We basically are the sum of the choices that we have made over our lifetime. Wisdom is when we choose to do those things that move us toward good character growth, and a growing relationship  with Jesus and others, and significant accomplishments in our life.  There are millions of choices in our lives, and the number is growing everyday. It can be very overwhelming as we try and figure out what is best for our life. Here are a half dozen guidelines that I have used for a number of years in the choosing process in my life. I actually started making this list way back in 1976 when I was struggling with whether I should stay on the dairy or become a pastor.

(1) Ask God for His wisdom and guidance every morning before you start the day. God loves to give His wisdom to those who ask for it.

(2) take some time and think through what your values and priorities in life are. The goal here is to greatly simplify your life and reduce the number of choices that pop up in your life everyday. It is like if you lived in the wilderness in a little log cabin all by yourself with a bow and arrows, a knife, and an axe. Most of the choices that you are regularly faced with now would never enter your head. Prune your life as much as possible of low value activity, simplify, simplify, simplify and the number of choices will drop off tremendously. spend your time doing the things that result in significant accomplishment.

(3) Don’t make important choices until you have to so you can think, get counsel, and ponder on the results of the various choices once made, but when it is time make the choice decisively, don’t procrastinate.

(4) Get as much counsel as time allows from the wisest, most experienced people you know. Our pride often keeps us from this, but this principle is the bulk of what the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is teaching.  The basic message of Proverbs is, the more counsel you get the less apt you are to make a poor choice.

(5) we are all asked to make many choices that are unimportant, that is it really doesn’t matter much which way we choose. Give those choices away to others. We all tend to be control freaks by nature, that is we want to decide about everything for ourselves and others. Train yourself to stop that by giving most of your choices away. Ask the waiter what he recommends on the menu and go with it. Ask your wife what would be good for you to wear to church. Choosing is very tiring so eliminate all choices from your life but the very important ones, and you will have the mental and emotional energy left to think clearly.

(6) If you make a bad choice and you know it, think about what you should have done and why, think about what prompted you to make the wrong choice, make whatever restitution may be required because of the consequence of the wrong choice, and then forget about it. You can’t literally forget about it but you can choose not to dwell on it and replay it in your mind over and over again.

I have three gas tanks in my physical body, my physical energy gas tank, my emotional energy gas tank, and my mental energy gas tank. If any one of those three run out of gas I don’t do very well. I have learned how to read the gas gauges of my body to tell when any one of those three gas tanks is getting down to quarter full, and I have learned how to fill them up again fairly rapidly. That is a skill that many have never learned, and they pay the price. The basic way of filling our gas tanks is to rest. That rest can be sleep, recreation, hobbies, fellowship, solitude, and travel.

When I used to run marathons I discovered that if I would run 10 minutes and walk 1 minute I would finish the race faster than if I ran the whole thing. On our cross country bicycle trips across the USA to the Atlantic Ocean where we averaged 70 miles every day for 60 days we would take a short stand up break every 5 miles. We would stand over our bike and drink a bit of water, take a picture of the scenery, talk for a minute and then off we would go. Every 10 miles we would lean the bicycle up on a post and walk around a bit, drink some water, eat some trail mix, look at our maps, and chat about how things were going. We would take a full hour break at noon and take a day off every 7 days.

I have been teaching at our annual seminar the last three days, and now Patty and I are over at the coast in a nice motel for three days resting up. I am looking forward to getting back at it this weekend, and I will do it with three full gas tanks.

Jesus said that God the father was glorified when we bear fruit. He said if we do not bear fruit we are worthless. Also if we do bear some fruit God will work with us, nurture us, strengthen us, equip us, and provide the resources so that we can bear more fruit. Fruit is the good changes, the growth, and the character that happens in other people’s lives because of our influence.  Bearing fruit becomes very addicting. It feels so good to know that you have influenced another person to grow, change, choose for the better in their life.

This past two days I have been teaching about 150 people who have come from various places, some as far away as Los Angeles about prayer, how to increase the amount of prayer in their life, how to motivate others to pray, and the power of prayer to change other people in their life.

Prayer is the mightiest force on earth and when people pray their marriages improve, their kids improve, their health improves, their joy goes up, and they change things in their own  life.

It is Patty’s Birthday today. We went to the Olive Garden today after church and celebrated. She is the world’s all time best wife ever. Wednesday after I get done teaching in the seminar we are doing at our church we are headed over to the “Inn of he Spanish Head” for a little down time. I look forward to many more years with this wonderful life partner.

A psychological principle is that making decisions takes huge amounts of mental energy, and after making a number of decisions our ability to make good and wise decisions goes down. It is called “decision fatigue”.  In our culture today there are more decisions to be made on a daily basis than there ever have been, as a result many people are suffering from this “decision fatigue”. One of the things I have done is sit down and make as many decisions as I can think of that will be coming up in my life in the days ahead. Because this is premeditated decision making there is little pressure, therefore low energy loss, and I can intelligently pray about each decision asking for God’s wisdom, guidance and energy. These decisions tend to be ones that are repeated over and over so I have to be disciplined not to revisit the decision but to go with my commitment, which is what a decision becomes if you decide to stick with it every time it comes up. An example in my life is I used to get phone calls or letters from other churches who were without a pastor asking me if I would consider coming to be their pastor. The first couple times it happened I went through this agonizing time of trying to decide what to do. After the second time I made the decision at a 4 day prayer retreat that I was going to stay at JBC until I died. After that I never went back and revisited that decision, it was a commitment. Now I am so old I don’t get those calls and letters any more.

Related to that is the fact that many worry about upcoming decisions and what they are going to do, but it never happens, so there was “decision fatigue” over a decision that didn’t even need to be made. I have another commitment that I don’t make a decision for the future unless I am absolutely sure it will need to be made. There are few things worse than wasting energy on a decision that doesn’t need to be made.

Some people live their life in such a way that they leave a big wake behind them, that is they accomplish significant things with their life that changes people and things, they make a difference, a good difference. Why do some do this and many others do not. Let me suggest some reasons why some “bear much fruit”, while most others just mow their lawn, feed the cat, take out garbage, and wash their car.

(1) Those who do something significant with their life do so because they want to. This isn’t a casual, it would be nice if I could, passing thought, kind of want, it is an obsession, a very strong desire, a consuming drive and vision for a better tomorrow that they want to make happen. This “want to” is usually caught like a cold from someone who has it. If you know that you are a lukewarm person, look around and find a hot person and hang around with them.

(2). Those who make things happen do so because they choose to with courage and conviction. People don’t live lives of significance by accident, they make choices that open up doors of opportunity to influence their world. Most of those proactive choices have an element of risk involved even if it is as simple as the risk to be thought weird. Most people play it safe and avoid any risk so the default setting for their life is mediocrity.

(3) Often the reason for the shift from being a “do nothing”, mediocre, “play it safe” kind of person to a “change agent” is because of the growing boredom, frustration, depression, and an increasing sense of worthlessness that a mediocre lifestyle produces. Some to be sure get comfortable with a boring, insignificant life and stay there until they die. But God created us for accomplishment, for “fruit bearing”, and has assigned to each of us  uniquely “much work” to be done for Him.  God has put desire in us, and for it not to motivate us we must resist it.

I pray for every person in our church by name every week, and one of my prayer requests for many is that God will increase the desire in their life and that they will become hot.

I use the term “wake” to refer to the influence of our life in the lives of others over the years that we have lived. Some people have a big “wake” and some have none, at least not a positive one.  When I was about 13 years old I went to Summer Bible Camp which I usually did, and the counselor for our cabin of about 10 boys was a young man named Mr. Titus.  He was single, never married, and sold insurance for a living, and he loved working with Junior High Boys. He had brought to camp a box of leather bound Bibles, and every day during devotions he would tell us how important it was to read our Bibles, every day, every day, every day, and that we should make a goal to read the Bible through every year of our lives. After every one of his devotions he would make us an offer of one of the Bible’s he had brought with him if we would promise him that we would read it through the next year. It seemed like a daunting task to me so I didn’t jump at the chance for a nice, new, leather, obviously expensive Bible until the last day of camp when I agreed to read it through in the next year. I did read it through, and I have read the Bible at least once each year since that year at Bible camp. As a pastor I have taught, reminded, persuaded, and nagged people to read their Bibles every day, every day, every day for years and very many have and do faithfully. I think someday Mr. Titus is going to be standing before Jesus and he will be surprised at how many people have read their Bibles because of his influence, that is a wake.

I am always looking for new ways to serve the Lord and people. I look for needs and I especially pay attention to events and circumstances that would suggest an open door, an opportunity, an invitation from the Lord to do something that matters. Recently in a class I was teaching for new people at JBC I asked people to write down for me any suggestions that they might have of what we could do better as a church to make people feel accepted and loved, and meet needs in their life when they first visited JBC.  I got about a dozen very good suggestions, and two of them said, “you need to have something for singles, especially older singles”, JBC is such a family oriented church it is hard to fit in as a single mom with two little kids. As I read both of the papers that had this need expressed I got to thinking about how that could happen and what it would look like. I went through our directory and counted up the adult singles that attended, and realized there were a lot. I then went through the list of all those who had attended for a short time and then left and realized that many who were adult singles  didn’t stay. I got some books written by churches that had a successful singles ministry, and read what they did and how. I started thinking about who I could recruit to lead it, and as I pondered on that one for awhile I decided I would start it and learn how and then train someone to take over. I thought, even though I am an old married guy with 22 grand kids I can start and lead this ministry, and get it rolling good and then hand it off. So that is what I am going to do.

We will have the meetings on Wednesday evening to start with from 6:30 to 8:00 pm. We will start with snacks and fellowship for 30 minutes, then we will have a 30 minute service with 15 minutes of worship and a 15 minute devotional, and then we will have 30 minutes of games. We can adjust that depending on what works well. I like starting things, fine tuning them so they run smooth and then giving it to someone to keep it going.

If you live in the Jefferson area and know people you think would be blessed by this ministry send them on over.

2 Timothy 4:7-8  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing.

I watched one of the most exciting football games I have ever seen tonight as Alabama and Clemson played for the Natioal Championship. It was won by Clemson with 1 second left on the clock. Both teams played well, and played hard, giving it everything they had. The winners were hugging, and jumping around, pouring gator aid on the coach, crying for joy, and acting like winners. Alabama players and coaches acted sad.

I want to be a winner in life, and finish my life well. Finishing well as a person who is serving the Lord is obviously different than football, but there are a lot of similarities. I have an adversary who resists and fights every good thing I attempt to do, an adversary who wants to throw me to the ground, hurt me, and make me a loser. I need to resist him strong in my faith, stand firm against his schemes, and fight him, trampling him under my feet.

The Alabama / Clemson game went to the very end, one second left. It was a game of perseverance. The game of life goes to the very end. I am starting the fourth quarter, and I am ahead by 1 point. Alabama may very well have won the game had their star running back not gotten injured. I am playing the fourth quarter with some “injuries”, some significant health issues, most do. Good coaches know how to adjust and compensate for the loss of players. I will adjust and compensate so as to finish well the race that is set bsfore me, even if I am just crawling across the finish line.

Several guys and I went to the movies tonight and saw “Hack Saw Ridge” together. It is a true story of War World II, and a fellow that was a consciences objector and refused to carry a gun and went into the army as a medic. The story ends with a major battle in which he single handily saved 75 wounded soldiers by dragging them to safety under fire. The core of the story is about his faith in God and his devotion to His Word and obeying Him. It was very inspiring to see his story acted out on the big screen.

I so much enjoyed seeing and hearing about Desmond Doss’s courage and faith when we got home I ordered three Kindle books about him from Amazon. I always wonder when I hear about, read, or see a movie about a person who has exemplary character how it came about. I wonder about what the circumstances of his life were that forged such a man of courage and character. People aren’t born that way.

I am very interested in the topic of character development in people, for myself and also as a pastor what I can do to facilitate the growth of character in the people in my life. Many of the stories in the Bible are about people who had major flaws and made sinful choices, but also had the kind of character that God uses.  In reading their stories over and over in the Bible it is clear they didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to be the person they had become. There were people in their lives, and events and circumstances that worked together to mold them like clay into a strong person of great character.

I believe there is a mysterious partnership between us and God as He sovereignly causes events to occur in our life that will shape us, and He brings people into our life who will teach us, and then we choose how we will respond. My prayer for myself and all those I pray for each week is that we would see all the events of our  life as God caused, and recognize that He is creating for us the perfect environment for our growth and that we would not fuss or complain about what He does, but rejoice and cooperate with Him.