Awaken Your Might

By Daniel Allen

Each of us is called to reflect Christ’s heart to our families, workplaces, and the world. Awaken Your Might is a Christ-centered devotional, with daily reflections meant to build leadership ability for all the places God calls you to serve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CrossLink Publishing
• Release date: Oct 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633570542

Book preview

Awaken Your Might

Working to Become a more Christ-Centered leader

Daniel Allen

Awaken Your Might: Working to Become a More Christ-Centered Leader

CrossLink Publishing

www.crosslinkpublishing.com

Copyright, © 2015 Daniel Allen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews, without the written permission of the author.

Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law.

ISBN 978-1-63357-053-5

Scripture quotations marked NIV is taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®.

Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from The Message. Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

FOREWORD

By Virgil Allen

At the beginning of my son’s last year of high school, it dawned on me that he would really be leaving home, and if he were anything like me, my ability to offer advice for his future would be gone as well. Once gone, my ability to influence Dan would be lost.

Sure, like most families we had our family rules.

The Five Rules:

(1) Life is not fair. People use unfairness as an excuse for not getting what they want.

(2) The family is not a democracy. Children can lobby but only parents vote.

(3) Pigs do not fly. Don’t tell me things that are impossible.

(4) Never take the queen’s bishop’s pawn. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is not true.

(5) Drink your coffee black. Adding things to something won’t improve it.

But these rules were not sufficient for a young person going off to college and the rest of his life.

Dan was smart but young. I was certain that I had not given him the best of my experience and knowledge. There were many things I wanted to tell him. What father hasn’t looked at his children and felt the loss of opportunity? In my panic to compensate for the past, I decided to collect as much wisdom as I could recall, remember, and assemble in a format that a college freshman might read.

I decided on putting each thought on a single page because a young person might read a single page before losing interest. More than that, I wanted to find a reference in the Scripture to support each thought. Some of the thoughts had to be reworded from the simple phrases I had learned as a sailor into phrases that would be meaningful.

The process of assembling all the thoughts took almost a year. When completed, I printed out the pages and put them in a notebook. It was not a very fancy presentation. I gave the package to Dan as I dropped him off at college. For more than twenty years, I didn’t know if Dan had ever opened the notebook or if he would have just tossed it into the trash when we left him.

When Dan called to tell me that he had not only kept the notebook but also turned it into a devotional, I was stunned beyond my ability to say anything. I am pleased he has taken my rather feeble effort and created something really special. It is my prayer that all my grandchildren will read what he has written and benefit from his wisdom.

INTRODUCTION

The story behind this book

There are so many books about leadership that there is probably no accurate way to quantify it. My Amazon search today turned up nearly 120,000 books related to leadership. A search for leadership with Bible turns up over 4,500 results.

Leadership is tough to define and tougher to measure. Essentially, we know good and bad leadership when we see it, at least we think. The fact is that even the wisest leader making the smartest choices can still fail to reach his or her goals, though they are certainly more likely to succeed than an unwise person making poor choices.

So, why write another book about leadership? To know why, you have to know the story behind it.

I was fortunate that I grew up with my dad who cared about leadership and developing me into a wiser decision maker. That’s where this book began over twenty years ago.

My dad, as he approached retirement from his first career as a military officer, was also an elder in our church and a leader of a church home group where he regularly taught as part of ministry. Around the same time that he was figuring out the next phase of his professional life, a change that was happening largely to stabilize our family after many times relocating, he started to compile his accumulated wisdom on the biblical teachings on leadership.

Reading daily, he drew these principles from, by his count, over three hundred books, articles, and other sources on leadership.

My senior year of high school came and went, and in the summer of 1995, I prepared to head off to Vanderbilt University in Nashville on an ROTC scholarship. This was itself a minor miracle given my academic late-bloomer status. One of the last gifts Dad handed to me was a binder with his collection of about 150 leadership maxims, each one drawn from a specific biblical passage but written out in a way that required no faith background to make my own.

In the collection, I recognized many phrases that had been part of ordinary conversation in our household. Only now I could see how prayerfully those moments had been prepared by my dad. I kept that binder throughout college, probably opening it once a year. I kept it through my two-year peacetime hitch on active duty that didn’t have anything particularly dramatic to show for.

When I struggled to get back on my feet after the Army, the collection represented everything I felt I wasn’t as a leader. There had been a time when I was an obvious campus leader and role model, but my story didn’t go the way I thought it would. Fighting a recession, I had a tough time finding work. I stocked shelves, substitute taught, and was briefly a terrible computer salesman, among other things.

I kept the binder when I finally connected with the VA and turned my life around. It went from being the embodiment of what I had been, and now wasn’t, to what I could one day be again. My body and soul healed.

I found a second life in academics, earning my doctorate and becoming a teacher of college students. In a world where college educations are increasingly expensive, and liberal arts educations seem interchangeable, the binder became something new. The wisdom of godly leadership development became not just my aspiration but something I want to develop in others, just as my dad and the Army had developed in my life.

One night at a Bible study in Minnesota, during prayer, my wife and I were told we would awaken our might. I had been made strong, become weak, and was now ready to become a leader again for my family and community. I felt compelled to transform the binder into a format that anyone could use, adding life lessons from the military, higher education, and my journey in faith. To put it another way, I felt I owed God to do this as a sacrifice for the new career and new life He had restored in me.

The project took on a whole new sense of urgency when my wife became pregnant with our son. The wisdom of my dad needed to be less dependent on me and forever accessible to him.

So, about two decades later, this book is completed. It is inspired by my dad, written for my son, and in thanks to God.

What you should know before continuing

There are a few things you need to know about my starting points when I talk about leadership from the perspective of my faith:

1. I believe everyone is called to be a leader. We are not all called to be leaders in the same context.

It doesn’t matter if you work inside the home or outside it, or whether you are self-employed or part of a gigantic corporation. In the contexts we live and serve, our leadership is needed.

2. I use the terminology team and organization interchangeably throughout this book.

Leadership starts with the home team—our family.

If nowhere else, we have the obligation to serve our families by cultivating our own gifts and developing the gifts and talents in others. This is not easy, but it is the starting point of leadership development.

3. Successful leadership is measured generationally.

Businesses measure success in terms of quarterly profits, sports teams in championships, militaries in strategic victories, students in graduating and starting careers, and American politicians in two and four-year election cycles.

Underlying all of these measures of success is the idea that the future generation should be put in a position to succeed to a higher level than currently.

The truth is that a military can win every battle and lose a war. Politicians can win elections but never actually accomplish anything. Students can graduate while being poorly prepared for lifelong learning and competition.

Victory in the short term is fleeting if it doesn’t serve the longer, generational purpose.

4. I avoid the Bible translation debate.

I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God. I am open to using any good faith translation, and I will use whichever translation delivers, in its context, the greatest chance to communicate. This is why I have selected passages from a number of different translations, and often included multiple translations for the same verse if they use language that supports the objective. I’ll leave the debate to theologians.

I use the following translations:

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (NRSV) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scriptures quotations marked (NKJV) are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (MSG) are from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Finally, at times I made use of the Bible Gateway website, a division of Zondervan and HarperCollins Christian Publishing (www.biblegateway.com) when comparing across multiple translations.

5. I believe people are made in the image of God.

We can reflect the image of God, including his creativity. This is why it can be worthwhile to write yet