Sermon Illustrations on leading others astray

As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...

My experience with following indicates that it can be even more difficult than leading. Following requires humility, risk, attention, awareness and guts. It means serving someone else’s agenda and fol...

In her book, Invitations from God, Adele Ahlberg Calhoun shares a great analogy of the difficulty of faithful discipleship: it’s not always easy to follow: Recently I had to follow another car to a ...

This reminds me of a term Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to refer to Adolf Hitler and leaders like him. He called these bad shepherds “mis-leaders.” Bonhoeffer gave a speech just two days after Hitler’s ele...

Over the years, I’ve read about many leaders who failed ethically in their leadership. Can you guess what they had in common? They all thought it could never happen to them. There was a false sense of...

It’s important, then, to have our eyes open to this deception. How is it that so many modern promises sound true but in the end lead to our deception, or even our destruction? A long, long time ago, t...

People in the world naturally want to boss others. Imagine a boy beginning work with a firm. He has a lowly place and is ordered around by everyone. Do this! Do that! Every dirty job is his. He is the...

For some reason I have always had a tendency to be a hero worshiper…Unfortunately I carried this tendency into my life in the church. Even those I learned to love and admire let me down. From an early...

Most of us recognize that self-deception hampers our ability to grow and live healthy lives. The Arbinger Institute takes it a bit further in their best-selling book Leadership and Self-Deception ...

The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic. Lostness, of course, looks different depending upon your perspective and personality. It is ...

In 1988, I (Randy) moved with my wife and two sons (ages two and eight weeks) from Texas to Sulawesi, an island north of Australia and south of the Philippines. We served as missionaries to a cluster ...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

As we travel through the New Testament, it becomes clear that Jesus’ disciples often get distracted, almost like they have a case of spiritual attention deficit disorder. They quickly lose focus and w...

We may find it hard to believe Jeremiah’s words that the heart is “deceitful above all things.” We would rather look outward and think, Yes, others may be quite foolish and misguided. But I have a ...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

Early in this century a London newspaper carried an advertisement that read: “Men wanted for hazardous darkness, and constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” T...

Imagine, if you will, that you work for a company whose president found it necessary to travel out of the country and spend an extended period of time abroad. So he says to you and the other trusted e...

Early in the 20th century a London newspaper carried an advertisement that read: “Men wanted for hazardous darkness, and constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success...

I sometimes hear people talk about leaders as people who make things happen. But it takes followers to make Jesus' agenda happen. My friend Julie tells me that physicists define a leader as an ext...

For years Kyle and I [Jamin Goggin] had no trouble looking critically upon others in their quest for power. We bemoaned the rock-star pastors who were in the spotlight, whose churches appeared to be m...

He may have been the hardest person I ever counseled. He was self-assured and controlling. He argued for the rightfulness of everything he had ever done. He acted like the victim when in fact he was t...

In C. S. Lewis’ classic work Mere Christianity , the English apologist compares God’s use of adversity to walking a dog on a leash. When the dog wraps its leash around a pole and tries to move fo...

Why did Moses strike the rock? He was a man of faith, whose life had been characterized by trust in God (see, for example, the description of Moses in (Heb 11:24-29). So why did he fall into unbelief ...

While teaching on Jesus’ sending out of the disciples in Matthew 10, pastor John Ortberg uses the analogy of sports teams to describe the absurdity of Jesus’ description of the disciples as “sheep.” b...

In these acts of love Jesus created a scandal for devout, religious Palestinian Jews. The absolutely unpardonable thing was not his concern for the sick, the cripples, the lepers, the possessed . . . ...

The Swiss-German novelist Hermann Hesse published a short story in 1932 called "Journey to the East." In it, a group of men go on a long journey. Throughout their trip, they are accompanied ...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton discuss the poignant insight that it is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the Wildnerness. What does this...

Sometimes in our adolescence what we need most is just someone to stick by our side, even if we make some rather hasty decisions. In this short excerpt, Bob Goff tells a story from his own teenage yea...

In the first book of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien tells the tale of a small, diverse group who go on a mission to destroy the power of an evil Dark Lord. The Fellowship of the Ring is a band ...

In their book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe adaptive challenges as the work confronting a leader when there is no known fix to a problem. It’s when “best practices” ...