“Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” — Isaiah 49:16

No doubt a part of the wonder which is concentrated in the word “behold” is excited by the unbelieving lamentation of the preceding sentence. Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me; my God has forgotten me.”

How amazed the divine mind seems to be at this wicked unbelief! What can be more astounding than the unfounded doubts and fears of God’s favored people? The Lord’s loving word of rebuke should make us blush, and he cries, “How can I have forgotten you, when I have engraved you on the palms of my hands? How can you doubt my constant remembrance, when the memorial is set upon my very flesh?”

O unbelief, how strange a marvel you are! We do not know which more to wonder at: the faithfulness of God or the unbelief of his people.

God keeps his promise a thousand times, and yet the next trial makes us doubt him. He never fails, he is never a dry well, he is never as a setting sun, a passing meteor, or a melting vapor—and yet we are as continually vexed with anxieties, bothered with suspicions, and disturbed with fears, as if our God were the mirage of the desert.

“Behold,” is a word intended to excite admiration. Here, indeed, we have a theme for marveling. Heaven and earth may well be astonished that rebels should obtain so great a nearness to the heart of infinite love as to be written on the palms of his hands.

“I have engraved you.” It does not say “your name.” The name is there, but that is not all: “I have engraved you.” See the fulness of this! I have engraved your person, your image, your case, your circumstances, your sins, your temptations, your weaknesses, your wants, your works. I have engraved you, everything about you, all that concerns you. I have put you altogether there.

Will you ever say again that your God has forsaken you when he has engraved you on his own palms?

Adapted from Morning and Evening.

The Epistle to the Hebrews the Greek text with notes and essays. 1903 (B. F. Westcott, Ed.) (3d ed.). Classic Commentaries on the Greek New Testament (338). London: Macmillan.

The ground of this efficacy of sin by deceit is taken from the faculty of the soul affected with it. Deceit properly affects the mind; it is the mind that is deceived. When sin attempts any other way of entrance into the soul, as by the affections, the mind, retaining its right and sovereignty, is able to give check and control unto it. But where the mind is tainted, the prevalency must be great; for the mind or understanding is the leading faculty of the soul, and what that fixes on, the will and affections rush after, being capable of no con­ sideration but what that presents unto them. Hence it is, that though the entanglement of the affections unto sin be oftentimes most troublesome, yet the deceit of the mind is always most dangerous, and that because of the place that it possesses in the soul as unto all its operations. Its office is to guide, direct, choose, and lead; and “if the light that is in us be darkness, how great is that darkness!” [Matt. 6:23].

~John Owen~

Stephen R. Covey dies; author of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ was 79

Stephen R. Covey, a former business professor whose 1989 leadership manifesto “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” sold more than 20 million copies on the way to becoming one of the most highly effective volumes in the history of self-help publishing, died July 16 at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He was 79.

He died of complications from injuries he sustained in a bicycle accident three months ago. The death was announced by FranklinCovey, the multimillion-dollar business and leadership consulting firm he co-founded in his home state of Utah.

Stephen Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’: A look at author Stephen Covey’s “habits” through the prism of seven successful leaders.

Dr. Covey was quick to admit that few new ideas could be found in his landmark book and the publishing and motivational-speaking empire he built around it. He was preceded in self-help business literature by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., the McKinsey consultants who wrote “In Search of Excellence” (1982). Before them came Dale Carnegie, author of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (1936).

Yet millions of readers turned to Dr. Covey’s books, whose titles included “First Things First,” “The Leader In Me” and “Everyday Greatness.” Fortune 500 executives lined up for top-dollar seminars where Dr. Covey was treated like a rock star, and President Bill Clinton once summoned him to Camp David, but not because Dr. Covey knew something they did not.

Dr. Covey had articulated a philosophy that — however platitudinous it seemed to detractors — transcended business and spoke to the centuries-old American values of self-improvement and self-reliance.

“This is not some kind of Big Bang theory,” Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn said in an interview. Dr. Covey’s achievement, she said, was a practical action plan for business leaders who no longer wished to be “the man in the gray suit” as they headed into the 21st century.

Instead, Koehn said, Dr. Covey challenged readers and listeners to think about their “character and integrity and a sense of one’s place not only relative to . . . one’s professional standing but one’s place in the cosmos.”

Dr. Covey disdained what he called the “flood of trendy philosophies” emanating from the modern workplace and instead offered seven seemingly timeless maxims. They had very little to do with business and everything to do with character.

And, he told the Daily Telegraph in 2004, “there was nothing esoteric or special about why I chose the number seven. . . . It just happened to turn out that way.”

The maxims are:

1. Be proactive.

2. Begin with the end in mind.

3. Put first things first.

4. Think win/win.

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

6. Synergize.

7. Sharpen the saw — a Benjamin Franklin-esque injunction to seek constantly to improve oneself.

In 2004, as self-help books occupied ever more real estate in bookstores, he amended his 1989 book with “The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.”

As Americans found their lives increasingly busy and cluttered, Dr. Covey emphasized the differences between tasks that are urgent but unimportant, important but not urgent, and every other permutation of the two.