“Excellence” might not be the business leadership buzzword it once was, but it’s far from dead. A quick search at Amazon shows plenty of business titles with “excellence” in them. Even if the term isn’t the word of the day anymore, the concept has never waned.

This is because the business world understands that making what they do, and how they do it, better is essential for their survival in a competitive marketplace. Maybe that marketplace mentality is partly why ministry leaders sometimes view excellence as a “a business thing.”

But they shouldn’t.

A Christian…

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Having surveyed the first section of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah, or Law—the 5 books of Moses—we turn now to the second, the Prophets. This section is normally divided into the Former Prophets, what we Protestants call the books of History, and the Latter Prophets, what we call the Major and Minor Prophets. There’s a lot of creation material in the Latter Prophets, but I’m going to touch on just one passage in the Former.

During the reign of Hezekiah, Assyria invades, conquers, and takes into…

This article is reprinted from 2009, with permission, from Doug Kutilek’s free newsletter “As I See It,” then a monthly electronic magazine.

One of the most often-quoted devotional comments in Matthew Henry’s (1662-1714) famous commentary on the Bible is his remark regarding the creation of the first woman from the side of the first man (Genesis 2:21-22)—

[T]he woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by…