It’s no secret: Finishing this life with a God-honoring legacy isn’t automatic and certainly isn’t easy. So, in my twenties and thirties and again in my forties, I asked a number of older Christians to show me how it’s done. Thankfully, they agreed!

A few months before his death, best-selling author and international consultant Dr. Ted W. Engstrom invited me to spend a day together, just the two of us. His eyesight was gone, but his mind was still sharp. For hours, he told me about the things closest to his heart.

Among other things, Ted told me about a pact he, Billy Graham, and Bill Bright had made decades earlier, before they became famous. “We promised each other that we would finish well,” Dr. Engstrom told me, smiling. “And just think—Bill Bright did just that! Billy Graham assures me he’s going to be faithful to the end. And I fully intend to do the same!”

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David Sanford’s book and Bible projects have been published by Zondervan, Tyndale House, Thomas Nelson, Doubleday, Barbour, and Amazon. His speaking engagements have ranged everywhere from UC Berkeley (CA) to The Billy Graham Center at the Cove (NC).

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to belief in God in recent years has been a growing disillusionment with Christians and the church. No doubt the church has a historical closet full of skeletons. Even in our own lifetimes, horrendous evils have been exposed, with those who bear God’s name having done reprehensible things under the institutional cover of the church. So with the church’s moral currency bankrupted by religious hypocrisy, and when you consider that part of the Christian story supposedly involves a change brought about in the human heart by God, how do you explain Christians behaving badly?

There should be no room for any answer to a question this raw that does not begin with tremendous sorrow for those who have been harmed, closely followed by a deep protest against any ongoing existence of those evils. God Himself is intimately familiar with the terrible wounds that can accompany being the target of religious hypocrisy since the religious establishment, who were meant to be a spiritual safe haven, were the very ones whose dark actions of betrayal and injustice led to Jesus’ brutal execution.

Through my 18 years of church and non-profit experience, along with my time as a church consultant I have learned a lot about the right and wrong way to bring change. Today, I want to share what I have learned as necessities to bringing impactful and long-lasting change. If you are a leader, your survival may depend on how you bring change. Why is that? People do not like change and if you bring it about poorly you will lose the people.

Here are six things you can do to be a positive change agent:

Mission and Values: Does the change you want to bring drive your mission forward and align with your values? If the answer is no, you need a new idea. If it is yes, now you have something you can share and inspire people with. The mission and values of your church should always serve as a filter for your ideas.

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Bob Van Baren is a church consultant and coach at his company Vision 2-10. He also has 18 years’ experience in church ministry and non-profits, along with a Master of Arts in Leadership and Organizational Development from Bethel Seminary.

It’s been thirty years now since the first personal computers and cellphones began infiltrating almost all aspects of our everyday life. We’ve been dealing with technology long enough now to begin understanding the risk factors that we didn’t recognize early on. No doubt, parents from the 1950s eventually learned that smoking in a car with the windows up was damaging (or smoking in general, much less around children). Parents today, in their heart of hearts, are beginning to understand the need to put down the screen and start relating more with their children in a way that builds personal, loving relationships.

But the real challenge is how do you build stronger relationships with your child once you put down your phone!

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Adapted from The Relationally Intelligent Child: Five Keys to Helping Your Kids Connect Well With Others by John Trent and Dewey Wilson (©2021). Published by Northfield Publishing. All rights to this material are reserved.

“Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.” (1 Peter 5:5-7, esv)

I’ve always needed someone to help guide me. I needed this even when I was blind to it. I thought I could be a lone ranger with Jesus, but it turns out my heart, family, and ministry is more of a community project than I originally thought.

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Russ Masterson is a husband, dad, pastor, and writer in Marietta, Georgia. He serves as the senior pastor at Christ the Redeemer Church of Marietta. He is the co-author (with Scotty Smith) of Searching for Grace: A Weary Leader, A Wise Mentor, and Seven Healing Conversations for a Parched Soul. Visit him at www.russmasterson.cc.

Until fifty years ago, hardly anyone in the West was interested in Muslims or their religion, Islam. It was largely because of the discovery of incredible oil reserves in Arabic countries and increased international terrorism that caused Islam to achieve certain fame.

Today, Islam is no longer an exotic religion that is only thought about by scholars. With roughly three and a half million followers in the United States, it is the third-largest religion after Christianity and Judaism.

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Adapted from God of the Impossible: Stories of Hope from the Muslim World by Rev. Stefano Fehr and Dr. Samuel Naaman (©2021). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.

A rock collector named Robert Cutshaw once found a rock he described as “big and pretty.” He tried to sell it, and when that failed, he kept the rock under his bed in the dark. Rob guessed the blue chunk of rock could bring as much as $500, but he would have taken less for it if an urgent bill needed paying. That's how close he came to selling for a few hundred dollars what turned out to be the largest, most valuable sapphire ever found. The Blue Rock that Rob had once abandoned to the darkness -- now known as the ”Star of David” sapphire -- weighs nearly a pound and could easily sell for several million dollars.

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Dr. Tony Evans is Senior Pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship (Dallas, TX) and founder of The Urban Alternative, a worldwide media ministry. In 2019 Dr. Evans became the first African American in history to author a Study Bible (The Tony Evans Study Bible) as well as a one-volume Bible Commentary (The Tony Evans Bible Commentary). www.TonyEvans.org

When we first moved to the Fixer Upper Farm, it was a bit of an eyesore. Weeds six feet tall. Broken windows. Snakes swimming in the broken-down pool. And so many bushes that needed to be trimmed way back.

We have girls. And girls are great and can do anything; I’m a total believer in that. But my girls? They aren’t exactly the farm-help type.

So I asked my friend Wendy if her son, Griffin, would be interested in being our farmhand for the summer. We promised a decent paycheck for a teenage boy, a pool to jump in whenever he needed to cool down, and three girls to cheer him through his projects for us.

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Nicki Koziarz is an author and speaker with Proverbs 31 Ministries. Her latest book is Flooded: The Five Best Decisions to Make When Life is Hard and Doubt is Rising. The Koziarz family lives on a small farm near Charlotte, NC. www.NickiKoziarz.com

I remember having a conversation with a pastor from my home church a few years ago. We were discussing the idea of living with purpose. The phrase “living with purpose,” or “walking out your purpose,” is one that I hear often in women’s ministry.

I was frustrated because church people, particularly women, were obsessed with “finding their purpose.” Women would constantly struggle with what God was calling them to do or be. They would spend hours scouring self-help books or listening to podcasts by women who apparently had figured it out.

He said something that helped me clarify how to respond to these women who were steeped in concepts like destiny. He said, “God rarely reveals His unknown will to those who are not already walking in His known will.”

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Adapted from Summoned: Answering a Call to the Impossible: An 8 Week Study of Esther by Megan B. Brown (© 2021). Published by Moody Publishers. Used by permission.

It’s been thirty years now since the first personal computers and cellphones began infiltrating almost all aspects of our everyday life. We’ve been dealing with technology long enough now to begin understanding the risk factors that we didn’t recognize early on. Parents today, in their heart of hearts, are beginning to understand the need to put down the screen and start relating more with their children in a way that builds personal, loving relationships. 

The great news is that you can help your children experience and create positive relationships by learning and modeling what they need to learn in your home. In the process, you’ll discover how they learn and how prepared they are for real-world experiences like relating well with others in the workplace, social settings, and even their loving relationships in the future. Becoming relationally intelligent will have a positive impact on their health and future. 

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Adapted from The Relationally Intelligent Child: Five Keys to Helping Your Kids Connect Well With Others by John Trent and Dewey Wilson (©2021). Published by Northfield Publishing. All rights to this material are reserved.