I am yielding my blog today to my friend Jon Lewis. He recently wrote the following letter to NPR regarding a segment on the responses to the affair and resignation of General Petraeus. His words are important and timely for us as believers who hold to a different model of leadership than that of the world in which we live. Good words, John! _________________________________ I take exception to some of the conclusions that were .

I was recently completing an on-line survey produced by a major US university (name not important) when I came to a page that stopped me short.  It was simply titled, ‘Gender’. What caused a double-take was the answer options – Male, Female, Other.  Other? I looked again, wondering if this was either a typo or a subliminal way for the surveyors to see if I was really paying attention.  But there is was…Other. My .

The 2012 election will be remembered in history for many reasons, and I would like to submit one for your consideration. This was the election of evangelical disengagement.  Simply put, we didn’t much matter. Our core kingdom values were trampled on and we sat on our hands.  Regardless of what you think of his leadership and policies, Barak Obama is a pro-choice champion, a supporter of the redefinition of marriage and an opponent of .

Our third meditation on this text considers the emphasis, “why have you forsaken me?”  If we are honest, this is the version with which we most closely identify.  It is not just the forsakenness, or the fact that it is happening for some reason, or even that it comes from a loving God.  It is the fact that it is happening to me! The result of this emphasis is either guilt or anger.  We .

We are looking at the different interpretations of this text that come from the way the key words are emphasized.  In the first blog we looked at, “why have you forsaken me?” and we contemplated the purposes of God.  Here we will look at, “why have you forsaken me?”  This is a question of the character of God.  It is direct, stinging and personal.  It skirts the universal, theoretical form of the question and .

Have you ever played the game where you take a simple sentence and see how the meaning changes when you change the emphasis?  Start with, “Why did you eat that apple?”  Now read it as, “Why did you eat that apple?” or “Why did you eat that apple?” or “why did you eat that apple?” or even “why did you eat that apple?”  The meanings change significantly, don’t they? Matthew 27:46 records Jesus’ anguished .

The comment caught me completely off-guard.  I was proudly showing a colleague my new truck; a sleek black Dodge Ram 2500 long bed with a V8 Hemi engine that my kids named Darth Vader.  Instead of the expected words of admiration, however, this friend just retorted, “You are really supporting terrorism with that thing.”  He said it with a smile, but I heard the seriousness in his tone. What took me back was not .

The sixth and final temptation in the way we as leaders deal with money is to play the owner and not the steward. The previous five temptations may be wrapped up and subsumed under this one powerful Christian concept. We are stewards not owners. Our earthly existence can be understood on four planes; our relationships with God, with ourselves, with our neighbor and with the creation itself. On all four planes we live in .

The fifth temptation in our role as leaders in relationship to money is to separate our personal spiritual journey from our work as a Christian leader. In our postmodern culture we are encouraged to compartmentalize our private life from our public service. Postmodernism teaches us that It is perfectly acceptable if not downright beneficial to live one life at home and another at the office. We are told that there is no meta-ethic that .

The fourth temptation we face as leaders is kingdom building. Loving one master and despising the other calls us to be one-kingdom Christians. Christ’s call on our life is uncompromising and unequivocal. We are to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him. There is place for only one allegiance, one Lord, one master. The abundant Christian life is only found in the total surrender of all we have and all we are .