Editor: Richard (Dick) Innes
Published by: ACTS International
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Vol. 8 – No. 2606 July 01, 2006
Thought for the week: "If men are not governed by God, they will be ruled by tyrants." – William Penn
"Everyone is ignorant on different subjects." – Will Rogers
"Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do the listening." – Larry King
"If you only know your side of an argument, you didn't learn it very well." – Michael Hodgin
"The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness,
beauty and truth." – Albert Einstein
"The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity." – Zig Ziglar
"Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. Emotional health is facing reality at any cost." – M. Scott Peck
"One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Humor is a rubber sword; it allows you to make a point without drawing blood." – Mary Hirsch
Stuart Briscoe writes about a funeral for a war veteran in which the man's military buddies had a role in the service.
The friends requested that the minister lead them to the casket for a moment of silence. They would then follow him out a side door. The plan was carried out with military precision—until the minister marched them into a broom closet. The soldiers had to make an awkward retreat.
That preacher made an honest mistake, but it illustrates that leaders need to know where they are going. As go the leaders, so go the followers. (Haddon Robinson).
Barrie McClymont, ACTS International New Zealand Director from Auckland, in Letters to the Editor of the newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, wrote:
Dear Sir, Forget the many arguments and many words. Here are some concise facts:
Everyone who supports euthanasia is alive. Everyone who supported slavery was free. Everyone who supports abortion was born. That's how oppression works.
Re: Dolly the sheep
Dear Sir, Again we read that Dr. Ian Wilmut created Dolly, the first cloned animal. My dictionary's definitions of the words "create" and "invent" suggest strongly that the talented Dr Wilmut did not "create" Dolly. At best he invented her from life which already existed. The definition of "create" says "to bring into being or form out of nothing". Clearly God creates. Man invents.
Imagine what it must be like to be shipped like cargo along with your whole family to a place, the only purpose of which is to kill people. Imagine struggling to stay alive physically and spiritually in that setting, not knowing what has happened to the rest of your family, but believing that they were exterminated in gas chambers or ovens. This was the common experience of people referred to as holocaust survivors.
One survivor was Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who emerged from the experience with extraordinary insights valuable to all of us. In Man's Search for Meaning he says, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked throughout the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
"Every prisoner had a moral choice to make," he says, "to surrender one's inner self to the Nazis, or to find the meaning in one's life that would give one the strength to go on."
The lessons we can learn are that no matter how bad our troubles are, we can survive them if we choose to survive. And the best way to survive—in fact, the best way to thrive—is to find meaning in every moment of existence, every memory and every possibility for our future.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
"Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, serving as overseers-not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not greedy for money, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock" (1 Peter 5:2-3, NIV).
General Eisenhower would demonstrate the art of leadership with a piece of string. He'd put it on a table and say: "PULL it and it will follow wherever you wish. PUSH it and it will go nowhere at all. It's just that way when it comes to leading people. They need to follow a person who is leading by example."1
People who lord it over others are control freaks. They are insecure people who only feel secure when they are controlling others—or think they are. And whether they are seeking to lead a church, a class, a team, their family, or just one other person, they are not being effective leaders but pushers. Secure people will want to avoid this type of person. The only way to be an effective leader is to be a "puller." That is, to lead by example.
Suggested prayer: "Dear God, please help me to be a true follower of Jesus and to lead others to you by example; that is, by modeling the person you want me to be, so that others seeing my life will also want to be a follower of Jesus. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."
1. Michael P. Green, Illustrations for Biblical Preaching, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989, p. 216
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Books by Dick Innes, Editor of Weekend Encounter You Can't Fly With a Broken Wing How to Mend a Broken Heart I Hate Witnessing—A Handbook for Effective Christian
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