore leadership truth from those fields, we should confess God’s sovereignty over them. 
• God wants to move us from the drudgery of mastering it all to the joy of mystery— the joy of discovery.
• Convictional leaders haven’t mastered the Bible. The Bible has mastered them.
• Listening for God’s voice in his world is hard for us, because as leaders (and sinners) we like to hear ourselves talk.
• Painfully, we learned that having convictions sometimes means losing friends and letting go of some dreams.

Putting More Merry into Your Christmas

Christmas cheer isn't always easy to come by. 

Yet Christmas cheer is what the angel announced to the shepherds. 

“Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”

The content of the good news of great joy is the key to putting more merry in your Christmas. 

Unto you is born a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

That means that no matter how wrong things feel this Christmas, what's wrong will be made right. But it also means that no matter how right things are for you, a day is coming when what's right will be made infinitely better. 

He is a Savior. He saves us from our sins. 

He is the Christ, the king who rules forever, the Lord.

God wins. We win. Everybody can win.

We forget this. Sometimes we don't understand it. We're like a small child who has inherited millions but is crying over a broken toy. 

Sometimes we feel the cheer, and we're tempted to think it doesn't get any better than this. Think again. It gets infinitely better. We're still paying with broken toys. 

A new day is coming. Jesus is coming. We need not be overcome by what's wrong now, as painful and sorrow filled as it might be. We need not give our entire focus to our broken toys.

But we dare not hold to tightly to what's right now. It's only a foretaste of something infinitely better.

Merry Christmas!