Weekend Reads: Leading, following, and submitting

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions: Your Foundation for Successful Leadership

By John Maxwell

When you’ve written more than 60 books, where do you find ideas for another one? Leadership guru John Maxwell decided to open the floor to the general public. He solicited people’s leadership questions on social media, and then wove them—and their answers—into Good Leaders Ask Great Questions: Your Foundation for Successful Leadership (Center Street, 2014).

Some of the questions are very guru-worthy: “What is the most effective daily habit for any leader to develop?” Maxwell’s answer is that a leader must habitually give more than he receives. This is the way to change the world. Other questions, such as, “Does everyone have the potential to be an effective leader?” seem fairly easy to answer. Yet Maxwell almost effortlessly nuances his response: “Anyone can become better at leading.” I think that’s almost a “no,” though Maxwell points out that leadership and service are intimately connected. Anyone can learn to serve better, and in so doing will gain more of the influence that is the essence of leadership.

Maxwell writes in his usual easy-to-follow style, his point being that helping people is more important to him than sounding smart. That’s why questions are good. Better to be ignorant and ask questions: They are “the most effective means of connecting with people.” Go into every situation asking, “What do I need to know?” Then listen carefully to the answer.

Will reading Maxwell make you a better leader? Only if you listen to what he says. Asking questions is pointless for those who already know all the answers. It’s a question I always ask: “Caleb, are you too proud to learn something, or will you be humble enough to admit that you don’t know and submit to the answer you receive?” Maxwell unpacks that kind of thinking in 275 readable pages, and his answers are worth following.

The Red Sea Rules: 10 God-given Strategies for Difficult Times

By Robert Morgan

I admit it. Robert Morgan’s The Red Sea Rules (Thomas Nelson, 2014 edition) met an unfair degree of skepticism when it first crossed my desk. Exodus 14 exists to reveal the God who saves His people, and to find in it the sub-titular 10 God-given Strategies for Difficult Times seemed like an exercise in missing the point. Then I found out what the strategies are.

Morgan is a pastor, and if this book is any indication, his ability to find the point of a text and then explain why it matters is well above average. His first two rules alone are worth the price of the book. Rule 1: “Realize that God means for you to be where you are.” Just as God purposely directed the Israelites to camp exactly where they could be best trapped by Pharaoh, so He is sovereignly directing your paths too. Here is no flirtation with the soul-crushing idea that one can somehow miss God’s best. Morgan unapologetically directs readers to fix their confidence on the inscrutable ways of Providence with the confidence that God’s will is always being carried out. How is that comforting? See Rule 2: “Be more concerned for God’s glory than for your relief.” The very fact that He is working out what is best for His glory is where your comfort lies.

In other words, the same God who delivered Israel is at work to glorify Himself in your life. The Red Sea Rules is not, after all, an exercise in narcissistic reading of ourselves into the biblical text. It is an accessible exposition of the character of God and His marvelous wisdom in dealing with His people in all ages. We walk in this age by a faith in the God who delivers, and you can trust Morgan to show you His unchanging faithfulness.

Beat God to the Punch: Because Jesus Demands Your Life

By Eric Mason

I once heard that if your theology can’t be preached in the ghetto, then you’d better examine your theology. Eric Mason, an inner-city pastor in Philadelphia, clearly endorses this view. He knows and serves a God who is big enough to handle the ghetto, and this little book is grassroots theology at its finest. The title, of course, is deliberately provocative. Beat God to the Punch: Because Jesus Demands Your Life (B&H Books, 2014) intends to make readers stop and think. In so doing, it draws on its author’s background.

Mason grew up in a family where discipline was largely administered through questions. “Oh no you didn’t?” was just one of the most popular. As a thoroughly white, thoroughly rural farm kid, I’ve never actually been to the ghetto or heard that question. I never thought of conceptualizing submission to God as beating Him to the punch. In Mason’s parlance, God’s punch is His righteous wrath against sin which must and will land, and which God cannot pull precisely because He is righteous. But if you kneel now, if you submit now, then that punch of God’s wrath will spend its force on Christ instead of you. With that understanding, you can be liberated to live by grace.

Beat God to the Punch deals honestly—I mean, “for real for real” with the challenges of ministry in the ghetto. The one that sticks out to Mason is his own sinful heart. He’s learning to show genuine Christian love to the homosexual who walks in the door on Sunday morning. As another brilliant illustration has it, he’s learning to listen to every frequency in the soundtrack of God’s revelation, not just the pounding bass of the “808s” or sub-woofers he loves. What’s more, Mason deftly draws the reader along with him, right from the ghetto into the presence of God.