Stan Hilton, my good friend was killed in a car accident yesterday. Stan, his cousin Gordon, and I used to duck and goose hunt together almost weekly for the duration of duck season most years while we lived in Talbot in the ’70s and ’80s. I went on my first guided steelhead fishing trip on the Nestucca River with Stan. I bought my first drift boat with Stan, an old beater wood boat, I think he paid for it, but we were partners and used it together on the Nestucca River. I made my first fishing trip up to Alaska with Stan. We flew up and and stayed with a friend, Jay Goold who took us all over southern Alaska fishing. We fished the Susitna River, Willow Creek, the Talkeetna River, Sheep Creek, Montana Creek, the Kenai river, Bird Creek, Halibut fishing out of Homer, and Halibut fishing out of Seward. For about 20 years we went to Stan and Betty’s place for the fourth of July and had a feast together and then went to the fireworks at the Stayton High School.

Jesus said to His disciples, “I call you friends.” Proverbs says that a good friend sticks closer than a brother” and that a “friend loves at all times.” I have a book entitled “friends,” and it says that very few men have any real friends, just a lot of acquaintances. I have been very blessed at JBC to have a number of very good friends, and Stan was one of the best.

When I got news of Stan’s death, there was the initial shock and the sense of loss, but it didn’t take long before my predominant thought became, “Stan, you lucky dog, you! You are in heaven and I am stuck here in this life, but I will see you soon!”

Stan Hilton was killed instantly in a car wreck today. Stan is a very good friend and an Elder in JBC. Stan is Gordon Hilton’s cousin and they were in business together for year’s. 35 or 40 years ago Stan and Gordan and I used to go duck hunting together. We would put my drift boat in the Willamette river at the Talbot/ Buena Vista Ferry and drift down to Independence and take out there. We would dead drift the boat and jump shoot ducks as we drifted by them and they would fly up. Stan decided that we would kill more ducks if we would use decoys and sit in a slew only a 10 minute drift down the river from where we put in. So we did that and we shot about a dozen ducks and headed back upriver to the boat ramp. Shortly after we got going we hit a tree under the water and sheared the pin on the prop. Stan didn’t have a spare pin in the boat so we had no choice but to drift down to Independence. It was just getting dark when we sheared the outboard motor pin so we drifted the next two hours in the pitch dark with one oar and no flashlight. Stan’s boat was a small 12 ft boat, and we had it loaded down with decoys, there were three of us and a black lab dog in the boat and it had about 6 inches of freeboard. Did I mention that there had been a lot of rain and the river was at flood stage. Did I also mention that the week before another boat with guys duck hunting like us had capsized and that two of the hunters drowned. We had two fears as we drifted down the river, the first was that we would not be able to recognize or see the boat ramp and drift right by it, and the second was that we would hit one of the pylons of the bridge coming into Independence and capsize the boat. As we headed into Independence we heard the roar of the water going around the pylons and we were scared out of our heads. Well, we made it to the boat ramp and got back to my house around midnight. Sometime that next week Stan trusted Christ as his personal savior, and both Gordon and I figured it was our scaring him to death that prompted him to take care of his eternal life destiny. Stan is in heaven with Jesus right now and I look forward to seeing him again when I get there.

The worst sin would be breaking the most important of all commandments in the Bible.

Matthew 22:36-37 Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

If you are married there are two ways you can stop loving your spouse. The first is through neglect of communication and time together you simply drift away and get lukewarm in the strength of your relationship, and after a time both would agree that their love is dead. The second is by betraying your husband or wife by having an affair with another person, you commit adultery, and love has been killed. It can be resurrected in both cases, but takes work by both husband and wife.

Our love for God would grow cold in the same way. We begin to have a substitute for God in our life, and commit spiritual adultery, breaking the first of the Ten Commandments by having another god in our life. The substitute for God would be money, cars, houses, cloths, golf clubs, boats, vacations, hobbies. All of those things are legitimate and good under control. How can you tell if you have moved to having an affair with the world? You don’t make time to read the Bible every day, your time in the world leaves little time for prayer, and you use the phrase, “I don’t have time,” every time you are asked to attend any event at the church or to help in some ministry. Because we live in the middle of the world, the world system and everyone around us is loving the world it is very easy to drift away from God and begin loving the world, and it is difficult to see it happening.

1 John 2:15 Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

James 4:4-5 You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: “He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us”?

The key thing is read your Bible everyday, everyday, everyday. When you stop, it is because you are entangled in the world and have lost your desire for intimacy with God and you don’t have any time to do the spiritual disciplines that keep your relationship with God hot.

Revelation 2:4-5 But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place—unless you repent.

On four different occasions, Jesus scolded the disciples over their little faith. But on other occasions, He praised people for their great faith.

Matthew 8:26 Jesus said to them, “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm.

Matthew 15:28 Then Jesus said to her, “O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed at once.

Jesus declared the great possibilities for anyone with faith even if it was as small as a mustard seed.

Matthew 17:20 And He said to them, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

We grow our faith by exercising it and there is no greater exercise for developing great faith than praying, especially praying together with your church family. While praying, we pray to a God that we can’t see or hear, we pray for things that we really don’t know if they got answered or not.

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

We finished day four in our “Five Days of Prayer” tonight at 10:00pm and I will have prayed for 35 hours when we finish tomorrow night. We have a “Five Day Prayer” event four times a year, and I almost always pray for at least 40 hours. Over the last 30 years of having prayer events my faith has grown a little bit more each time. Now my faith in the power of prayer has grown so strong compared to what it used to be, that I couldn’t miss one of these events unless I was dying or a family member was dying. I believe without a doubt that God is in our midst as we pray together, and that our praying together results in great things happening in the lives of people.

The stronger my faith the more power I have with God in prayer, and the more I pray the stronger my faith grows. I talk a lot about “God’s favorites” and in scripture it is easy to see that God’s favorites are the ones with great faith.

Hebrews 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.

I hear people pray asking God to bless our country with a healthy economy, freedom from COVID, a just and good government, both local and federal, and that all the craziness will end. I am not praying for any of those things, I am going to just wait and see what God has planned. I am praying that the fear and anxiety people are feeling because of all these things will push them to seek for God. The Bible promises that if people will seek for God they will find Him, if they draw near to God He will draw near to them. When things are going well for people, they don’t seek God, but when things start to go wrong, they seek answers and security from God. The quality of life here on this earth matters little compared with the quality of life in the next. Only those who have sought God and have received Christ as their savior will live in heaven; everyone else will spend all of eternity in hell, which is a black pit of nothingness and aloneness. My fervent prayer for all the lost people I know is, “ whatever it takes, Lord, whatever it takes.”

In the early days of our church we decided to do a concert so we could have an event that we could all invite people to attend who didn’t go to church any place else. We were running about 100 people on Sunday mornings and we had a goal of growing up to 200 people in attendance in the next ten years.The problem was that with 100 people there aren’t a lot of singers available with the kind of voices that you feel comfortable inviting your friends too. We were so hard up for quality voices that I sang with three other guys in a male quartet. We sang “I’ll Fly Away”. That experience was so traumatic for me that I still remember it clearly and think about it often.

Last night I bought some airline tickets to fly to Fairbanks, Alaska where our daughter Shelley lives with her husband Philip and six grandkids. I bought a ticket for Patty, two of our local grandkids who are going with us, and myself. All the time I am navigating around on Alaska Airlines website I am singing, “I’ll Fly Away.”

“I’ll Fly Away“ that means I am headed for heaven, “ Soon and very Soon,” is when I am going.

Philippians 3:18-21. For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things. For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.

That sounds to me like, “I’ll Fly Away.”

I was reading back entries in my journal, in fact, way back, and I noticed something that I know to be true, but I forgot. The things that I used to write down as sins and weaknesses that I was struggling with, I no longer write them down, they are a thing of the past. Now I write about new struggles. They were a problem in the past, I just didn’t notice them much because I was dealing with bigger and badder flaws and sins. When I started getting those under control a whole new crop of problems, character flaws, weaknesses, and sins popped into view. Now I write about these new issues, groaning to myself and God over my lack of self-control, wondering why I am growing so slow. One of the characteristics of growing in spiritual maturity is that our sensitivity to sin increases so I notice things now that I used to be blind to. It is like peeling an onion, one layer at a time. Maybe before I die I will get down to the bottom layer. The hard thing to think about is, I don’t know how many more layers there are, I could just be getting started, oh my, I better keep at this pressing on to maturity thing, and I better keep examining my life and confessing all known sin to God.

People often justify gossip and slander, saying they need to get their feelings out rather than “stuff them.” So they dump on different people in their lives concerning their hurts. I tell people that I don’t share any negative information about people who may have hurt me, with anybody, not even my wife. The response that I often get is that it isn’t healthy to keep things bottled up inside of me. I hear of people counseling their friends and encouraging them to gossip and slander others in the name of catharsis. I don’t dump on people about others, I dump on God. I use the “Imprecatory Psalms” and there are many of them, to vent my anger and hurt against people.

Psalms 69:7-24
Those who hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head. . .Those who would destroy me are powerful, being wrongfully my enemies. . .Dishonor has covered my face. . .May I be delivered from my foes and from the deep waters. . .For I am in distress; answer me quickly. Oh draw near to my soul and redeem it; Ransom me because of my enemies! You know my reproach and my shame and my dishonor;
All my adversaries are before You. Reproach has broken my heart and I am so sick. . .May their table before them become a snare; And when they are in peace, may it become a trap. May their eyes grow dim so that they cannot see, And make their loins shake continually. Pour out Your indignation on them, And may Your burning anger overtake them.

Included in my daily Bible reading is five chapters of Psalms. There are 150 chapters in Psalms so I read through it each month. When I read the five chapters for the day I pray them back to God, personalizing the words so they become my prayer. It is amazing how many times the words in a Psalms for a particular day perfectly fit what I have experienced and what I am feeling.

After I have prayed curses upon those who I am angry at, I then change course and pray that God would open their eyes and convict them helping them to see their own sin, and bring them to repentance, and deliver them from the control of the evil one. I then really change course and pray that God will bless them, and that I might be able to help them.

It doesn’t happen very often, probably only once or twice a year, but I like to eliminate all negative feelings toward anybody. Life is so much more comfortable then.

1 Peter 5:8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

2 Corinthians 11:3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

Ephesians 6:11-13 so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness

One of the goals of the domain of darkness is to fill us with fear. If they can do that they effectively paralyze us and keep us from doing anything with our life that matters. If we include the commands to not be anxious there are over 100 commandments in the Bible to not fear, or be anxious.

Deuteronomy 31:8 The Lord is the one who goes ahead of you; He will be with you. He will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.”

The cure for fear is prayer. Once the church got rolling in the book of Acts the leaders were thinking that the people would be to afraid to witness, so they called for a prayer meeting to pray for courage and boldness. It says in Acts 4:31 that when they had prayed they spoke the Word of God with boldness.

In our present day fear and anxiety are at a very high level. The devil is keeping that fear as hot as he can. Jefferson Baptist Church is having a “five-day prayer event” beginning this Monday. We pray from 5:00 to 10:00 am and pm. We will pray Monday through Friday. If you come and pray for one hour a day or more this next week, you will notice very rapid growth in boldness. Give it a try and see what happens. There isn’t much worse than a chicken heart.

Psalms 139:17-18 How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.
When I awake, I am still with You.

When Patty and I were dating in College I was very afraid that I would lose her. She was the most popular girl on campus, and all the guys were wanting to go with her. I was the least known person on campus because I was such an introvert and recluse. I didn’t think that I had much of a chance of attracting her with my unassuming and bland personality. One day we had a conversation that changed everything, and catapulted our relationship into high gear. I said to her, “I am struggling with my grades because all I can think about is you,” and she responded by saying, “ I am having the same problem.” I thought, “wow! I can’t hardly believe this is true! But she said it! Wow, I am all she can think about! Whoooooeeeeeeee, thank You Lord!

As good as that was to hear from Patty to my love sick ears, it is even better news to hear that God’s thoughts about me are more numerous than the sand of the sea. That is a lot of thoughts! He must care for me a lot. That is a thought worth meditating on.

I wonder if I would have impressed Patty more by saying to her, “ The thoughts that I have about you are more numerous than all the sand on the sea shores in the whole world!” I will never know the answer to that question, but I do know that what I did say worked.