As I finish this series of leadership posts based from the book of Nehemiah, I want us to review the definition of leadership from George Barna’s book, A Fish Out of Water, p. 7: “Leadership is the process of motivating, mobilizing, resourcing, and directing people to passionately and strategically pursue a vision from God that a group…
Do you remember Aesop’s Fable about the “Goose and the Golden Egg”? A farmer’s goose suddenly and unexplainable starts laying golden eggs. The farmer is just thrilled about this because he is becoming wealthy; however, he gets greedy and wants the goose to produce more and more eggs. He ends up killing the goose so…
“Hard times and hard hearts made the poor miserable.” ~ Matthew Henry. This is how the great Bible commentator starts his analysis of Nehemiah chapter 5. We saw how wise and bold Nehemiah was as he battled enemies from the outside (Tobiah, Sanballat,Gesham, and all the others), but in this chapter, we see that…
As Nehemiah set his hand to the good work of rebuilding the walls and gates around Jerusalem, enemy forces were gathering around him to stop the work. We already know the first two enemies that came against him were Sanballat and Tobiah. Oh, but friends, the enemy list would grow tremendously throughout Nehemiah chapter 4!…
You may remember the story of Scott Beamer, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. When Scott realized the plane had been hijacked by terrorists, he placed a call that went through to an operator. He told the operator what was going on and that he and some other passengers planned…
When we last left off in this series of blog posts about leadership, we learned of Nehemiah’s burden to return to Jerusalem and re-build its burned, broken down walls. At this point, Nehemiah was a “cupbearer” to the Persian King Artaxerxes. He was in the King’s palace and had the responsibility of tasting the wine…
“He that thinks he is leading – and no one is following him – is only taking a walk.” ~ John Maxwell. Nehemiah was NOT just taking a walk!In October of 2010, I was so blessed to be part of Precept Ministries International’s “Leadership Development” Conference. It was an incredible 3 days of examining leadership from…