If you want to get more from your prayer life, you’ve got to work on your prayer life. It’s that simple. There’s no magic pill. A way to work on your prayer life is by taking a coach approach to prayer.

Taking a coach approach means you get curious about your prayer life. You begin by asking, “Where am I now?” This is the “present” question. It wonders about your current reality. What is the present state of your prayer life? How are you getting...

I’m on a kick to read books on employee engagement. My reading list for the New Year is full of them. As the head of our company’s human resources function, my role is help drive employee engagement. The reason is simple—when employees are engaged, everyone wins.

So how do we drive engagement?

In his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement, Patrick Lencioni shares three causes of “job misery” (what a wonderful, yet terrible term). If you’ve ever been...

Although spiritual gifts are one of God’s ways to build a healthy Church, many Christians aren’t operating in them.

• They don’t know what a spiritual gift is.
• They don’t know what a spiritual gift is not.
• They don’t know what their spiritual gift is.

And consequently, the Church isn’t benefiting from their gift nor is the individual experiencing joy from operating in their gift. The Body is dismembered.

But the Bible exhorts us to pursue spiritual gifts...

When I was a senior in college, I struggled with depression.

It started as a deep gray feeling, then widened and darkened into a black abyss. I lived with five of my college friends, but felt all alone. It got so bad I dropped out of school and entered treatment.

The doctors said I had suffered from low grade depression for years. I don’t know if this was true, but it’s what they said. Apparently I had a knack for coping. But this current season of depression, this slick and...

Praying the Bible is praying the words of the Bible as your prayer. God’s words become the content of your conversation with him. You say his words back to him, and as you do, you tap into the ancient words that are alive. And when you do, you connect with the generations before you who prayed God’s Word.

You pray like Joshua. Joshua was the leader who took over for Moses on the Israelite’s forty-year exodus out of slavery and into destiny. The former slaves were on their...

Life is a process of becoming more aware of yourself and others. As you do, you become more effective at life and work. As you pay attention to those around you, you notice different types of people.

Understanding things like what drives them, how they communicate, how they contribute, what they need, and what can be their downfall, will help you as you relate to them.

In addition, it may be helpful to see examples from the Bible, key verses, and a word to remember.

Everyone is different, and...

One morning I sat down to spend time with God.

Sometimes I make a specific appointment with him and other times I don’t. I’ve found that he’s flexible and can always see me on a whim. I don’t know how he does this with such a full schedule, but I’m grateful.

Our time didn’t start off well. Yeah, I showed up, which is an accomplishment because half the time we make plans, I ditch. But here, now, something was off. We didn’t have the usual...

Sometimes when I drop our children off at Sunday school, I wonder what’s really going on. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great church with a great children’s program. There are whimsical characters painted on the walls, shelves full of toys, boxes of crafts, reams of Bible curriculum. There is a check-in and check-out process so parents leave with the right child.

And there are lots of people who love our kids – from the director of the program to the shift...

Last time we talked about the benefits of creating a role and outcome statement for employees. Now let's talk about how to do it. Only 60% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work, which leaves 40% guessing and the engagement level plummeting.

At my day job at EnergyCAP, Inc., we’ve created role and outcome statements for every employee, which are accessible to the entire company. Like I said, doing so has yielded big benefits for our employees,...

A few years ago, the Barna Group released results from a multiple year survey involving 3,000 self-described Christians. The survey was about spiritual gifts. Although it’s clear from the Bible that spiritual gifts matter deeply to the health of the Church, the survey revealed four troubling statistics.

28% Think They're Empty-Handed

For example, 1 Corinthians 12 says twice that spiritual gifts are given to each believer, but 28% said they didn’t have a spiritual gift....