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This book will help you to pray. It strings together what some of the great prayer warriors of the past have had to say about prayer (p.20). You’ll hear from hall-of-famers like Andrew Bonar, Robert Murray McCheynne, and Richard Baxter. Unfortunately...moreThis book will help you to pray. It strings together what some of the great prayer warriors of the past have had to say about prayer (p.20). You’ll hear from hall-of-famers like Andrew Bonar, Robert Murray McCheynne, and Richard Baxter. Unfortunately, this wisdom from the ages also comes with the original packing, and some readers will struggle a little with the older styles of writing.
Our equipment for prayer is a quiet place, a quiet hour, and a quiet heart. Of course, in our noisy world, it’s hard to find anything that’s quiet. Yet, as George Bowen says, “it will never be altogether well with us till we convert the universe into a prayer room, and continue in the Spirit as we go from place to place” (36).
Of the three tools, the most important is a quiet heart. We can quiet our hearts for prayer by directing our hearts to
- our acceptance with God through Christ’s offering
- the Spirit’s grace
- the Holy Scriptures.
What about our posture in prayer? Kneel? Sit? Lie down—surely not! When it comes to prayer, it’s not so much the posture of our bodies that counts, but the posture of our minds. Our minds need to open to God’s presence, honest before him, and full of faith in him who as God is all-powerful and as Father is all-gracious. Here is the posture the author extols:
Lord, here I hold within my trembling hand,
This will of mine—a thing which seemeth small;
And only thou, O Christ, canst understand
How, when I yield thee this, I yield mine all.
It hath been wet with tears, and stained with sighs,
Clenched in my grasp till beauty hath it none;
Now, from thy footstool where it prostrate lies
Thy prayer ascendeth, Let thy will be done. (p.58)
After devoting a chapter to each of the forms of prayer (worship, confession, and request), the book concludes with two chapters on the rewards of prayer. Prayer’s rewards are both “hidden” (changing you) and “open” (blessing others).
Prayer changes you! One of its “hidden” riches is the knowledge of God’s will:
In prayer we present ourselves to God, holding our motives in his clear light, and estimating them after the counsel of his will. Thus our thoughts and feelings stratify themselves: those that rise towards the honour of God taking precedence of those that drift downward towards the gratification of self. And so the great decisions of life are prepared.
In prayer, Jacob became Israel; in prayer, Daniel saw Christ’s day, and was glad; in prayer, Saul of Tarsus received his commission to go ‘far hence’ among the Gentiles; in prayer, the Son of Man accomplished his obedience, and embraced the cross. (107)
Prayer changes others! One of its “open” rewards is the spread of the kingdom by prayer:
By prayer, the tentmaker of Tarsus won the dissolute Corinthians to purity and faith, laid the enduring foundations of Western Christianity, and raised the name of Jesus high in the very palace of Nero. (121-2)
Robert Roberts preached a sermon that led to an awakening in Wales. A friend asked the preacher a few days later where he got “that wonderful sermon.” Roberts led him to a small parlour and said “It was here I found that sermon you speak of—on the floor here, all night long, turning backward and forward, with my face sometimes on the earth” (122).
“In a word, every gracious work which has been accomplished within the kingdom of God has been begun, fostered and consummated by prayer” (123). There is no secret to revival; it is only “ask and receive.”(less)
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This is not an Andrew Murray type book on humility. This is a book on leadership, business leadership. However, it’s not a Stephen Covey type leadership book either. The author comes to the topic as a historian. Dickson’s basis thesis is that “the mo...moreThis is not an Andrew Murray type book on humility. This is a book on leadership, business leadership. However, it’s not a Stephen Covey type leadership book either. The author comes to the topic as a historian. Dickson’s basis thesis is that “the most influential and inspiring people are often marked by humility” (19) and that if you want success, humility is a virtue to be cultivated. The book’s aim, therefore, is to convince the reader of the logic, beauty, and benefits of humility (29).
Dickson anticipates that many of us do not instinctively associate humility with leadership, and so he shows us some of the “strange places” it shows up in. Jim Collins, in his hunt for the components of great leadership, determined them to be “steely determination and an attitude of humility” (20).
Then there’s this quote from General Stanley McChrystal:
I have found in my experience that the best answers and approaches may be counter-intuitive. The opposite of what it seems you ought to do is what ought to be done. So, when I’m asked the question, What approach should we take in Afghanistan? I say, humility. (21)
The author defines humility as
the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself. More simply, you could say the humble person is marked by a willingness to hold power in service of others. (24)
Humility presupposes dignity, is willing, and is social (for the sake of others, unlike modesty, which is more a private condition of mind) (24-5).
Next follows a chapter on leadership, which Dickson discusses in such a way that we can immediately see the contribution humility can make to it. Because leadership is fundamentally relational—it’s all about leading and influencing others, after all—the leader’s most central tools are persuasion and example (43). By example, Dickson means the leader’s character. In order to be respected and followed, leaders must display honourable character, of which humility is key. Character is also a vital factor in a leader’s persuasiveness: “The perceived character of the persuader is central to his powers of persuasion” (140).
Humility’s other benefits are its abilities to inspire others (chapter 9), outdo “tolerance” at promoting harmony (chp 10), and promote growth in abilities (chp 7). Dickson provides a great example of the latter when he talks about humility’s contribution to science (118-20). Professor Raymond Tallis tells the story of the invention of the clinical trial and of how an 18th century ship physician named James Lind found that a diet of citrus fruits was effective in warding off scurvy. Tallis concludes:
So, let’s hear it for James Lind. The humility built into the very idea of the clinical trial: I don’t know whether this treatment based on anecdotal observation and consistent with my theories really works is the opposite of the argument from authority. (119-120)
In this case humility fostered knowledge.
Also, following Chesterton, Dickson writes: “Humility, by contrast, [Chesterton] said, reminds us that we are small and incomplete and so urges us on toward the heights of artistic, scientific and societal endeavour:
Even the haughty visions, the tall cities, and the toppling pinnacles are the creations of humility…For towers are not tall unless we look up at them; and giants are not giants unless they are larger than we. All this gigantesque imagination, which is, perhaps, the mightiest of the pleasures of man, is at bottom entirely humble. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything. (120)
In chapter 3, the author shows that it makes sense for us to be humble quite apart from any discussion of humility’s benefits. When we look out horizontally at each other, and vertically at the universe (and its Origin), humility becomes us.
In chapters 5 and 6, the historian in Dickson kicks in especially. Humility hasn’t always been a virtue. The ancient world was an honour and shame culture, and thus humility didn’t rank very high. You would be humble before a god or emperor because they could kill you, “but humility before an equal or a lesser was morally suspect. It upset the assumed equation: merit demanded honour, thus honour was the proof of merit. Avoiding honour implied a diminishment of merit. It was shameful” (89).
He persuasively shows the starkness of change from the ancient world to the modern one by a section on boasting (90-95). The only thing that can account for so vast a change is a “humility revolution” (95).
Which leads to chapter 6 (“Cruciform: How a Jew from Nazareth Redefined Greatness”). Even more than Jesus’ revolutionary teachings, it was his execution that put humility on the map. So much so that humility, and the accompanying virtue love, become the central virtues that the Apostle Paul exhorts the Christians in Philippi to adopt 20 plus years later, and he bases his appeal in Jesus’ crucifixion and subsequent exaltation.
The final chapter discusses steps that we can take to grow in our humility.
This is a great little book. The author is a Christian writing about a subject that historically revolves around Jesus of Nazareth. But Dickson’s audience is a business one, not a Christian one, and he takes many precautions to keep his secular audience from being turned away. Too many precautions, would be my only complaint.(less)
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This book builds on the previously written, First, Break All the Rules. Its main assertion is that a “strengths revolution” is required in order for businesses to achieve excellence. Organizations must switch their focus from fixing weaknesses to max...moreThis book builds on the previously written, First, Break All the Rules. Its main assertion is that a “strengths revolution” is required in order for businesses to achieve excellence. Organizations must switch their focus from fixing weaknesses to maximizing strengths (3-4). It is not true that each person can become good at anything. It is not true that the greatest potential for personal growth is the areas we are weak in. The greatest potential for growth is in the areas of our greatest strength (7-8).
This book contributes three tools to the furthering of the strengths revolution. First, it brings clarity to what a strength is and what it’s composed of. A strength is composed of knowledge, skill, and talent, and the greatest of these is talent. A talent is something innate, whereas skill and knowledge are things that can be picked up. This means that one’s potential strengths are limited by one’s makeup. Endless effort to develop skill and gain knowledge will not a strength make unless one possesses the needed talent integral to that strength.
Thus, the key to building a bona fide strength is to identify your dominant talents and then refine them with knowledge and skills (30).
The second tool, following from the first, is a system for identifying one’s dominant talents. Here the book offers two forms of help. To assist in self-identifying them, we are instructed to monitor our spontaneous reactions to situations, our yearnings, the things in which we learn rapidly, and our satisfactions.
The main tool that is provided for discovering your talents, however, is the StrengthsFinder Profile, which is explained in the book, and conducted online.
The third revolutionary tool they provide is a common language describing the main kinds of talents. Chapter 4 labels and describes 34 themes or talents.
Beyond these three tools, the authors also include a chapter on managing the various strengths. One page is devoted to each of the 34 themes, and helpful advice is given if you are managing an employee who strong in analysis, for instance.
The final chapter lays out the big picture of how to build a strengths-based organization.
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I found the book, and the StrengthsFinder Profile in particular, to be a great help. The five talents the StrengthsFinder identified in me were accurate in identifying my major talents, although I might quibble with the way there were ranked.
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How this book intersects with a Christian worldview
One thing to consider is how a focus on one’s innate talents rubs shoulders with the Christian concept of one’s calling (pp. 144-7 are very interesting in this regard). For instance, if we should focus our energy and time on what we’re innately good at, does that mean that a Christian can explore his or her talents, and see in them God’s calling on their life?
The logic would be like this:
If God has a calling for our lives
then he would shape us for that calling by gifting us with the necessary talents
Therefore, an important process in discerning one’s calling in life is to explore what he has fitted us for. A Christian considering becoming a nurse because the pay is attractive might realize this is not God’s calling for her when she discovers that she is not naturally blessed with the talent of empathy.
I think this is a legitimate approach to choosing a station in life. It is submissive to God’s authority. However, some caveats need to be mentioned. First, when God calls us to do something, he does equip us for it, but not always by supplying one individual the needed talent in every case. I’m thinking of Moses here. Buckingham would call that “managing around your weakness” (148-59). Secondly, the authors make an important distinction between your field and your role within that field (160). To return to our nursing example, the gal lacking in empathy may still be called to the field of nursing, but perhaps she would serve better in a research role, particularly if one of her talents is intellection.(less)
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My knowledge of church history (and all history, for that matter), is embarrassingly sketchy, so I’ve been devoting my Sunday afternoons to remedying the situation. The Veil is Torn is the first volume of the Christian History Project’s series, The C...moreMy knowledge of church history (and all history, for that matter), is embarrassingly sketchy, so I’ve been devoting my Sunday afternoons to remedying the situation. The Veil is Torn is the first volume of the Christian History Project’s series, The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years. Series editor Ted Byfield introduces the series in his Foreword, in which, following Chesterton, he writes that “the most dangerous people…are those who have been cut off from their cultural roots” (vii). Byfield believes that the whole western world is in that dangerous situation. In our world Christianity is unfashionable, and yet “our founding educational institutions, our medical system, our commitment to the care of the aged and infirm, our concept of individual rights and responsibilities, all came to us through Christianity.”
So this series is all about getting us back to our foundations, and this first volume starts where it all begins: with Jesus, his crucifixion, resurrection, and creation of the Church in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. From there it progresses to other historical happenings that are familiar to readers of the Bible. We follow Peter in and out of the Temple (and prison!). The majority of the rest of the book is then devoted to Paul. The title of chapter 4 is far from an overstatement when it describes Paul’s conversion to Christ as “the conversion that changed history.” Here we encounter a man whose zeal against Christ is transformed into zeal for Christ. The attractiveness and reality of Jesus were so great to Paul that he was willing to endure anything for the sake of his Lord. Sometimes the opposition to him was such that only the Lord was left standing with him:
With Barnabas now, for the moment at least, aligned with the Jerusalem faction, Paul found himself almost alone and surrounded by opponents: by hard-line Temple Jews who saw him as a danger; by the Christian legalists, both Gentiles and Jews, ostensibly backed by the Church authorities in Jerusalem, who considered him reckless and misguided; by pagans, who regarded him as an unpleasant rival and annoying threat; by Greek intellectuals, who viewed him as unbalanced, if not deranged; and, increasingly, by Roman authorities, who viewed him as a disruptive nuisance. (116)
And like his Lord, people have been opposed to him ever since (184-185). Yet he accomplished so much! The Taurus Mountains were a formidable wall discouraging travel from Tarsus to the north east. One single crack, the Cilician Gates, allowed admittance. Through these gates Alexander the Great led his army onward to conquer the world. “Now, through the same pass, the greatest conquest Europe would ever know was about to begin, and the force that would accomplish it was an army of two—Paul and, beside him, his companion Silas” (118).
Paul not only took criticism; he could also give it. Nero’s shenanigans were revolting to many of the Romans themselves; “they were un-Roman!” (218). But the Roman who most stridently denounced Imperial Rome was Paul himself in his letter to the Christian church at Rome. His letter “disclosed a distinct irony. For the Christians, who would be despised and persecuted by Roman officialdom for most of the next three hundred years, in fact stood for nearly all the virtues and principles which Rome had once enshrined” (219).
The last chapter, chapter 9, covers the fall of Jerusalem. It is a horrific tale. The citizens of that city had as much reason to be afraid of their own people as of the Roman army outside the city’s walls. Josephus says they ran out of both wood and room for crosses. Evil reached its lowest when an odour of fresh meat cooking came from the home of a woman named Mary. When a band of rebels demanded that she show her hidden store of food, she produced her roasted, half-eaten baby. The incident was so repulsive that “some Romans simply refused to believe such a thing could happen” (265)
I plan to continue reading through the rest of the volumes in this series. From what I have seen, each volume is well-written, interspersed with many attractive side bars, excurses, and pictures. I would highly encourage families to invest in this series. If Byfield is right, it will be an investment not only in history, but also in the future.
For more information see www.thechristians.ca(less)
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The main contribution of this book is to recognize that the Bible doesn’t only have Ephesians 5.25; it also has Eph. 5.33 and 1 Peter 3.1-2. The ideal marriage is one in which all these verses are known and practiced. Men need respect; women need lov...moreThe main contribution of this book is to recognize that the Bible doesn’t only have Ephesians 5.25; it also has Eph. 5.33 and 1 Peter 3.1-2. The ideal marriage is one in which all these verses are known and practiced. Men need respect; women need love. When a man enjoys the respect of his wife, she will enjoy the love of her husband. And vice versa. I believe that much of the happiness of our marriage is due to my wife reading and putting into practice the truths in this book early in our marriage; as I read through it, I was checking off all the things she is doing right!(less)
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I never thought a book on statistics would be exciting, but this one was! It helps that it’s full of stories, stories of the misuse of statistics in management, highlighting the “numerical naiveté” surrounding us (vi). Businesses are managed today of...moreI never thought a book on statistics would be exciting, but this one was! It helps that it’s full of stories, stories of the misuse of statistics in management, highlighting the “numerical naiveté” surrounding us (vi). Businesses are managed today off the typical monthly management report; Wheeler shows the irrelevance of such reports for making sound managerial decisions. Graphing the data in control charts present much more meaningful information, and allow one to distinguish between the variation inherent within the process and data that legitimately signal that the process has changed.
The author’s principles are simple and his examples from real life are convincing. He shares more than one horror story of managers being rewarded for the changes they implemented when sound data analysis later revealed that their “improvements” were nothing of the sort.(less)
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In this book Taiichi Ohno, one of Toyota’s famous innovators, discusses the Toyota Production System (TPS) that he developed. So much of what he says is simple. He surely wasn’t the first business leader to focus on reducing the time line “from the m...moreIn this book Taiichi Ohno, one of Toyota’s famous innovators, discusses the Toyota Production System (TPS) that he developed. So much of what he says is simple. He surely wasn’t the first business leader to focus on reducing the time line “from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash” (ix). And the TPS doesn’t seem very profound when he states that its’ “most important objective…has been to increase production efficiency by consistently and thoroughly eliminating waste” (xii).
And yet the underlying concept of a pull system rather than a push system, and the mechanisms for implementation (just-in-time, autonomation, and kanban) are anything but simple. Toyota’s entrance into and dominance within the automobile industry is an amazing story of innovation and challenging existing assumptions.
I also appreciated Taiichi Ohno’s respect for humanity. While Toyota tries to eliminate workers from its payroll in order to achieve profits, they seek to respect the workers they do employ by making them responsible for their quality and by organizing processes so that no one is just watching a machine.
Though this is the Toyota production system, the applicability of the concept for any type of business is emphasized throughout the book (e.g. p.9).(less)
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This book is a simple introduction to Lean Six Sigma, an improvement method or engine for eliminating waste in business processes and improving quality (iv).
Lean Six Sigma starts with focusing on the customer and delighting them via speed and quality...moreThis book is a simple introduction to Lean Six Sigma, an improvement method or engine for eliminating waste in business processes and improving quality (iv).
Lean Six Sigma starts with focusing on the customer and delighting them via speed and quality. The way to achieve this is by improving processes, the environment for doing it in is one of teamwork, and the foundation for it all is data and fact based (as opposed to experience and opinion).(less)
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Joni wrote this book out of excruciating pain. It will be especially valuable to those who are also suffering. I won't say more except to mention an wonderful illustration (pp. 96-8) of God’s sovereignty, and wondrous grace in times of trouble.
A whil...moreJoni wrote this book out of excruciating pain. It will be especially valuable to those who are also suffering. I won't say more except to mention an wonderful illustration (pp. 96-8) of God’s sovereignty, and wondrous grace in times of trouble.
A while ago Joni and hubby Ken observed 38th anniversary of the day she broke her neck in diving accident. They had crab cakes, because, were it not for a “feisty Chesapeake Bay blue crab” that bit Joni’s sister’s toe, her sister Kathy would not have found Joni lying helpless face-down in water, praying that Kathy would see her and rescue her.
God gave Joni a gift after that anniversary dinner. They were reading from John 5.2-6 when she discovered that Jesus thought that 38 years of paralysis was a long time! She especially appreciated that in light of the fact that 1 Peter 5.10 makes it sound like a “little while.”(less)
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