What Will Others See of God in You Today?

You are created in God's image ... charged with the responsibility to carry each of God's created attributes into every arena of your personal and professional life. In so doing, you are reflecting God's image. What will others see of God in you today?

Meaning & Purpose

You were redeemed for a noble mission in the human enterprise - to restore within yourself the long-forgotten attributes of God - so that - you can fill the earth with the glory of God. Go out today with meaning and purpose! Richard

Your Leadership Mandate

You are mandated to lead!

Your leadership enables each person to reclaim the characteristics of God given to him as bearer of God’s image. Leadership must help others fulfill their mandate to reflect and represent the image of God. Leadership must help every person do that which God put them on earth to do: fill the earth with His glory.

This is leadership in its ultimate, created, eternal, and fullest sense. Show me a person who is actively reclaiming and cultivating their created attributes (i.e. active and purposeful, rational, creative, exercise dominion, moral, relational, free and responsible, loving, merciful, faithful, interdependent, and generous), and I will show you a true leader.

Leaders are not born!

Leaders are not made!

Leaders are created!

You have been created with the full capacity for this one essential purpose of the human enterprise – to restore within yourself and within each other the long-forgotten image of God so that we can fill the earth with the glory of God. You were created for this purpose. This is your leadership mandate.

You were created to lead!

You have the created capacity for leadership!

This is the truth about leadership!

This is the Genesis Principle of Leadership!

Now go out and lead!

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Organizations collapse for the lack of leaders.

Every organization needs all the good managers it can find. However, finding and developing managers (that is - people who know how to do things right) is not all that difficult.

Organizations do not collapse because there are not enough good managers. Organizations collapse because there are not enough leaders. Evidence? Look at the big three automakers. Need I say more?

In spite of the glut of leadership literature and seminars, organizations continue to collapse because there are simply not enough people who lead. Most professional development seminars and books are ineffective because they continue to miss the mark regarding this essential purpose of leadership.

The key to developing effective leaders is helping people restore the long-forgotten image of God within them. Leaders are to help others reclaim and steward the created attributes of God within those they lead. Leaders must become more conscious of men and women as being made in the image of God. Therefore they possess the God-created, God-given attributes. Leaders must see that people are not driven by the evolutionary forces of genetics or the developmental press of the environment. People are not in the process of perceiving, behaving, or becoming a fully functioning self, nor are they in a lifelong pursuit of self-actualization.

Rather, leadership and the development of leaders must be specifically directed at enabling each person to reclaim (structurally) the long-forgotten attributes of God and to cultivate (functionally) each created leadership attribute.

Now go out and develop leaders … in His image.

LEADERSHIP HAS A PURPOSE

Leadership has a purpose. I don’t hear much about this today. Do you?

The redemption of all men and women and boys and girls is for one central purpose: to fill the earth again with the glory of God through the restored attributes of God within each and every person. The central purpose of the church, the family, education, and, particularly leadership is to take mankind back to its first and original condition – the “good creation.”

Convinced of the importance of this task, pastors must focus their preaching, teaching, and shepherding toward enabling every member of their congregations to reclaim and cultivate the long-lost attributes of God.

Parents must reorder their priorities toward the cultivation of the created attributes in their children.

Teachers must recapture a high, traditional, biblical view of their students and radically alter their pedagogical approaches to training and developing children.

Employers must change their low, mechanistic views of the worker enabling their employees to recapture a high and holy view of work and personhood.

As this occurs, everyone will delight in God’s image and become His garden of delight – people will delight in God – God will delight in His image bearers – and the earth will be filled with God’s glory. It will fulfill Comenius’ dream who prayed:

Do thou, everlasting wisdom, who dost play in this world and whose delight is in the sons of men, ensure that we in turn may now find delight in thee. Discover more fully unto us ways and means to better understanding of thy play and to more eager pursuance of it with one another until we ourselves finally play in thy company more effectively to give increasing pleasure unto thee, who art our everlasting delight! Amen!

More later ….

Now go out and lead – in His image.

Finding Your Leadership Voice

Pastor John was deeply concerned about the illiteracy of the children in his parish. His church served a rural, agricultural area. Life in this farming country was demanding. The days were long. Everyone worked hard from sunup to sundown. Work on the family farms required the help of everyone – particularly the children. As soon as they were able to walk, the children worked alongside their parents. Children were essential to the success of the family farm. Consequently, there was no time for learning reading, writing, and arithmetic. Going to school was a luxury only the noble and wealthy people in the surrounding villages could enjoy.

Nevertheless, Pastor John convinced the parishioners in his church to allow their children to stay for a few hours following the Sunday worship service so that he could teach them reading, writing, arithmetic, and Latin. Pastor John called this innovative program, “Sunday School.” As far as I can discern, this may be the first record of “Sunday School” in church history. Curiously, though, his “Sunday School” was for the purpose of providing a well-rounded education to the boys and girls in the parish.

Known today as the “Father of Pedagogy,” Pastor John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) pioneered several modern educational methodologies at his “Sunday School” in Moravia (now known as the Czech Republic). He was the first to use pictures in his textbooks; the first to include women in his school; and, the first to believe that learning was a cradle-to-the-grave process. He wrote over 150 books (some of his Latin textbooks are still in use today); documented the distinctive learning styles of children of varying ages; and, formulated an educational model based upon the developmental growth of children (which he named “pedagogy” – the art and science of teaching children). There is evidence that he turned down an offer to become the first president of Harvard University.

John Amos Comenius was also the first to believe that learning, spiritual growth, and mental/emotional development was intricately woven together. He held a classical, traditional, biblical view of the person believing that the essential purpose of education was to enable every child to be fully conformed to the image of God. “The restoration within us of the long-forgotten image of God” was the driving vision for his “Sunday School.” Comenius believed that the essential purpose of the human enterprise – in every sphere of life – was rooted in man’s call to fill the earth with the glory of God through the restored created attributes of God. Once restored, we would be able to fully participate in God’s divine redemptive purpose, which ultimately leads to the restoration and liberation of the entire fallen creation.

Comenius was convinced that authentic human living begins with the imitation of God. He approached all of life guided by a biblical view of personhood. Life was to be a “garden of delight” where we, as “gardeners,” are to “water God’s plants,” enabling each person to “find his voice.” In this way, each and every person becomes “a garden of delight for his God.” Toward this end, Comenius emphasized bringing faith and reason together into what he called “harmonic interrelation.” By this, he meant that faith and reason are to compliment each other in such a way as to teach all things to all men from all points of view. Such an approach ultimately promotes the rediscovery and restoration of the long-lost attributes (image) of God.

Think about it: This is the foundational organizing principle of leadership.

Comenius had it right!

More later …

[i] Comenius, John Amos Comenius, The Great Didactic, vol. xvi: 2.

The "Krypton" of Leadership

As a leader you possess the created capacity and responsibility to be generous as God is generous, dispensing the sacrificial generosity of God to those around you by being supremely and wastefully generous with your time, talent, and treasure.

Supreme generosity is at the very core of your nature! Generous is an attribute that God gave to you. You were created to be gloriously – even wastefully – generous. It is part of your created nature and divine responsibility, as a bearer of God’s image, to be supremely generous with your time, talent, and treasure.

Yes, the story of the greedy king who learned to excel in the grace of giving is a wonderful example. But what better example can be found than in the supreme, inexpressible generosity of God, the King of Kings? Supreme generosity is at the very core of God’s nature.

God the Father generously created and sustains the universe.

God the Son generously gave His life that you might live an eternally abundant life.

God the Holy Spirit generously equips you with divinely originated abilities that enable you to play a unique and strategic role in transforming every corner of culture for God and for good.

Supreme generosity is as the very core of your nature! Excelling in the grace giving is not an abstract, dusty, theological notion. God is exuberantly, cheerfully, and lavishly generous. God’s acts of generosity are transformative. God’s generosity is real. God’s generosity changes things. God loves to give.

In his masterful collection of daily devotional poems, The Diary of an Old Soul, the Victorian poet, novelist, and Christian fantasy writer, George MacDonald (1824 – 1905), described God’s generosity as “gloriously wasteful.” In his poem for March 2, MacDonald wrote, “Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art Thou.” [i]

God created you to be gloriously and wastefully generous. The generosity of your time, talent, and treasure also changes things. In fact, in the final analysis, it may be the only thing that ever changes things. And like the greedy king, you too will learn that you are the true benefactor of your own generosity. Like the greedy king, you, too, will experience great joy and fulfillment as you learn to excel in the grace of giving.

Furthermore, God takes great joy and delight in watching His people cheerfully and lavishly – even wastefully – bestow gifts of their time, talent, and treasure in changing people and the world about them. God gives cheerfully and loves those who cheerfully give. When you are generous, you fill the earth with the glory of God.

Generosity is the “krypton” of leadership. The element krypton, appearing on the periodic chart of elements is, basically, an inert chemical. But, when used in fluorescent bulbs, krypton makes the light whiter and brighter. When used in laser lights, krypton makes them more powerful and precise. Like the element krypton, rich generosity lights up leadership – leadership that separates and distinguishes great leaders from good leaders. Great leaders excel in the transformative, wasteful generosity of their time, talent, and treasure.

You are generous.

You are a leader.

This is the truth about leadership.

This is the Genesis Principle of Leadership.

Now go out and brighten the world with your generosity!

[i] MacDonald, George, The Diary of an Old Man: 366 Writings for Devotional Reflection, Augsburg Fortress Publishers, Minneapolis, 1994.