“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.”

When you get to the end will God say, “Well done,” or, “What was up with that?”

Leadership is not for the faint of heart

Whatever the capacity for human suffering, the church has a greater capacity for healing and wholeness.

Enjoy every single day you get to lead because it will be over in a blink.

I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity.

To be developed as a leader, failure must be allowed. Failure only helps us improve.

Jesus took what I deserved so I could get what He deserved.

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.

I remember being young in the 1960s. We had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.

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.

God led Jesus to a cross, not a crown, and yet that cross ultimately proved to be the gateway to freedom and forgiveness for every sinner in the world.

Your culture will only ever be as healthy as the senior leader wants it to be.

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.

Most of us are far too busy for our own spiritual good.

Everyone wins when a leader gets better

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.

He will only plant that seed where the conviction of his spirit has brought brokenness, where the soil has been watered with the tears of repentance as well as the tears of joy.