FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR Power is only as strong as the authority that sustains it. This book will help you be a better leader. It will help you receive a healthy dose of accountability through applied spiritual authority. The biblical prophets did not live or prophesy in a contextual vacuum. They spoke into real-life circumstances to real-life leaders such as kings, queens, governors, and generals. Drawing on biblical accounts, Dr. Mark Rutland shows how these interactions, sometimes in the form of advice but more often as dramatic confrontations, demonstrate the tension between heaven's authority and the princes of this world. Readers will discover that: God positions His messengers to confront and advise those who lead in the natural realm. Likewise, Satan is also working to position his own servants near the world's leaders hoping to steer them away from the things and plans of God. To whom those leaders listen will determine, to a large extent, the fate of nations. God often positions His servants at the right elbow of leaders in a wide range of disciplines, from business to education to entertainment to politics. Every believer should be open to being "God's prophetic voice" in someone else's life, whether that person is a child, a boss, or a town councilman. Likewise, every believer should be in constant prayer for and humbly sensitive to wise counsel sent from God as a gift of grace. God makes and unmakes kings. When they can discern and listen to His voice, He sustains their well-wielded authority with His supernatural power.

Many of America’s greatest Protestant preachers—Paul Tillich, William Sloane Coffin, Barbara Brown Taylor, Fleming Rutledge, Peter J. Gomes, Billy Graham, and others—have spoken powerfully from the pulpit of the “great towering church” that is the spiritual and architectural center of Duke University. This collection of fifty-eight of the most notable sermons proclaimed from that pulpit commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of the groundbreaking for Duke Chapel. It is a sweeping panorama of sermons selected and edited by Bishop William H. Willimon, Dean of the Chapel for twenty years and one of the most widely read writers on preaching in America. Opening with the sermon preached in June 1935 at the dedication of the Chapel and closing with one by Willimon delivered at the beginning of the 2003–4 school year, this volume presents Protestant Christianity at its most eloquent and prophetic. Some sermons are pure meditations on biblical texts; others are period pieces in the best sense of the term, reflecting on such contemporary concerns as civil rights, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the wars in Europe, Vietnam, and Iraq. Willimon provides a brief introduction to each sermon, commenting on the work and thought of the preacher. Diverse in subject and style, the sermons collected in this volume are a treasure for those who love fine preaching, a resource for those studying the history of homiletics, and a light to rekindle the memories of those who have worshiped in the Chapel over the years.