Becoming A Person Of Influence - Talent Is Never Enough Order Printed Copy

Author: John Maxwell
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About the Book

"Becoming A Person Of Influence - Talent Is Never Enough" by John Maxwell explores the importance of developing influence to maximize success in personal and professional relationships. The book emphasizes that talent alone is not sufficient to achieve success, and stresses the significance of building strong character, integrity, and effective communication skills. Maxwell provides practical guidance on how to cultivate influence through honesty, teamwork, and humility, ultimately empowering readers to become influential leaders in all areas of their lives.

John A. Broadus

John Broadus, Southern’s second president, was born on January 24, 1827 in Culpeper County, Virginia. After undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Virginia, he joined the university’s faculty as an assistant professor of classics. There, he displayed unusual facility in his post. He served simultaneously as pastor of the Charlottesville Baptist Church. In this period, Broadus won the heart of Maria Harrison, daughter of renowned classics professor Gessner Harrison. Married on November 18, 1850, the Broaduses had three daughters (Eliza, Annie, and Maria) together before Maria passed away on October 21, 1857 at twenty-six years of age. On January 4, 1859, Broadus married Charlotte Eleanor Sinclair, who gave birth to several additional children. The 1858 Education Convention elected Broadus to the seminary’s first faculty. Broadus declined the position because he had close ties to school and family in Charlottesville. For months, Boyce and Manly doggedly urged him to reconsider. After much thought, and not a little anguish, Broadus accepted. From the time he began teaching, Broadus showed a lifelong affection for instructing and mentoring students. Prior to the seminary’s closing in the Civil War period, Broadus drew a single student to his homiletics class. Rather than canceling the class, Broadus lectured to his lone pupil week after week, honing the content that later became the book The Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. The text’s durability was remarkable. Over half a century later, several seminaries used it in homiletics classes. When Southern suspended courses in 1862, Broadus served as a chaplain to Confederate soldiers. He returned to Southern at the war’s end and resumed his teaching post. His talents gained renown. Over Broadus’s career, the University of Chicago, Vassar University, Brown University, Georgetown College, and Crozer Theological Seminary each wooed the professor as a potential president. Large and wealthy churches invited him to be their pastor. Broadus declined these overtures. The greatest need and his greatest influence were at the seminary he loved. In 1889 trustees elected Broadus president of the seminary to succeed Boyce. He guided the school for six peaceful years. Broadus contributed much to the fields in which he taught. In addition to his landmark text on preaching, the scholar labored over his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew for twenty years before publishing it. With such depth of thought, he excelled at preaching. University of Chicago professor W. C. Wilkinson once remarked of Broadus that he had “every natural endowment, every acquired accomplishment to have become, had he been only a preacher, a preacher hardly second to any in the world.” (1) By his plain exposition and conversational delivery, Broadus changed the character of SBC preaching, a shift seen in the current day. Broadus’s life is notable on a variety of fronts. While a pastor in Virginia, Broadus baptized Lottie Moon, who became Southern Baptist’s most famous overseas missionary. In the Civil War, Broadus preached before Confederate general Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals, earning a standing invitation from Lee to preach for him. J. D. Rockefeller went further than Lee—he offered Broadus a hefty salary to become his pastor in New York City, an offer Broadus turned down. In 1886, on the 250th anniversary of Harvard University, the school conferred an honorary degree on Broadus due to his national academic reputation. In 1889, Yale University invited the professor to New Haven to deliver the Lyman Beecher Lectures on preaching. Broadus was the only Southern Baptist to address the Ivy League school in a series of talks. Together with Basil Manly, Jr., he founded the monthly Sunday School newspaper, Kind Words in 1866, a title that was eventually adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Home Mission Board. As a preacher, professor, and leader, Broadus looms large in Southern’s history and in the history of the SBC. He was an active churchman at Louisville’s Walnut Street Baptist Church. Broadus passed away on March 16, 1895. (1) William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 67. Sources: William Mueller, A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1959.

The Sweet Grief of Repentance

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Psalm 51:17) I can still see the moment clearly in my mind. At a Christian conference, a friend whom I had been studying the Bible with that semester shared with our group that he was ready to follow Jesus. He broke down in tears. We were football players. We didn’t cry. I honestly couldn’t believe it. He not only accepted my invitation to attend the conference, but he even repented of sin and believed upon Christ for the forgiveness of sins. I sat watching it unfold in absolute awe. Afterward, I talked with the campus minister about how amazing my friend’s conversion had been. The minister, an older man, shared that he had witnessed many such conversions — and that not all had lasted. I didn’t have categories at the time for what the minister said. Had the minister not been there? My friend spoke, “I want to follow Jesus,” so clearly; no doubt he felt some truths deeply; he soon sung hymns so sweetly, as the crowd sang with him. But time proved that repentance was not his truest praise. The talk, the tears, the newfound happiness soon led to a crossroad. A sinful relationship with a girl proved harder to give up, for him, than Jesus. Fruit of Lifelong Repentance If someone’s conversion to God is true, lifelong repentance will follow. The mouth of one not born again can say true things for a time. Unchanged eyes can cry. A dead tongue can sincerely sing worship songs for a season. And turning away from Christ, repenting of him, can prove it all was false. “Christians sin, and at times sin grievously. But they do not make a lifestyle of sinning.” This is what the minister had seen time and time again. He witnessed seed fall on rocky soil — someone who received the word “with joy,” yet because they had no root, they fell away eventually (Matthew 13:20–21). Though they seemed to experience the Spirit’s transformation and fellowship with other believers, they finally “were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us” (1 John 2:19). And the pain of watching them leave us can be unbearable. True repentance, then, is lifelong. Martin Luther, in the first of his ninety-five theses, began, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Luther is capturing what Scripture attests to, for example, when John the Baptist instructs, “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matthew 3:8). The wringing of our hearts over our sins, the sighs and groans of remaining corruption, our turning away from sin and looking to Christ will follow us to the grave — if we’re true. Saints Still Sin Now, do not misunderstand: Christians sin, and at times sin grievously. But they do not make a lifestyle of sinning. It is impossible to do so. “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9). Those with the Spirit repent of sin and turn away from it, encouraged by the discipline of a loving Father. Repentance, we learn in Scripture, is not figuring out the secret passwords to get into heaven. We do not begin an immoral relationship, get confronted in our sin, and continue on in that immoral relationship. We confess our wrongness before God, understand how we’ve conspired against him, and prayerfully cast the sin into the fire, like Paul cast away the poisonous viper fastened to his hand on the island of Patmos (Acts 28:3). Have you continued in a life of repentance? Have you continued in true contrition over sin, accompanied with a true impulse to renounce that sin? Have you continued to wonder how you could so offend your dearest Friend, grieve his indwelling Spirit, and dishonor your heavenly Father? Have you asked, How could I indulge the sin that Christ died to redeem me from? Contrition Draws God Near If you have persisted in repentance, do not forget that your God does not despise this brokenness: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). He does not stand in heaven cross-armed, scowling. Contrition draws him near. As with the Prodigal Son, we do not need to bring our mere promises to do better next time; we bring bended knees and lowly hearts. We ask him to cover our disgrace and lavish us with fresh mercy flowing from the cross of his beloved Son who died to take away our sins. This is an immovable part of our praise to God: agreeing with him that our sin is horrible, that we deserve punishment for it, but that Christ died for our forgiveness, and gave us his Spirit to put it to death. We vow to turn from it, yes, but only in the strength, forgiveness, and acceptance that he provides through grace alone. Having seen more men walk away after sin, having witnessed the painful sights the minister has seen, I plead with you: Continue to offer God this truest, deepest, and sweetest of praises to God. “Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord” (Acts 3:19–20). Article by Greg Morse