God Has a Plan
Sometimes in life you can see clearly what God has laid out for you. Sometimes you have no idea what God is doing. There are times in life where everything is crazy and it seems that there is no way God is working through this time in your life, but looking back later you realize just how much God was in control. There are also times when you believe that you are making decisions but you realize that God was in control the whole time.
Another spiritual discipline that can save us many heartaches and prevent many problems in our exercise of leadership is devotional reading, written by spiritual leaders who have gone before us. This is not just reading theological tomes or novels by Christian authors, but focusing on the writings of Christian leaders, telling how God has worked in and through their lives, in an effort to see how God may want to work in ours as well. The writings of Richard Baxter, Watchman Nee, Eugene Peterson, E. Stanley Jones, Thomas à Kempis, Henri Nouwen, Charles Swindoll, and many others provide the developing leader with a wealth of lessons to be learned, practices to begin, and mistakes to avoid. This devotional reading should be a part of the leader’s daily routine.
