Shame tells you that you need to do everything possible to prevent God and people from seeing your failures and weaknesses. This keeps you living in shame’s shadow. It provides no way to escape; instead, it keeps digging your hole deeper so that no one can see who you really are. This week at Iron Leadership we will discuss The 5 Signals of Shame: Blame-shifting Questions constantly rolling through your mind like: Am I really good enough? Did my dad/mom…
The lie of shame is that I need to do everything possible to hide. I need to do everything possible to prevent people from really knowing me. The truth is God really delights in you and he’s the one who does see everything. He sees everything and he wants you to change, but he loves you fully just the way you are. He doesn’t want you to stay where you are, but he loves you as you are because you…
We are meant to point our lives in one direction towards the Lord, but something comes in between us (sin) and we can’t see it. We’re turned around, but we don’t know that we’re turned around. You’re walking away thinking wealth, women, wine, work is the right way to go. We’re trying to have Christ come in and lift that off of us so we repent and turn around. There’s a different way to live our lives and we don’t…
“Many men are in a state of massive despair because they have forgotten their future – their inheritance, their calling, their horizon. They only see the present and the bleakness of the present seeps into their hearts, the shadow of despair robs life of its possibilities.” Jon Tyson in Fighting Shadows. This week we will discuss what it takes to fight successfully against the shadow of despair. We will learn from King David about how he fought against his despair while…
(Audio Transcription Below) This is my very favorite video. It’s about how a small introduction, few in number, changes everything in the ecosystem. The reason I like it is that men, coming in and living in the right way, change the ecosystem of the world. Romans 8:19 says, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.” Much like the wolves have this downstream effect on the rivers themselves, men coming into the world’s…
The wise writer of Proverbs states, “All wisdom comes from the LORD and so do common sense and understanding”( Proverbs 2:6) This reminds us that there is a way to live our life “along the grain” of the way God has structured the universe. Common sense and understanding might be found through various means, but all true wisdom comes from the LORD. This summer I read Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday and found the author’s thinking and storytelling helpful…
The wiseman who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes makes a series of observations about the futility of life. Listen to what he says in Chapter 6:7-12: “All a man’s work is for his mouth…yet this appetite is never satisfied.” You work all your life to feed the beast – your family, your ego, opinions of other people. Yet those appetites are never quite satisfied, so without the correct perspective it can feel like futility. “There are many words which only…
“Farewell to Shadowlands” is the title of the last chapter of C.S. Lewis’ book The Last Battle, the last book in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Lewis used the word “Shadowlands” to refer to life on Earth, and in the last chapter, time in the “Shadowlands” comes to an end. He writes, “The term is over, the holidays have begun…this is the morning.” This is an excellent way to describe our time on Earth. Shadows are created when light is…
(Audio transcription below) This morning I am going to use the sermon from the smart man in Ecclesiastes, who we think is Solomon, and then I’m going to show a video called Between Days which captures the ending mood of the preacher. The video is titled Between Days and is about Abdulah and Sehaveta Kadenic, a Bosnian couple displaced from their home in the 1990’s by war. They moved to Norway for 12 years, but Sehaveta had a series of…
(Audio transcription below) Today we’re going to talk about our connection to our children. If you don’t have any children, or even if you do, I think there are a lot of parallels here just as leaders leading other people. If there’s anybody in your down line at your business, there’s a lot of overlay here, how you as a boss work with employees or how you as a dad are with your sons and daughters. I’m going to use…