Making Vision Stick Order Printed Copy

Author: Stanley
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About the Book

"MAKING VISION STICK" by stanley is a practical guide on how to effectively communicate and implement a vision within an organization. The book provides clear strategies and techniques for making a vision memorable, engaging, and actionable for all members of the team. Through compelling stories and case studies, the author demonstrates the power of a strong vision and offers practical steps for ensuring its success.

Oswald Chambers

Oswald Chambers (24 July 1874 – 15 November 1917) was an early twentieth-century Scottish Baptist and Holiness Movement evangelist and teacher, best known for the devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Family And Education Born to devout parents in Aberdeen, Scotland, Chambers moved with his family in 1876 to Stoke-on-Trent when his father, Clarence Chambers, became Home Missions evangelist for the North Staffordshire Baptist Association, then to Perth, Scotland when his father returned to the pastorate, and finally to London in 1889, when Clarence was appointed Traveling Secretary of the Baptist Total Abstinence Association. At 16, Oswald Chambers was baptized and became a member of Rye Lane Baptist Chapel[3] Even as a teenager, Chambers was noted for his deep spirituality, and he participated in the evangelization of poor occupants of local lodging houses. At the same time, Chambers also demonstrated gifts in both music and art. From 1893 to 1895, Chambers studied at the National Art Training School, now the Royal College of Art and was offered a scholarship for further study, which he declined. For the next two years he continued his study of art at the University of Edinburgh while being greatly influenced by the preaching of Alexander Whyte, pastor of Free St. George’s Church. While at Edinburgh, he felt called to ministry, and he left for Dunoon College, a small theological training school near Glasgow, founded by the Rev. Duncan MacGregor. Chambers was soon teaching classes at the school and took over much of the administration when MacGregor was injured in 1898. Ministry In 1911 Chambers founded and was principal of the Bible Training College in Clapham Common, Greater London, in an “embarrassingly elegant” property that had been purchased by the Pentecostal League of Prayer. Chambers accommodated not only students of every age, education, and class but also anyone in need, believing he ought to “give to everyone who asks.” “No one was ever turned away from the door and whatever the person asked for, whether money, a winter overcoat, or a meal, was given.” Between 1911 and 1915, 106 resident students attended the Bible Training College, and by July 1915, forty were serving as missionaries. In 1915, a year after the outbreak of World War I, Chambers suspended the operation of the school and was accepted as a Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) chaplain. He was assigned to Zeitoun, Cairo, Egypt, where he ministered to Australian and New Zealand troops, who later participated in the Battle of Gallipoli. Chambers raised the spiritual tone of a center intended by both the military and the YMCA to be simply an institution of social service providing wholesome alternatives to the brothels of Cairo. Death Married to Gertrude (Biddy) Hobbs, Oswald Chambers was stricken with appendicitis on 17 October 1917 but resisted going to a hospital on the grounds that the beds would be needed by men wounded in the long-expected Third Battle of Gaza. On 29 October, a surgeon performed an emergency appendectomy, but Chambers died 15 November 1917 from a pulmonary hemorrhage. He was buried in Cairo with full military honors. The last six years of his life were spent as principal of the Bible Training College in London, and as a chaplain to British Commonwealth troops in Egypt during World War l. After his death, the books which bear his name were compiled by his wife from her own verbatim shorthand notes of his talks.

expect god to do something unexpected

God doesn’t do things the way we think he should. That theme emerges reading de-conversion stories or listening to people explain why they left Christianity based on supposedly intellectual arguments. God doesn’t fit our expectations. He is not like us; he is wholly different. Although not put in exactly these words, the argument goes something like this: If God is perfect and good, he should have revealed himself more clearly, he should have preserved the Scriptures without any textual variants, he should have produced a Bible less open to so many different interpretations (it should somehow be transhistorical and transcultural), he should have completely removed evil and suffering right away. These arguments could be rephrased: If I were God, I would have done things differently . In comparison to our enlightened reason, God’s actions are seen as wanting and deficient. Our preferences, wisdom, rationality, and expectations become the standard to which God must submit or be rejected as false and untrustworthy. There seems to be no place left for a humble assessment of the limits and frailty of human ability and rationality. Scandal and Folly at the Cross God often does not do things the way that we as humans think he should. The clearest example of this is Jesus’s crucifixion. Paul argues that “we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:23–25). Paul is not embracing fideism, blind faith, or anti-intellectualism; he is recognizing the limits of human rationality and the reality that God is not bound to act as we think he should. The crucifixion may have been scandalous to Jews and ridiculous to Gentiles, but it was God’s plan to save and restore his image-bearing representatives. Scandal and Folly at Christmas We are so familiar with the Christmas narratives that we often fail to see how they are similar to the crucifixion: certainly scandalous, debatably foolish, but nevertheless, God’s plan to fulfill his promises and save his people. First, the virgin conception was scandalous. Joseph himself assumed infidelity and intended to divorce Mary. Around 100 years after Matthew wrote his Gospel, Origen describes the common non-Christian Jewish counter-narrative. He accuses him of having “invented his birth from a virgin,” and upbraids him with being “born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child.” (Origen, Against Celsus 1.28, in The Ante-nicene Fathers , 4.408) These claims have no surviving first-century corroborating evidence, but it is easy enough to see how they arose in response to Christian claims about Jesus’s virgin conception. Could God have done things in a way less open to ridicule? Or could he not have somehow provided more supernatural proof? Of course he could have; but he didn’t. And skeptics mock. Meanwhile, Christians celebrate this truth as the way God chose to act to save the world through his Son Jesus, fully God and fully man. Second, the incarnation itself is incredible to believe — did God really need to become man? Justin Martyr describes early criticism of Christianity from the mid-second century, You ought to feel ashamed when you make assertions similar to theirs [Greco-Roman religions], and rather [should] say that this Jesus was born man of men. . . . You endeavor to prove an incredible and well-nigh impossible thing; [namely], that God endured to be born and become man. (Justin, Dial . 67–68, in The Ante-nicene Fathers , 1.231–232) It may be hard to believe, but God became man; he entered our pain, our suffering, and our death in order to defeat death for all of us. As the book of Hebrews makes clear, he experienced our limitations and temptations in order to become our perfect and eternal High Priest and to offer a perfect and final sacrifice for sin. Could God have done it a different, less painful, less embarrassing way? Maybe, but he didn’t. Third, why the lowly birth? Why be born in poverty, in obscurity, and in weakness? We are so familiar with the Christmas story that we fail to see how counterintuitive this all is. In saving the world, God seems to have gone the most difficult route imaginable. Like Satan’s temptation to instantly give Jesus global sovereignty without the suffering of the cross, there could have been quite a few quicker and easier ways to get this done. But as Paul notes, God’s “folly” is greater than man’s wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:25). Trust God to Be God As you reflect this Christmas season on your life, your struggles, your disappointments, your victories, your faith, and your hope, remember that God is God and we are not. Jesus’s death on the cross was simultaneously foolishness to the wise in the world, to those who are perishing, and a demonstration of the power and wisdom of God to those of us who believe. He doesn’t always do things the way we might expect or wish he would, but when it comes to God, shouldn’t we know by now to expect the unexpected? Faith in God certainly doesn’t make us safe (as if we were living in a magical bubble in which nothing bad could happen and we were guaranteed success at every turn), but it does make us incredibly secure. Because he is faithful and good, we can trust and worship without always completely understanding. Christianity did not begin, survive, and expand primarily through intellectual argumentation but through a demonstration of the Spirit, who is the true power of Christmas.