I am even more pleased that it happened that I read this book alongside Respectable Sins.
Both books are good headlamps to help you see into your own motivations and failings and hypocrisy.
But Leadership.... takes a more psychological approach while Respectable Sins gives and entirely spiritual view of the subject of how we must develop a clear view of how we are really behaving, and what's at the root of it.
Leadership and Self Deception is meant to be a tool for personnel management in business. It's written in a kind of contrived conversational style which weaves some very useful strategies for understanding our own motivations and behaviors. Once we see our self-made stumbling blocks, we are able to change our behavior and act in a more productive manner.
The central theme of each book really boils down to the fact that we are dealing with sin in our hearts. We don't like to call it sin. And Leadership and Self Deception doesn't call it sin. In this book, it's called "self-betrayal" and "being in the box". But it's the same thing in the end. They name it differently, but give some good insight to help us see our wrong motivations with a keener eye.
I think that how we name our failings is important, though. If we call our failures "self-betrayal" and "being in the box" rather than sin in our hearts.....we can then deceive ourselves yet again with the idea that we are able to conquer it on our own. Only when we recognize that it's a spiritual problem with only a spiritual cure, we have hope of help....through Christ, not through strategies.
And when we see our sin as "self-betrayal" we miss the point that it is also sin against a Holy God and against other people.
I do appreciate the much re-iterated message in Leadership... that generally, when we think that the problem in our relationships is The Other Guy, we are deceived and are, in fact, ourselves, the problem.
It is the same old scene in which I continue to fret over the bit of sawdust in my brother's eye, when I have a plank in my own eye. (Matthew 7:3,4).
This is a good image to be reminded of on an hourly basis. Perhaps moment by moment would be better.
Respectable Sin is well worth reading. He looks at some real core places where we ignore teaching that's clear in the Bible, like failure to pursue Godliness, failures of faith which show up as irritation and worry. Many of the sins he discusses are viewed by many of us as something like fun little quirks in our personalities. And as long as we see them in this way, we have little motivation to deal with them. It's really essential that we make an honest appraisal of our need for change, or we will stumble along in ignorance of the sin in us that is so obvious to everyone else.
Having finished Respectable Sins for the second time, I have to say that I can think of a few which he didn't cover that are present in my life.
I have a plan now to read through the book and use the study guide which is available from the same publisher as an exercise with my three oldest kids.
These two books were helpful to me, and I think that if you want to just really dig out all the gunk in your heart and get a good view of how big the plank in your eye really is, I'd recommend taking these two books and James Wilson's How to be Free from Bitterness on a solitary weekend retreat. They are all good tools.
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