Rudy Guliani et al

It was recently released that Presidential hopeful, Rudy Guliani, billed New York City taxpayers for security expenses while on weekend trysts with Judith Nathan, his then-mistress and now wife. Whenever he snuck out to Nathan's condo in the Hamptons, Guliani brought along a security detail of several New York City cops, who were fed and put up at hotels. The expenses for the cops--totaling tens of thousands of dollars--were, conveniently, billed to obscure city agencies and kept from public knowledge, until now.

I am reminded of the words of Henry Blackaby from his book, Spiritual Leadership: Leaders can accomplish marvelous feats in the public eye and be praised as heroes. But the real heroes are the ones who go home at the end of the day to a family that loves and respects them.

Kouzes and Posner, in their book, Credibility: How Leaders Gain And Lose It, write: The ultimate test of leaders' credibility is whether they do what they say.

And Dan Cooper, writing about the integrity of CEOs, states: There is an inefficiency in the market place because the market place doesn't value this characteristic of character. And all we're doing is taking advantage of that mispricing in the market and trying to make money off of it. We don't approach our investment from a moralistic standpoint, but we believe that the world and the market place doesn't fully understand the value of character. Really, at the heart of it, is that being good wins.

Simply put, when Jesus develops leaders, He is far more concerned with who a leader is on the inside than with all of his worldy accomplishments on the outside.

So Rudy et al . . . just keep in mind a few more words of Jesus: "What good does it do for a person to gain the world but in the process lose his soul?"