What is ‘Revelation’

Apokalypsis, the source of our English word ‘apocalypse’. This term has come to denote a major catastrophic event, and it is true that the book depicts great disasters that have given us concepts such as Armageddon and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The derived word ‘apocalyptic’ denotes a genre of literature depicting end-of-the-world scenarios that are often filled with fantastical, colourful imagery of wild things of different kinds involved in various events, including great battles between good and evil.

 

Etymologically, the Greek word apokalypsis is formed from apo (= away from) and kalyptein (= to cover), and means an uncovering, unveiling, disclosure or revelation, usually of something hitherto obscure or hidden. Both the source and the subject of disclosure is Jesus Christ – a person……

 

Revelation promises to do two things: fill our hearts with praise to God, and simultaneously prepare us for God’s inevitable cataclysmic intervention in this world to judge evil righteously at the return of Christ. It will challenge us to think hard about what we are really living for. It will also give us a way of coping with the ongoing problems of evil, pain and death by revealing how God will finally deal with these issues, and so give us a credible hope of ultimate victory.

 

Paul was encouraging the Thessalonian believers to look at the present in the light of the future. That principle, sometimes called the ‘telescope principle’, is one of the keys to applying Revelation at any time in history.

 

--- John C. Lennox, God, AI and the End of History: 

Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines. 2025.

Imperial Persecution of Christians

After the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, which Jesus had foretold in his Olivet discourse, the Romans introduced the fiscus Judaicus (Jewish tax), the payment of which lifted the obligation of Jews to sacrifice to Roman gods. The amount was 2 denarii, the same as observant Jews were used to paying for the upkeep of the Temple in Jerusalem. This revenue was devoted to the repair and upkeep of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter in Rome which had been badly damaged by fire. Therefore, the tax was both an insult and an embarrassment to Jews.

 

Suetonius reports that Domitian tightened up fiscal policy in AD 81 by expanding the tax to all Jewish converts and to people who concealed their Jewish origins. Since the Romans tended to regard Christianity as a Jewish sect, Christians also had to pay the tax.

 

In AD 96, Nerva, Domitian’s successor, reformed the administration of the tax and redefined Judaism as a religion. This meant that Judaism was seen as distinct from Christianity and only those practising the former were liable to the tax. This exposed Christians to Roman persecution, which began a few years later and continued until the Edict of Milan in AD 313 gave Christianity the protection of legal status.

 

--- John C. Lennox, God, AI and the End of History: 

Understanding the Book of Revelation in an Age of Intelligent Machines. 2025.

The Mindsets Behind the Three Conversations

These three conversations—which correspond to practical decision-making conversations, emotional conversations, and conversations about identity—are best captured by three questions: What’s This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and Who Are We? Each of these conversations, as we will see, draws on a different type of mindset and mental processing.

 

When we have a conversation about, say, a choice—a What’s This Really About? conversation—we’re activating different parts of our brains from when we discuss our feelings—the How Do We Feel? discussion—and if our mind doesn’t align with the brains of our conversational partners, we’ll all feel like we didn’t fully understand one another.

 

The first mindset—the decision-making mindset—is associated with the What’s This Really About conversation, and it’s active whenever we’re thinking about practical matters, such as making choices or analyzing plans. When someone says, “What are we going to do about Sam’s grades?,” our brains’ frontal control network, the command center for our thoughts and actions, becomes active. We have to make a series of decisions, often subconsciously, to evaluate the words we heard, but also to consider what motives or desires might be lurking underneath……

 

The second mindset—the emotional mindset—emerges when we discuss How Do We Feel and draws on neural structures—the nucleus accumbens, the amygdala, and the hippocampus, among others—that help shape our beliefs, emotions, and memories.

 

The third conversational mindset—the social mindset—emerges when we discuss our relationships, how we are seen by others and see ourselves, and our social identities. These are Who Are We discussions.

 

 

 

 --- Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators:

How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. 2024.

 

 

New Life

Jesus contrasts feasting with fasting, new patches with old garments, and new wine with old wineskins to reveal that the power of the Gospel is not compatible with old ways of thinking or shaped by worldly assumptions (Luke 5:33–39). It calls for nothing less than renewal—a complete reorientation of how we live and relate to God. Repentance, therefore, is not merely an outward act but an inward change. Jesus calls us to enter the fullness of transformation that only He can bring, casting off every pattern and attitude that no longer reflects His Kingdom.

 

And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’ (Luke 5:39) 

Luke 5:39 reminds us that spiritual renewal means abandoning what feels safe or comfortable, so that God can pour in something new. In this 120-day journey, we are called to become new wineskins—hearts open to be stretched, reshaped, and filled by the Spirit. 

 

Let His presence renew us, His truth reshape us, and His Spirit fill us until our lives overflow as a living testimony to His transforming power.

 

from: The Turning of Hearts

- Gabrielle K, The Turning of Hearts: 

A 120-Day Transformational Journey through Luke’s Gospel, 2025.

 

 

Language and the Neural Construction of Reality

Our perception of reality is tied not only to the words we know but also to the patterns of activation in our brains, and these patterns vary across people based on individual experiences.

What we perceive as reality is essentially brain activity. Because our perceptions and thoughts are bound by patterns of neural activation, and because different languages activate different neural networks, those who speak multiple languages can cross these mental boundaries in ways that are nothing short of awe-inspiring. What we see or hear is influenced by which neurons are most likely to fire, and which neurons are most likely to fire depends on which prior neurons were activated by recent experiences.

When bilinguals switch languages, their networks of neural activation change as well and, with them, so do their perception and interpretation of reality, allowing them to move across multiple planes of neural co-activation – and hence, arguably, across multiple planes of existence.

--- Viorica Marian, The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society. 2023.

 

Language-Dependent Memory

The accessibility of memories varies across languages – the Language-Dependent Memory phenomenon – has implications for interviewing bilingual witnesses in legal cases, accessing traumatic memories of events and providing psychotherapy to bilingual clients.

The memories that come to the forefront, in turn, shape how we think about ourselves and the frameworks we use. Languages can even affect how one experiences love and hate. ‘I love you’ feels different in a native versus a non-native language. A native language packs more emotional punch. Which is also why some multilinguals prefer the use of a non-native language when they feel they need some emotional distance.

 

There is now a sizeable body of research under the umbrella of the Foreign Language Effect suggesting that people make more logical and rational decisions in a non-native language in a variety of spheres ranging from moral judgements to financial allocations.

 

--- Viorica Marian, The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society. 2023.

The Destructive Power of Misinterpretation

Failure to account for the differences between languages can lead to devastating results. In 1945, when Allied leaders met in Germany at the end of the Second World War, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek sent the Japanese premier, Kantarō Suzuki, a declaration of surrender terms, asking that Japan surrender unconditionally. The declaration also stated that any negative answer would elicit “prompt and utter destruction.”

When reporters questioned Premier Suzuki about his reaction, he replied with the usual political fallback that he was withholding comment. The Japanese word he used, mokusatsu, derived from the word for silence, can be translated in multiple ways, from “remaining in wise inactivity” to “taking no notice” to “treating with silent contempt.” In a diplomatic failure of epochal proportions, an ill-chosen translation was interpreted in the West as a hostile response. In now-unclassified documents, the National Security Agency writes:

The word has other meanings quite different from that intended by Suzuki. Alas, international news agencies saw fit to tell the world that in the eyes of the Japanese government the ultimatum was ‘not worthy of comment.’ US officials, angered by the tone of Suzuki’s statement … decided on stern measures. Within ten days the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb, the bomb was dropped, and Hiroshima was leveled.

--- Viorica Marian, The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society. 2023.

Real Love Includes Truth

Real love—the kind described by the God who created and is love (1 John 4:8)—always includes truth. The two are inextricably intertwined, since true love celebrates truth (1 Cor. 13:6). Christians are called to this kind of love regardless of whether we feel empathy or not. Christians love because Christ first loved us, not because we feel a certain way or have had a particular experience (1 John 4:19).

 

That’s why empathy is different from love and why it also must be submissive to love. Putting yourself in someone’s shoes may help you feel their pain, but their pain isn’t determinative of what’s true or false, right or wrong……

 

--- Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. 2024.  

How to Identify 'Toxic Empathy'

Kindness is good, and empathy can be good too. But empathy that affirms sin or lies is always misguided. How can we tell when empathy has become toxic? Here are a few red flags that we’ll see repeatedly in these pages:

 

1.      THE USE OF EUPHEMISMS: Euphemisms obscure the truth to make a position seem more palatable. Think “reproductive rights” for killing an unborn child, or “gender-affirming care” for bodily mutilation. In every conversation, advertisement, article, or podcast, you must carefully look out for the use of euphemisms. Ask yourself, “What does she mean by that?” and try to identify the reality her language choice is hiding.

 

2.      CONTRADICTIONS TO GOD’S WORD: Sometimes these contradictions are obvious (e.g., “Jesus isn’t the only way to heaven”), but most of the time, they’re not. Just like the Devil tricking Eve or tempting Jesus, unbiblical statements are often paired with something true. Think “Christians are called to love the foreigner” to justify chaotic border laws, or “The early church shared everything they had” to justify socialism. Just because something sounds good doesn’t mean it is. It’s crucial we know our Bible and train ourselves to think critically about the things we read and hear—especially when they’re viral or catchy.

 

3.      EXCLUSIVELY POLITICAL ENDS: When calling for empathy, inclusivity, and love, are they talking about how we treat these people as individuals, or are they actually speaking of achieving certain political ends? For example, “love is love” isn’t really a call for us to love gay people by recognizing their innate worth as human beings and treat them with kindness; it’s a call to legally redefine marriage and family…… These are examples of the exploitation of empathy to achieve political power, not peace.

 

4.      CHRISTIAN-SOUNDING WORDS WITH UNCHRISTIAN MEANINGS: The concepts of equality, equity, liberation, oppression, inclusion, and social justice can all be, in some way, found in the Bible, but the Bible defines them differently than progressive activists do. Biblical equity, for example, means fair, impartial judgment (Ps. 99:4). Progressive equity means equal outcomes…… equal outcomes are impossible outside of extreme, oppressive government intervention, and nowhere does the Bible indicate that justice means everyone having equal resources.

 

5.      EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE: Manipulative rhetoric lacks substantive, logical arguments and replaces them with demands that you feel a certain way. If you’re really loving, caring, understanding, empathetic, etc., you will buy into a particular position. Often, your rational points will be rebuffed with accusations of callousness instead of thoughtful responses. When they call you hateful, bigoted, racist, or any other epithet, it usually means they don’t know why they believe what they believe, so their insecurity manifests itself in anger…… You know such an allegation is ridiculous, and you don’t need to dignify it with a response. Simply continue to kindly, humbly, but confidently stand your ground. It may be that this conversation planted a seed in them.

 

When these red flags show up, it means someone is using toxic empathy to capitalize on the Christian’s righteous desire to be compassionate to the outcast and the weak, distorting biblical love into progressive activism and manipulating women into supporting issues that are harmful and, in many cases, sinful.

 

--- Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. 2024.

Cuteness in the Arts

How a society deals with this tension may explain whether cuteness appears in its art and literature.

 

Take medieval Europe as an example. Life there was anything but dull. On the contrary, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga writes: ‘Life was brimful of play: the joyous and unbuttoned play of the people, full of pagan elements that had lost their sacred significance and been transformed into jesting and buffoonery.’ Huizinga singles out ‘pagan elements’ because religion had transformed the social perception of play, if not people’s tendency to engage in it.

 

However, play remained pagan because Christians saw it as a frivolous distraction from God. Art was meant to express serious, religious themes, which might explain why cuteness appears far less in the art of medieval Europe than it did in Japan.

 

And yet Western artists did occasionally play around. Monks who spent many hours copying manuscripts sometimes doodled in the margins of the books they were working on. These marginalia include images of monsters and animals acting like humans, but they tend to look grotesque and strange. However, a few of them might be considered cute.

 

--- Joshua Paul Dale, Irresistible: 

How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World. 2023.

Man with Telos & Logos

Telos - every object in creation is directed toward an end. The value of an object lies in its capacity to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Facts and values aren’t separate things—values are embedded within facts.
 
What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.
 
So, according to both Plato and Aristotle, what makes us “virtuous” is doing our job: look at the world with our reason, discerning the final causes for which things exist. This is our purpose. Just as Adam is tasked with naming the animals in the Bible, so we are tasked with recognizing the telos of the world around us in Greek thought.
 
As philosopher Leo Strauss suggests, no society can be built on a multiplicity of end goals. In order to avoid arguing incessantly over end goals, therefore, the Greeks had to posit an objective, underlying logic to the universe: a Grand Designer, an Unmoved Mover. Were the universe a chaotic, arbitrary, and random place operating according to no design, it would have no telos. But if a grand plan stands behind all of creation, our job is merely to investigate that plan—to uncover the natural law that governs the universe.
 
Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) was the first known philosopher to use the term Logos to describe the system of unified reason behind the world we see and experience. Man could understand the universe because a force had created the universe; man’s mind mirrored that force to the extent that man could uncover its purposes. As historian Richard Tarnas writes, “As the means by which human intelligence could attain universal understanding, the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world.” And philosophers were tasked with uncovering this Logos; by doing so, they would be fulfilling both their own telos and discovering the telos of mankind more broadly.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

Happiness is Moral Purpose

Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities: golf, fishing, playing with your children, sex. Amoral activities can bring us pleasure—that temporary high, that feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.
 
This has been clear since the dawn of Western civilization. The very terminology for happiness is imbued with such meaning in both the Judeo-Christian and the Greek context. The Hebrew Bible calls happiness simcha; Aristotle called happiness eudaimonia.
 
What does the Bible mean by simcha? It means right action in accordance with God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments, “I said to myself: ‘Come now, I will mix [wine] with joy and experience pleasure,’ and behold, this too was vanity.”
 
The Bible doesn’t seem to care very much about what we want. Instead, God commands us to live in simcha. How can He command an emotion? He can’t—he can only command our enthusiastic pursuit of an ideal He sets forth for us. If we do not pursue that purpose, we pay a price: we serve foreign gods, which cannot provide us any sort of true fulfillment.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

The Ingredients for Happiness

Happiness, comprises four elements: individual moral purpose, individual capacity, collective moral purpose, and collective capacity. If we lack one of these elements, the pursuit of happiness becomes impossible; if that pursuit is foreclosed, society crumbles.
Our society was built on recognition of these four elements. The fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, tempered by the wit and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, led to the creation of a civilization of unparalleled freedom and replete with virtuous men and women striving to better themselves and the society around them.
 
But we are losing that civilization. We are losing that civilization because we have spent generations undermining the two deepest sources of our own happiness—the sources that lie behind individual moral purpose, communal moral purpose, individual capacity, and communal capacity. Those two sources: Divine meaning and reason. There can be no individual or communal moral purpose without a foundation of Divine meaning; there can be no individual capacity or communal capacity without a constant, abiding belief in the nature of our reason.
 
The history of the West is built on the interplay between these two pillars: Divine meaning and reason. We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.
 
We must make our way back toward our roots. Those roots took hold at Sinai.

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

The Creation of Reason-based Government

The Greeks gave us the roots of democracy.
 
Based on the notion of virtue—use of reason to act in accordance with nature—Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics developed ethical systems. Those ethical systems didn’t merely recommend personal cultivation. They also encompassed the creation of new forms of government. Some of their ideas regarding government were good; others were bad. But they began the process of applying reason to governmental structures—a process that has continued down to our day.
 
The ancients believed that in order to cultivate virtue, the polis—the city-state—must be at the center of human life. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out, the Athenians universally believed that good citizenship was a prerequisite to being a good man. Plato’s ethical system tied together happiness and virtue: the truly virtuous man will be happy. Plato defined various virtues, too: justice, moderation, and the like. But these virtues aren’t individual virtues, in Plato’s view—they only exist in the context of a community. The virtue of justice, for example, exists when each person fulfills his or her function in relation to the polis. Our virtues exist in relations with others.
 
Because the polis is the context in which virtue is cultivated—and because cultivating virtue is the ultimate goal of man—the polis must be governed rigorously so that human beings are inculcated with virtue, according to Plato. That means that those who govern must be the best and wisest among us—that we must rigorously condition a class of philosophers to rule. Otherwise, chaos will ensue.

The Athenian system of thought establishes certain fundamental notions crucial to happiness: the notion of telos, discoverable by us; the importance of reason-led investigation, leading to the birth of science; the recognition that social ties bind us to one another.

 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

Roots of Civilization

Why should Americans bother to learn about ancient Greeks? Because the classical roots of Western civilization in Athens still have much to teach us. Athens teaches us what we are capable of doing as human beings. Athens teaches us that we have the ability to use our reason to reach beyond ourselves. Athens teaches us not only how liberty can flourish, but why it should. I’ve argued that without Jerusalem, there could be no West; without Athens, the same holds true.
 
Religious faith is empowering because it tells human beings that they are loved, and that they have the capacity to choose between good and evil. But religious faith also requires us to acknowledge the inherent limits on human capacity—it requires us to say that there are things we will never understand, that we are earthly creatures bounded by dust. But if the project of Sinai was about elevating man above the animals by associating him with a Godly mission and granting him a Godly soul, the project of Athens was about elevating man using man’s own faculties. Religion doesn’t discount the capacity of mankind, of course, but that capacity is always secondary to God’s will; Athens elevates man’s capacity and makes it primary.
 

The ancient Greeks gave us three foundational principles: first, that we could discover our purpose in life from looking at the nature of the world; second, that in order to learn about the nature of the world, we had to study the world around us by utilizing our reason; and finally, that reason could help us construct the best collective systems for cultivating that reason. In short, the Greeks gave us natural law, science, the basis of secularly constructed government. Jerusalem brought the heavens down to earth; Athens’s elevation of reason would launch mankind toward the stars. 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History: 

How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, 2019.

 

A Price-weighted Index: Dow Jones

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is what’s known as a stock market index. An index is a group of stocks that are combined to figure out whether the stock market as a whole is going up or down. It is a way to track the performance of the stock market.
 
The business world has changed a lot since 1896, so the Dow Jones has adapted to keep up. In 1928, the Dow was expanded to include 30 companies instead of just 12. Every few years some of the declining businesses in the Dow Jones are removed and are replaced by businesses that are growing. This helps to ensure that the biggest and most successful companies of the day are always included in the Dow Jones. As of 2021, the Dow includes businesses like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Disney (NYSE:DIS), and Home Depot (NYSE:HD).
 
The Dow Jones has become one of the most well-known stock market indexes in the world. However, the Dow Jones also has critics that point out two big flaws.
 
First, the Dow Jones only tracks 30 companies. That’s only a tiny fraction of the 6,000 publicly traded companies that exist in the U.S. alone. Critics argue the Dow Jones does not accurately represent the entire stock market.
 
Second, the Dow Jones is calculated by using the dollar price of each stock. The Dow Jones ignores the size of each business. This means that a stock that is trading for $100 per share will have 10 times more influence over the Dow Jones than a stock trading at $10 per share.
 
That’s why the Dow is called a price-weighted index. The dollar price of each stock is what matters, not the size of each business.
 
To see why some investors think that this is a problem, let’s review the stock price from two Dow Jones stocks—McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)—in October 2020:

McDonald’s was $52 billion smaller than Intel, but its share price was about four times higher. This means that the price movement of McDonald’s stock had a four times greater influence over the performance of the Dow Jones than Intel’s stock, even though Intel was a larger company!

 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

 

A Capitalization-weighted Index: NASDAQ Composite Index

Computers became a lot more advanced during the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, people who worked on Wall Street started to experiment with computers to see if they could be used to improve stock trading.
 
At the time, there wasn’t a good way to get stock price information—or stock “quotes”—to all investors at the same time. This made buying and selling stocks inefficient and expensive. The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), an agency that oversees the buying and selling of stocks, decided that computers could be used to solve this problem.
 
The NASD created a brand-new stock exchange in 1971. This new stock exchange would allow investors to buy and sell stocks on computers that were connected to each other. They called this new stock market the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, or NASDAQ.

The NASDAQ stock exchange offered many advantages over other stock exchanges. Since all of the buying and selling was done on computers there was no need to have a physical trading floor. Accurate prices could also be viewed by all investors at the same time.
 
The inventors of the NASDAQ stock exchange also created an index that tracked the price movements of all the companies that were listed on the exchange. They called this new index the NASDAQ Composite Index. Today, there are more than 3,200 businesses that make up the NASDAQ Composite Index.
 
Like the S&P 500, the NASDAQ Composite Index is a capitalization-weighted index. This means that larger companies have a bigger influence over the movement of the NASDAQ Composite Index than smaller companies.

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

A Capitalization-weighted Index: S&P 500

In 1923, the Standard Statistics Company created a new stock market index. Their goal was to compete with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was popular with investors. To stand out, Standard Statistics decided to use data on 233 companies instead of just 30 like the Dow Jones.
 
Years later, the Standard Statistics Company merged with Poor’s Publishing to create the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) company. In 1957, S&P made a few changes to its stock market index that would allow it to better compete with the Dow Jones.
 
First, S&P increased the number of companies that it tracked from 233 to 500.
Second, S&P let larger companies have more influence over the index’s movements than smaller companies. S&P judged the size of each business by using its market capitalization, which is the total dollar market value of a company’s equity. This is called a capitalization-weighted index.
 
On March 4, 1957, the S&P 500 was officially launched.
 
In 2021, large companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) had market values that exceeded $1 trillion. That causes them to have much more influence over the index than smaller companies like Hanesbrands (NYSE:HBI) and Under Armour (NYSE:UA) which are worth less than $10 billion. This is why many investors like that the S&P 500 is a capitalization-weighted index.
 

- Brian Feroldi, Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?:

Everything You Should Have Been Taught About Investing In School, But Weren't, 2022

What is A Servant Leader

What is a servant leader? It is someone who, in Senske’s words, refuses to use people as means to an end—who always asks, “Am I building people up, or am I building myself up and merely using those around me?” 

A servant leader creates an atmosphere of “transparency” in which all relevant information is shared openly, so that everyone has an opportunity to make responsible decisions. Finally, a servant leader lets go of command-and-control methods, and creates a culture that allows everyone to grow into leaders, stretching their own God-given talents.

Dare to Confront

Every Christian needs to be equally convinced that biblical principles are true not only in some abstract sense but in the reality of our work, business, and personal lives. If we become aware that a ministry or business is violating biblical principles, we need to stop being enablers and start calling people to accountability—even if it means paying a price. An employee who takes a stand may not ultimately succeed in changing anything. In fact, he may run the risk of losing his job. The church’s task is to make sure that he does not bear that risk alone. As Lesslie Newbigin writes, fellow Christians should stand ready to support those who speak the truth to power and pay a price for it, even providing financial assistance to those whose moral courage costs them their livelihood.

We must never forget that going along with unbiblical practices is not only wrong, it is unloving. Acquiescing in an unjust situation typically stems not from love but from fear of possible negative repercussions. If we aspire to a godly, holy love for others, we must be willing to take the risk and practice loving confrontation.

- Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

Leadership vs. Management: It’s All About Intent

The leadership vs. management question is answered when we look at the intent behind both terms. When we take the lead, we are:

• At the front, showing the way.
• Doing new things – going to places where nobody has gone before.
• Making change, instead of keeping things the same.

When we manage, we:

• Make sure everything is under control.
• Want to see stability and reduced risk.
• Look at metrics to monitor and measure success.

Leading is about putting ourselves out there and carving a path. Management is more transactional, about stability, smooth operations and cutting out risk.

excerpt from: https://www.thoughtfulleader.com/leadership-vs-management/