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Great Leaders of the Bible: Lessons from Scripture's Visionaries, Change Makers, and Trailblazers
Discover timeless leadership principles through the lives of Scripture’s greatest figures. In Great Leaders of the Bible, John C. Maxwell, a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s most trusted voices on leadership, explores 28 biblical examples of men and women who demonstrated extraordinary courage, faith, and wisdom in the face of life’s greatest challenges.
From Moses leading God’s people through the wilderness to Esther risking everything for her people, each story reveals what true leadership looks like when tested by adversity.
Every chapter A biblical story highlighting a defining leadership momentA life lesson for everyday applicationA leadership principle from the BibleA heartfelt prayer for personal growth and guidanceWhether you lead in business, ministry, or your home, Great Leaders of the Bible will inspire you to lead with humility, courage, and conviction—following the example of those who trusted God in the hardest moments.
Perfect for personal study, leadership development, or small groups, this book reminds readers that the greatest leaders are not defined by power or position, but by faithful obedience to God’s calling.
From Moses leading God’s people through the wilderness to Esther risking everything for her people, each story reveals what true leadership looks like when tested by adversity.
Every chapter A biblical story highlighting a defining leadership momentA life lesson for everyday applicationA leadership principle from the BibleA heartfelt prayer for personal growth and guidanceWhether you lead in business, ministry, or your home, Great Leaders of the Bible will inspire you to lead with humility, courage, and conviction—following the example of those who trusted God in the hardest moments.
Perfect for personal study, leadership development, or small groups, this book reminds readers that the greatest leaders are not defined by power or position, but by faithful obedience to God’s calling.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 4, 2026
About the author
John C. Maxwell
1,098 books6,020 followersJohn Calvin Maxwell is an American author, speaker, and pastor who has written many books, primarily focusing on leadership. Titles include The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. Some of his books have been on the New York Times Best Seller List.
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Everyone Gets a Robe, a Lesson, and a Prayer
Inside John C. Maxwell’s Efficiently Managed Procession of Biblical Wisdom, Leadership, and Interpretive Certainty
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 1st, 2026
Designations are cheap in leadership books; the harder question is who acts when no designation arrives. John C. Maxwell’s “Great Leaders of the Bible” is most exact when it looks away from thrones and pulpits. Jonathan protects David, though David’s rise will close Jonathan’s path to the throne. Abigail stops the future king from answering an insult with slaughter. An enslaved Israelite girl points Naaman toward healing. Maxwell’s familiar maxim – leadership is influence, not position – could sit harmlessly beneath a dry-erase marker. These chapters make it cost something.
Early on, Maxwell introduces the device that gives the book its warmth and causes much of its trouble. He imagines meeting 28 biblical figures face to face, taking in their clothes, bodies, scars, and bearing, then hearing what their lives have taught them. Noah arrives weathered by centuries; Job wears jewels over a scarred body; Jacob still limps; Elisha carries the repaired mantle of succession. Each entrance files into the same order: dramatized meeting, compressed scriptural account, “Life Lessons,” “Leadership Lessons,” prayer. By the fourth or fifth visitor, the room has begun to feel less like eternity than a very efficiently managed retreat. Everyone receives a costume, a governing sentence, and a benediction before the next name is called. At their best, the details carry argument: Job’s rings and scars hold restoration beside loss, Jacob’s limp keeps surrender in the body, and Elisha’s mended mantle makes succession visible. Elsewhere they are stage business, another robe shaken out before the lesson begins.
Maxwell means the volume to be returned to according to need. The introduction proposes a daily reading plan, a month of chapters, or a 28-week practice involving Scripture, journaling, and action. In that rhythm, repetition becomes ritual. Miriam waits for the person whose comparisons have turned acidic; Elijah for the achiever who has collapsed after the applause. Esther addresses the suspicion that safety may be an assignment evaded. Martha is there for anyone who has made service so busy that the guest disappears inside the hospitality. The profiles are brief and already divided into discussion prompts. They know where the chairs should go before the small group arrives. The book succeeds when one of its sentences survives into a reader’s next difficult hour.
Even a devotional meant for intervals must bear the pressure of uninterrupted reading. The template soon stops receding behind the material. Chapter titles give away the lesson before the story has moved: Noah proves that one person matters, Joseph persistence, Rebekah generosity, Daniel purpose, Jonah second chances. Narrative does not discover meaning so much as report for duty beneath it. Difficulty becomes providence, then application, then prayer. What steadies a reader on Tuesday can feel foreclosed by Thursday.
The prose carries the rhythm of practiced oral instruction. Maxwell writes in short and medium-length declarations, built for enumeration and immediate recall. He likes balanced oppositions: faith zone and safe zone, character and reputation, purpose and position, surrender and control. An anecdote leads to three points; the points narrow into a line sturdy enough to underline. His sentences contain almost no grammatical doubt because his theology contains almost none. They state, repeat, and assign. Even bewilderment arrives already fitted with its eventual answer. They seldom remain uncertain long enough to change shape, which is why the prose can feel comforting in the moment and airless across the full sequence.
Repetition is the book’s liturgy and its tax. A principle appears in a heading, returns in the imagined speaker’s mouth, governs the retelling, reappears as personal counsel, becomes a leadership application, then enters the prayer. Maxwell compresses the story and enlarges the moral. He teaches efficiently by interpreting too soon. Scripture arrives rough, resistant, and historically strange; Maxwell sends it onward with a maxim polished for the pocket. The prayers keep that process from becoming pure self-help. After all the lists and action points, the reader must still ask for courage, patience, humility, or mercy. Virtue cannot be engineered alone. That final petition matters: it keeps Maxwell’s program from ending in the glow of completed self-improvement and returns the reader, however briefly, to need.
In the quieter profiles, the book reaches its governing insight: responsibility can precede permission. Jonathan matters because he helps the right person advance rather than guarding his own succession. Abigail listens to a servant, reads David’s rage faster than David does, and lends him enough future vision to prevent a present atrocity. The servant girl has no office, freedom, or social weight. One credible sentence from her redirects a commander and unsettles two kingdoms. Leadership here is what someone does with the sliver of access available when another person may suffer for their silence.
Power inside institutions often belongs, for one crucial minute, to someone whose authority has never appeared on the chart: a sponsor, an expert, a dissenter, the colleague willing to name what a superior cannot see. Maxwell does not write about project teams, and Deborah need not be issued a laptop. His better examples ask what to do when responsibility arrives before permission. The answer is not to seize the room. It is to answer the need in front of you. This is more interesting than the subtitle’s parade of visionaries and trailblazers suggests.
Among the 28 chapters, Elijah’s allows care to precede correction. After the spectacle on Mount Carmel – fire, victory, public vindication – Elijah flees one threat. He isolates himself. He collapses beneath a tree and asks to die. Maxwell’s account is devotional rather than clinical, but it notices the order of care. God does not begin with a maxim. Elijah receives food, sleep, companionship, and quiet before another assignment arrives. The sequence rebukes the belief that every exhausted leader merely needs a better calendar. Triumph can drain a person badly enough to make continued life feel like defeat.
Part of the book’s trouble comes from the same generosity that admits Abigail and the servant girl. Maxwell lets “leadership” spread until it loses some power to distinguish. Hospitality, motherhood, patience, prayer, witness, repentance, endurance, and ordinary faithfulness all enter the category. Job is admitted partly through the conjecture that his wealth required hundreds of servants, “like running a major corporation today.” The comparison is revealing in the wrong way. Job’s suffering does not need a corporate credential before it can instruct anyone. Maxwell’s category begins as a way of identifying responsibility between people; eventually it resembles a halo placed over nearly every commendable Christian act. The word gains reach and loses edge.
At Hagar, the cost of making every story manageable becomes harder to ignore. Sarah’s treatment of her enslaved servant is organized chiefly as a lesson about impatience, manipulation, and accepting blame. Those lessons are present, but Hagar’s reproductive use and vulnerability remain supporting material in Sarah’s education. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac is treated as the final proof of trust, with obedience placed before understanding. Within devotional faith, that may signify surrender. In a book about leading other people, it demands another question: how should conviction be tested when it regards itself as proof and someone else will bear the cost? Maxwell does not keep that question open.
Direct speech then gives the simplification a ventriloquist’s authority. The introduction identifies the encounters as imagined, yet the chapters supply motives, private histories, physical particulars, retrospective interpretations, and prayers without repeatedly marking where Scripture stops and reconstruction begins. “Sarah” explains her failure. “Jonah” approves the lesson about second chances. “Job” speaks as though catastrophe has settled into promise. Maxwell’s readings begin to sound personally ratified by the people being read.
In all their robes, scars, mantles, and sandals, these speakers sound remarkably alike. Noah, Sarah, Deborah, Elijah, Mary, and the Samaritan woman favor contemporary motivational phrasing, balanced contrasts, and conclusions burnished by hindsight. Their circumstances change. Their syntax barely does. Little in the sentences suggests differences of temperament, social position, humor, or pressure of thought. Maxwell has arranged a relay rather than a chorus, each speaker carrying the same voice for several pages before handing it on. The baton is sturdy. One misses the runner.
Most of all, that uniform voice changes the terms on which suffering may appear. Job loses his wealth, health, and ten children; the chapter moves toward restored prosperity, new children, and confidence that God saw the larger picture. Later blessings do not answer earlier deaths. The biblical story lasts partly because it refuses to make suffering behave like a leadership exercise. Maxwell recognizes pain but dislikes leaving it unemployed. It must build character, clarify purpose, deepen faith, or prepare influence. His God wastes nothing; his method sometimes permits nothing to remain waste.
If the method narrows these stories, it does not make Maxwell cynical. He consistently prefers restoration to disqualification. Jacob’s manipulation does not become his permanent name. Miriam’s jealousy does not erase her courage. Jonah is called again. Elijah is fed before he is corrected. Martha’s bustle can become attention. The prayers also keep the volume from becoming a management manual tied with a devotional ribbon. These people do not perfect themselves through technique. They ask for help, receive grace, and are reminded that whatever influence they possess is held in trust.
The revealing comparison is with Henri J. M. Nouwen’s “In the Name of Jesus,” more than with the obvious market neighbors. “Great Leaders of the Bible” shares the accessible assurance of Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” and the character-centered Christian tradition of J. Oswald Sanders’s “Spiritual Leadership.” Nouwen, however, mistrusts the desire to be effective in a way Maxwell rarely does. Maxwell asks how influence can be redirected toward service. Nouwen asks what the appetite for influence may already have done to the person who wants it.
Readers who accept Maxwell’s theological premises may find the volume consoling, quotable, and ready for group use. Its cast is unusually broad: women, servants, immigrants, supporters, and social outsiders stand beside rulers and prophets. Secular readers may admire particular judgments while finding the larger reasoning closed, since providence, miracles, divine communication, and scriptural authority are starting points rather than subjects of inquiry. Some Christian readers may also resist how quickly the book moves through slavery, sacrifice, conquest, gender, and unequal power. The decisive split is not between belief and unbelief. It is between those who want Scripture made immediately usable and those who believe some of its authority lies in the trouble it refuses to stop making. Maxwell serves the first group with admirable consistency. He sometimes answers the second before it has finished asking. The issue is less whether Scripture may guide conduct than whether guidance must always arrive as a lesson already resolved.
Over the final three chapters, the sequence itself begins to think. The early pages concern flood, covenant, migration, dynasties, armies, and national deliverance. The closing movement turns toward Mary’s consent, Martha’s attention, and a Samaritan woman’s conversation at a well. The scale contracts. Command gives way to receptivity, presence, and testimony: saying yes, stopping long enough to listen, then carrying recognition back to people who have denied it. The final trailblazer clears no wilderness and wins no battle. An encounter simply changes the direction of her body – away from the well, back toward the people she had gone there to avoid. Greatness, at last, is not spectacle. It is the courage to return carrying news.
Placed last, the Samaritan woman revises the subtitle more sharply than any of the book’s kings or prophets. She is unnamed, stigmatized, religiously marginal, and without institutional standing. Maxwell invents more of her emotional biography than the text supports, but he understands what her position in the sequence accomplishes. Jesus addresses someone her community has reduced to rumor. She leaves her water jar and returns to that community. The final leader does not command attention; being attended to has made her capable of summoning it.
Once praise and objection are held together, the rating follows: “Great Leaders of the Bible” earns 68/100, or 2/5 stars. It is highly usable and often humane, especially when it moves responsibility away from rank. It is also repetitive, vocally homogenized, interpretively overconfident, and too practiced at escorting difficult narratives toward conclusions they have not fully agreed to reach. Maxwell’s clearest idea survives the apparatus built to deliver it.
Underneath all its language of purpose and influence, the book reveals something more interesting than its stated program. Leadership often begins before anyone calls it leadership: in a warning offered upward, a future surrendered, a rival strengthened, a cup of water carried farther than duty requires. Maxwell’s teachers enter wearing robes, armor, scars, and mantles. The one who lingers leaves no insignia behind – only a jar beside a well, and a town at last willing to hear the woman who walked away from it.
Inside John C. Maxwell’s Efficiently Managed Procession of Biblical Wisdom, Leadership, and Interpretive Certainty
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 1st, 2026
Designations are cheap in leadership books; the harder question is who acts when no designation arrives. John C. Maxwell’s “Great Leaders of the Bible” is most exact when it looks away from thrones and pulpits. Jonathan protects David, though David’s rise will close Jonathan’s path to the throne. Abigail stops the future king from answering an insult with slaughter. An enslaved Israelite girl points Naaman toward healing. Maxwell’s familiar maxim – leadership is influence, not position – could sit harmlessly beneath a dry-erase marker. These chapters make it cost something.
Early on, Maxwell introduces the device that gives the book its warmth and causes much of its trouble. He imagines meeting 28 biblical figures face to face, taking in their clothes, bodies, scars, and bearing, then hearing what their lives have taught them. Noah arrives weathered by centuries; Job wears jewels over a scarred body; Jacob still limps; Elisha carries the repaired mantle of succession. Each entrance files into the same order: dramatized meeting, compressed scriptural account, “Life Lessons,” “Leadership Lessons,” prayer. By the fourth or fifth visitor, the room has begun to feel less like eternity than a very efficiently managed retreat. Everyone receives a costume, a governing sentence, and a benediction before the next name is called. At their best, the details carry argument: Job’s rings and scars hold restoration beside loss, Jacob’s limp keeps surrender in the body, and Elisha’s mended mantle makes succession visible. Elsewhere they are stage business, another robe shaken out before the lesson begins.
Maxwell means the volume to be returned to according to need. The introduction proposes a daily reading plan, a month of chapters, or a 28-week practice involving Scripture, journaling, and action. In that rhythm, repetition becomes ritual. Miriam waits for the person whose comparisons have turned acidic; Elijah for the achiever who has collapsed after the applause. Esther addresses the suspicion that safety may be an assignment evaded. Martha is there for anyone who has made service so busy that the guest disappears inside the hospitality. The profiles are brief and already divided into discussion prompts. They know where the chairs should go before the small group arrives. The book succeeds when one of its sentences survives into a reader’s next difficult hour.
Even a devotional meant for intervals must bear the pressure of uninterrupted reading. The template soon stops receding behind the material. Chapter titles give away the lesson before the story has moved: Noah proves that one person matters, Joseph persistence, Rebekah generosity, Daniel purpose, Jonah second chances. Narrative does not discover meaning so much as report for duty beneath it. Difficulty becomes providence, then application, then prayer. What steadies a reader on Tuesday can feel foreclosed by Thursday.
The prose carries the rhythm of practiced oral instruction. Maxwell writes in short and medium-length declarations, built for enumeration and immediate recall. He likes balanced oppositions: faith zone and safe zone, character and reputation, purpose and position, surrender and control. An anecdote leads to three points; the points narrow into a line sturdy enough to underline. His sentences contain almost no grammatical doubt because his theology contains almost none. They state, repeat, and assign. Even bewilderment arrives already fitted with its eventual answer. They seldom remain uncertain long enough to change shape, which is why the prose can feel comforting in the moment and airless across the full sequence.
Repetition is the book’s liturgy and its tax. A principle appears in a heading, returns in the imagined speaker’s mouth, governs the retelling, reappears as personal counsel, becomes a leadership application, then enters the prayer. Maxwell compresses the story and enlarges the moral. He teaches efficiently by interpreting too soon. Scripture arrives rough, resistant, and historically strange; Maxwell sends it onward with a maxim polished for the pocket. The prayers keep that process from becoming pure self-help. After all the lists and action points, the reader must still ask for courage, patience, humility, or mercy. Virtue cannot be engineered alone. That final petition matters: it keeps Maxwell’s program from ending in the glow of completed self-improvement and returns the reader, however briefly, to need.
In the quieter profiles, the book reaches its governing insight: responsibility can precede permission. Jonathan matters because he helps the right person advance rather than guarding his own succession. Abigail listens to a servant, reads David’s rage faster than David does, and lends him enough future vision to prevent a present atrocity. The servant girl has no office, freedom, or social weight. One credible sentence from her redirects a commander and unsettles two kingdoms. Leadership here is what someone does with the sliver of access available when another person may suffer for their silence.
Power inside institutions often belongs, for one crucial minute, to someone whose authority has never appeared on the chart: a sponsor, an expert, a dissenter, the colleague willing to name what a superior cannot see. Maxwell does not write about project teams, and Deborah need not be issued a laptop. His better examples ask what to do when responsibility arrives before permission. The answer is not to seize the room. It is to answer the need in front of you. This is more interesting than the subtitle’s parade of visionaries and trailblazers suggests.
Among the 28 chapters, Elijah’s allows care to precede correction. After the spectacle on Mount Carmel – fire, victory, public vindication – Elijah flees one threat. He isolates himself. He collapses beneath a tree and asks to die. Maxwell’s account is devotional rather than clinical, but it notices the order of care. God does not begin with a maxim. Elijah receives food, sleep, companionship, and quiet before another assignment arrives. The sequence rebukes the belief that every exhausted leader merely needs a better calendar. Triumph can drain a person badly enough to make continued life feel like defeat.
Part of the book’s trouble comes from the same generosity that admits Abigail and the servant girl. Maxwell lets “leadership” spread until it loses some power to distinguish. Hospitality, motherhood, patience, prayer, witness, repentance, endurance, and ordinary faithfulness all enter the category. Job is admitted partly through the conjecture that his wealth required hundreds of servants, “like running a major corporation today.” The comparison is revealing in the wrong way. Job’s suffering does not need a corporate credential before it can instruct anyone. Maxwell’s category begins as a way of identifying responsibility between people; eventually it resembles a halo placed over nearly every commendable Christian act. The word gains reach and loses edge.
At Hagar, the cost of making every story manageable becomes harder to ignore. Sarah’s treatment of her enslaved servant is organized chiefly as a lesson about impatience, manipulation, and accepting blame. Those lessons are present, but Hagar’s reproductive use and vulnerability remain supporting material in Sarah’s education. Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac is treated as the final proof of trust, with obedience placed before understanding. Within devotional faith, that may signify surrender. In a book about leading other people, it demands another question: how should conviction be tested when it regards itself as proof and someone else will bear the cost? Maxwell does not keep that question open.
Direct speech then gives the simplification a ventriloquist’s authority. The introduction identifies the encounters as imagined, yet the chapters supply motives, private histories, physical particulars, retrospective interpretations, and prayers without repeatedly marking where Scripture stops and reconstruction begins. “Sarah” explains her failure. “Jonah” approves the lesson about second chances. “Job” speaks as though catastrophe has settled into promise. Maxwell’s readings begin to sound personally ratified by the people being read.
In all their robes, scars, mantles, and sandals, these speakers sound remarkably alike. Noah, Sarah, Deborah, Elijah, Mary, and the Samaritan woman favor contemporary motivational phrasing, balanced contrasts, and conclusions burnished by hindsight. Their circumstances change. Their syntax barely does. Little in the sentences suggests differences of temperament, social position, humor, or pressure of thought. Maxwell has arranged a relay rather than a chorus, each speaker carrying the same voice for several pages before handing it on. The baton is sturdy. One misses the runner.
Most of all, that uniform voice changes the terms on which suffering may appear. Job loses his wealth, health, and ten children; the chapter moves toward restored prosperity, new children, and confidence that God saw the larger picture. Later blessings do not answer earlier deaths. The biblical story lasts partly because it refuses to make suffering behave like a leadership exercise. Maxwell recognizes pain but dislikes leaving it unemployed. It must build character, clarify purpose, deepen faith, or prepare influence. His God wastes nothing; his method sometimes permits nothing to remain waste.
If the method narrows these stories, it does not make Maxwell cynical. He consistently prefers restoration to disqualification. Jacob’s manipulation does not become his permanent name. Miriam’s jealousy does not erase her courage. Jonah is called again. Elijah is fed before he is corrected. Martha’s bustle can become attention. The prayers also keep the volume from becoming a management manual tied with a devotional ribbon. These people do not perfect themselves through technique. They ask for help, receive grace, and are reminded that whatever influence they possess is held in trust.
The revealing comparison is with Henri J. M. Nouwen’s “In the Name of Jesus,” more than with the obvious market neighbors. “Great Leaders of the Bible” shares the accessible assurance of Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” and the character-centered Christian tradition of J. Oswald Sanders’s “Spiritual Leadership.” Nouwen, however, mistrusts the desire to be effective in a way Maxwell rarely does. Maxwell asks how influence can be redirected toward service. Nouwen asks what the appetite for influence may already have done to the person who wants it.
Readers who accept Maxwell’s theological premises may find the volume consoling, quotable, and ready for group use. Its cast is unusually broad: women, servants, immigrants, supporters, and social outsiders stand beside rulers and prophets. Secular readers may admire particular judgments while finding the larger reasoning closed, since providence, miracles, divine communication, and scriptural authority are starting points rather than subjects of inquiry. Some Christian readers may also resist how quickly the book moves through slavery, sacrifice, conquest, gender, and unequal power. The decisive split is not between belief and unbelief. It is between those who want Scripture made immediately usable and those who believe some of its authority lies in the trouble it refuses to stop making. Maxwell serves the first group with admirable consistency. He sometimes answers the second before it has finished asking. The issue is less whether Scripture may guide conduct than whether guidance must always arrive as a lesson already resolved.
Over the final three chapters, the sequence itself begins to think. The early pages concern flood, covenant, migration, dynasties, armies, and national deliverance. The closing movement turns toward Mary’s consent, Martha’s attention, and a Samaritan woman’s conversation at a well. The scale contracts. Command gives way to receptivity, presence, and testimony: saying yes, stopping long enough to listen, then carrying recognition back to people who have denied it. The final trailblazer clears no wilderness and wins no battle. An encounter simply changes the direction of her body – away from the well, back toward the people she had gone there to avoid. Greatness, at last, is not spectacle. It is the courage to return carrying news.
Placed last, the Samaritan woman revises the subtitle more sharply than any of the book’s kings or prophets. She is unnamed, stigmatized, religiously marginal, and without institutional standing. Maxwell invents more of her emotional biography than the text supports, but he understands what her position in the sequence accomplishes. Jesus addresses someone her community has reduced to rumor. She leaves her water jar and returns to that community. The final leader does not command attention; being attended to has made her capable of summoning it.
Once praise and objection are held together, the rating follows: “Great Leaders of the Bible” earns 68/100, or 2/5 stars. It is highly usable and often humane, especially when it moves responsibility away from rank. It is also repetitive, vocally homogenized, interpretively overconfident, and too practiced at escorting difficult narratives toward conclusions they have not fully agreed to reach. Maxwell’s clearest idea survives the apparatus built to deliver it.
Underneath all its language of purpose and influence, the book reveals something more interesting than its stated program. Leadership often begins before anyone calls it leadership: in a warning offered upward, a future surrendered, a rival strengthened, a cup of water carried farther than duty requires. Maxwell’s teachers enter wearing robes, armor, scars, and mantles. The one who lingers leaves no insignia behind – only a jar beside a well, and a town at last willing to hear the woman who walked away from it.
September 29, 2026
I was very intrigued by the description of this book, and I think it did a good job of highlighting some often overlooked Biblical leaders, in addition to some of the notable greats. I particularly liked the Abraham and Jonah sections. The Abraham chapter was a great reminder that though we implicitly know that God is always right, it's sometimes easy to forget because we want our own way in our own time. And Jonah's section really emphasized the importance of second chances but also examining our hearts and listening to God because you never get another first chance.
However, some of the chapters were significantly less insightful, and I might even describe them as shallow. Furthermore, the book was a bit theatrical. I would've preferred more analysis rather than the author taking a significant amount of literary license. The ending was also slightly abrupt. I wish there had been a brief wrap-up or summary of some of the key overarching themes or takeaways.
Overall, this book was a mix of storytelling and references to Biblical events and leaders. I recommend it to those who enjoy more of a narrative while learning about the Bible, rather than a stricter analysis. *I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.*
However, some of the chapters were significantly less insightful, and I might even describe them as shallow. Furthermore, the book was a bit theatrical. I would've preferred more analysis rather than the author taking a significant amount of literary license. The ending was also slightly abrupt. I wish there had been a brief wrap-up or summary of some of the key overarching themes or takeaways.
Overall, this book was a mix of storytelling and references to Biblical events and leaders. I recommend it to those who enjoy more of a narrative while learning about the Bible, rather than a stricter analysis. *I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.*
August 11, 2026
I found Great Leaders of the Bible, by John C. Maxwell, to be an interesting and insightful read. This is one of a long list of books I’ve read over the years by Maxwell, a bestselling author and one of America’s top leadership authorities. Each chapter highlights one of 28 different biblical characters and contains a biblical story about the character, a life lesson, a leadership principle and prayer.
While I did learn a few things from a leadership perspective, I felt like the author’s attempt to tell their stories from a first person perspective and taking various liberties lessened its impact for me as opposed to quoting scripture. Because of that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have most of his other writings.
Special thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of the book in exchange for my honest review.
While I did learn a few things from a leadership perspective, I felt like the author’s attempt to tell their stories from a first person perspective and taking various liberties lessened its impact for me as opposed to quoting scripture. Because of that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have most of his other writings.
Special thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of the book in exchange for my honest review.
September 1, 2026
In Great Leaders of the Bible, John C. Maxwell, the well-known speaker on leadership, tackles lessons on leadership from the Bible. Highlighting 28 Bible characters, the author describes each character in relatable terms, highlight life lessons and leadership principles from each character and a heartfelt prayers. This is a great and inspiring read and can be used for daily devotions.
I got the ARC from FaithWords via Netgalley. This is my honest review
I got the ARC from FaithWords via Netgalley. This is my honest review
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews