**The audio for this article is in two parts, click 
for part 1 and for part 2.**
When there is a sudden power outage, people become incredibly desperate for alternate energy sources.
The great American philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “Prediction is very bad, especially when it’s about the future.” Indeed, as Leonard Sweet says, “He who lives by the crystal ball is bound to eat glass.”1 But looking ahead into the future, that great unknown, is an essential characteristic of effective leadership.
In the winter of 1988, nuns of the Missionaries of Charity were walking through the snow in the South Bronx in their saris and sandals looking for an abandoned building that they might convert into a homeless shelter. Mother Theresa, the Nobel Prize winner and head of the order, had agreed on a plan with Mayor Ed Koch after visiting him in the hospital several years earlier.
The nuns found two fire-gutted buildings on 148th Street, and the city of New York offered the buildings to the mission at one dollar each.
Along with the costs of leadership come many opportunities – some positive, some negative. Many leaders have access to information or financial resources that they could use to their personal advantage. Others travel widely and almost anonymously, and have ample opportunity to compromise their purity. Still others may be tempted to use their position to unethically crush the competition – whether internal or external. Whether the temptation is about money, sex or power, many leaders sell themselves out.
Doesn’t that make you hungry? Today we want to finish up our study about our motives for worshipping God. People perform acts of worship for many different reasons. But those who belong to the kingdom need to watch their motives. It’s not just an issue of what you do to worship God; the reason why you do it is crucially important.
Last week, as we continued our study of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we began talking about prayer. We learned two things about prayer:
First, we don’t pray to show off our spirituality to other people.
We pray to talk to God and when we pray we really are talking to God.
The clip you just saw from The Fiddler on the Roof is a great example.
used with permission by www.christianityexplained.net.tc
In horror I watched what brutal men did to Jesus. How shocking were the vicious events that lead to his death! During the agony the question repeatedly came to my mind: What will my dear Muslim friends think of it?
In his famous dialogue The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato tells “The Parable of the Cave,” in which a group of subterranean people mistake the shadows they see in the cave for reality. In Plato’s original telling of the story, when one of the people discovers the truth about the source of the shadows and attempts to share his knowledge with the others, they rise up and slaughter him.
An old story has a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi fishing together on a small lake. The discussion comes around to the differences between Christianity and Judaism and the bottom line of their differences is clear: Jewish people follow the Law of Moses and Christians follow the example of Christ. But the rabbi is interested in the practical difference this might make in terms of behavior.
Just then, a gust of wind blows the priest’s hat off his head.
Timothy stands out in Scripture as a stereotypical misfit for a leadership position. From what we know about him, he was timid, a bit sickly and perhaps reticent to do the work he’d been called to do. But when Paul wrote to this young man, his letters reflected the heart of a mentor who perceived his protégé’s leadership potential despite the younger man’s naturally timid disposition (2 Timothy 1:7).
