Category: Book Summaries

Happy National Coaches Day

On October 6, National Coaches Day honors the men and women who inspire us to work harder and do our best. For #NationalCoachesDay, we pause to consider how across the country in every community, a coach organizes teams, plans practices and training, and motivates players to be the best they can be.

Coaches pinpoint areas for improvement and supply guidance. Every sport or competition requires a leader. More importantly, a leader who knows the game and drives athletes to work together as a team.

A few years back, I read a book co-authored by Jon Gordon and former Atlanta Falcons Head Football Coach, Mike Smith. It’s entitled You Win in the Locker Room First: The 7 C’s to Build a Winning Team in Business, Sports, and Life.

Gordon and Smith wrote, “Success happens by focusing on the process, not the outcome. You win by cultivating the right culture, leadership, expectations, beliefs, mindset, relationships, and habits before you even play the game. You win in the locker room first.”

Click here to learn more from Gordon & Smith’s You Win in the Locker Room First

Andrew Murray’s With Christ in the School of Prayer

When I think of the practice of Confession (see this month’s focus here), my mind goes to the “ACTS” model for prayer (Adoration; Confession; Thanksgiving; and Supplication).  Of course, a key part of our prayer life is Confession.

On October 28, 1895, Andrew Murray said:

As long as we look on prayer chiefly as the means of maintaining our own Christian life, we shall not know fully what it is meant to be. But when we learn to regard it as the highest part of the work entrusted to us, the root and strength of all other work, we shall see that there is nothing that we so need to study and practice, as the art of praying aright.

The truth that has come to me with wonderful clearness as I studied the teaching of Jesus on prayer. It is this: that the Father waits to hear every prayer of faith, to give us whatsoever we will, and whatsoever we ask in Jesus’ name. We have become so accustomed to limit the wonderful love and the large promises of our God, that we cannot read the simplest and clearest statements of our Lord without the qualifying clauses by which we guard and expound them.

We need to learn more from Jesus Christ about how to pray.  May our fears vanish as we see Jesus, living ever to pray, living in us to pray, and standing surety for our prayer-life.

Click here for more from Andrew Murray on Prayer