I sit in my recliner almost every evening for about four hours reading, memorizing, writing, and praying. I almost always get a snack when I am about two hours from being done for the evening. My favorite snack is big bowl of popcorn with a cube of butter melted in the microwave and poured all over it. Eating a cube of butter each evening would probably not be a good idea for my health so I have figured out some other snacks. My second favorite is two cans of sardines on some healthy flax seed crackers with no sugar in them. I read for ten minutes and eat a cracker and then read another ten minutes. Because I get bored easily I switch activities from memorizing, to reading, then to wtiting, and then to praying and back again after I eat two crackers. My game playing to combat boredom reminds me of the book of Ecclesiastes.

Ecclesiastes 1:5-6
Also, the sun rises and the sun sets;
And hastening to its place it rises there again.
Blowing toward the south,
Then turning toward the north,
The wind continues swirling along;
And on its circular courses the wind returns.

Well at least the catching part of the equation is exciting

When you think about God who is infinite in existence, He has always existed without beginning, and He is infinite in power, there is nothing that He can’t do, and He is infinite in wisdom, He knows everything, and He is omnipresent, meaning He is everyplace. Who am I that He would listen to me, that He would want me to talk to Him, that He would give great words of promise and reward to whoever would choose to spend time talking to Him? It is quite amazing that He will listen with interest and attentiveness to my words to him, and that He promises to answer the requests that I make to Him. With all that was offered to me why would I choose to be too busy to give Him much time talking to him? That is a mystery to me. I guess it illustrates the stupidity of mankind. My morning prayer of commitment is that I will be devoted to prayer and that I will seek Him diligently..

When I was twelve years old our family lived in Alameda, California not very far from the Navy Base that was located there. My Dad was just months away from retiring from the Navy, having served since before World War II for over twenty years. He and I would occasionally walk to the Base and fish off of the docks. We would take our fishing rods, a small tackle box, buckets to sit on and to put the fish in that we caught, and a few pieces of bread which we used for bait. We would tie a lead weight on at the end of our line with about six hooks tied on above the weight, each one is about a foot apart. We would take a piece of bread and roll it around until it was a nice little doe ball the size of a pea and put one on each hook. We would then jig that collection of tasty doe balls up and down in the water about ten feet below the surface. It would usually only be a few minutes before we had a perch on our line, and sometimes two or three at one time.

Most of the time when we went fishing the wind was blowing briskly, as it normally does at the coast. But one time, late in the evening, it was an absolutely dead calm, and the water in the bay was flat and smooth as glass. Dad set his bucket and fishing stuff down and walked over to one of the many Navy ships that were tied up to the docks. He leaned out and put his hands on the side of this enormous ship and began to push with all of his might. I remember thinking to myself, ”Yikes, Dad has lost it, he should have retired months ago”! He pushed for a long time, and I began to seriously worry, and then the ship began to move away from the dock! My thinking immediately changed too, ”Wow, my Dad must be Superman”! He sat down on the edge of the dock, and asked me to sit down next to him and gave me this little speech that has incredibly impacted my life ever since; ”I don’t know exactly how it works, but somehow as I pushed my energy was being stored up in the molecules in the steel in the hull of this ship. After there was enough of my energy put into the mass of this ship it moved. It wouldn’t have worked had there been any wind, but tonight was the perfect time to show you this principle. Two things that I want you never to forget, first of all, if I had gotten discouraged and quit, it wouldn’t have moved and everything I had done up to that point would have been lost, if you want to move or accomplish something very big you have to keep pushing and never give up. The second thing is, if you had helped me we would have moved it in half the time.”

This morning before I headed to the church I wanted to check the oil in my truck. It is too tall for me to be able to reach the dipstick so I got a five-gallon bucket of paint from inside my shop to stand on. I was just standing on it with one foot and I was too heavy and the lid broke and my foot went through the lid and into the bucket of paint. The broken plastic resulted in many jagged edges which were digging into my lower leg and whenever I tried to pull my foot out of the bucket those ragged edges dug in and successfully kept my foot and lower leg trapped in the bucket. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t get my leg out of the bucket, whenever I made a concerted effort to free myself I came close to falling over, and I was making a huge mess with paint sloped everywhere around me. I felt like the mouse I recently saw in one of those “sticky traps” trying desperately to free himself. I phoned Sherri but she was already gone, Patty was gone, everybody was gone except Thomas and he is in a wheelchair.

I stood for five minutes looking at the bucket and trying to figure out what I was going to do. I bought the paint for my shop and garage and I didn’t want to waste any more than I already had. Finally I managed to bend over enough, reach under the lid and little by little pry the lid up and off of the bucket. Whoooeeeere I was free. It took me most of an hour to clean the paint up, wash it out of my shoe, my pants, my leg and foot, and my sock. I think Patty will be mad at me when she sees all of the paint on her towels that I used to clean up stuff.

I missed a noon appointment and when I called and gave my excuse to the person I was supposed to meet with he got a good laugh. I decided to go up to Derek’s and get a hair cut and 5 guys were waiting so I told them my story and I am pretty sure I made their day. I had an appointment with the general director of our denomination at 3:00 pm so I told him my story and he thought I could build a whole sermon around such a cool illustration, and here I sit in my recliner telling all of you my story. I hope I have made your day!

As I listen to people share their problems in life and read on social media the things people write about concerning their life, there is so much sadness, despair, fear, and bitterness in the world right now. Some of the bitterness is towards people but much of it is directed at God. As I listen and read there is one common mistake that everyone makes. They expect that God is going to give them a measure of pleasure in life, and when the storms come they shake their fist at God. The big mistake is they forget, I guess that is what happens, they forget that life is rotten on purpose, by God’s design, it is supposed to be full of trials so that we will grow in character, to be like Jesus Christ so that when we enter heaven we will be like Him, and therefore will enjoy Him and eternity to the max.

Weak character doesn’t like rapid change. We like time to adjust to change so we can be secure and comfortable. Now change is happening almost daily, and those with weak character panic, fear, make poor decisions, talk way to much, and react selfishly. So I am going to choose to pray a lot and ask God for joy, peace, strength, and wisdom. I am going to choose not to enter into negative conversations about the present situation and future fears. I am going to choose to be joyful always, not in a “head in the sand way”, but in a way that communicates faith in God. I will remind myself at least daily that life is designed by God to be hard, full of trials, and extremely difficult, and heaven is wonderful beyond comprehension. Those who will enjoy heaven the most are those who enter into glory with the character of Christ.

So many people believe that because God loves us He will keep us from hard times in this life. The truth is God knows this life is a blink of an eye in length and then we will be in eternity. We need to “set our minds on the things above, not on the things of this earth”. We need to anticipate and expect hard times and grow through them.

Philippians 4:9
The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

The promise of this verse of God being with us is made in many places in the Bible. God is omnipresent, meaning He is in every place all of the time. So why does it say that He will be with us as a blessing or a reward?

Psalms 139:7-10 Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the dawn,
If I dwell in the remotest part of the sea,
Even there Your hand will lead me,
And Your right hand will lay hold of me.

God manifests His presence, meaning He makes Himself “thicker.” The common description of what has been happening back in Kentucky at Asbury University is the outpouring of God’s presence. God chooses to make Himself felt. There are other places in the Bible where it says that God hides so that there is no sense of His presence at all.

One of the factors is that when we acknowledge God’s presence then He honors us with His presence. There is no activity that we do that acknowledges God’s presence as much as prayer does. When we are praying we are talking to God. Jesus says in Matthew 18 that when more than one person is praying together at the same time that He manifests His presence even more.

If we draw near to God He draws near to us. If we seek the Lord He will let us find Him. If we talk to God after a bit of time we will know that He is listening. If you are a person who would describe your faith as weak you ought to come and sit in the prayer room a lot during the “Five Days of Prayer”, your faith would grow because you would be experiencing God in reality.

The “Five Days of Prayer” starts April 3rd. We pray from 5:00 to 10:00 am and 5:00 to 10:00 pm Monday through Friday, April 3rd to the 9th. There is an awful lot at stake forever to just blow this challenge off.

This list of things that I like to do is also the list of things that I intend to do even when I get very old and can’t do much else as a pastor. I can lead accountability groups even from a wheelchair if I had to. They are incredibly rewarding.

The second thing I love to do is to pray for God’s blessing on JBC and for all the families and individuals that are part of JBC. I am sure that my power and influence with God has gone up over the years because of the amount of time I have spent praying. God rewards faithfulness and over the last 30 years I have been devoted to prayer, and my faith in the power of prayer has grown steadily. I have come to the point in my ministry that I truly believe that what I am able to accomplish at JBC in prayer is greater than any other activity that I do including my teaching.

Over the years I have spent many hours praying for my sermons, pleading with God to guide me in my preparation and that He would grant me a special and powerful anointing while I preach so that the preaching time was a supernatural event with God changing every person’s heart who was listening. Now I pray with that same fervor and desire for Pastor Mike’s preaching pleading with God to do what He did for Elisha when He took over for Elijah and give him a double portion of what He gave to me.

I have a prayer journal on my IPad that is very complete. I have every person in JBC in it along with their picture and prayer needs that I have observed, also what I have cut and pasted out of the prayer letter each week and what they have communicated to me. If they have a ministry I pray for that to be very successful. I pray for marriages, kids, health, and many other things.

I also spend as much time as I can in our corporate prayer times, especially our “Five Day Prayer” events. I want to be like Anna in the Bible who was 84 years old and it says of her that she served the Lord night and day in the temple in prayer.

I do a lot of different things as a Pastor now, but in the early days of my ministry I did way more different things than I do now. As the years have gone by I have given much of what I used to do to different people in the church. They not only have done a better job with that ministry than I did, but now they will receive eternal rewards at the judgment seat of Christ for contributing to the health of the church through their ministry. There are a few things that I still love to do and that give me great joy.

I have such a good time with the groups of men that I meet with each week for the purpose of holding them accountable for the basic disciplines of the Christian life, and they all enjoy getting on my case when I fall short of my goals. We read the Bible every day using our individual plans for how much we read. We pray by ourselves every day, most of us pray at least 15 minutes. If we are married we pray with our wives three times each week. This discipline is one of the hardest that many guys have, and it takes many of them a long time to get this one down and be faithful to it. Less than 1% of marriages where the husband and wife pray together ends in divorce. We all write our own personal goals for the year and read those goals several times each week. There are a number of other disciplines as well that we pursue diligently, holding each other accountable, encouraging each other, praying for each other, and becoming good friends. The best part of being part of these groups (I have five groups right now) is seeing the growth in each one of the men over time, they all become solid champions for God.

I have five other ministries that I hope that I can stay healthy enough to keep doing and remain involved and faithful in until Jesus takes me to heaven, but I have used up my allotment of words so I will save them for tomorrow.

Someone gave us a gift certificate to a very nice restaurant in Salem so I took Patty on a date tonight. We both had a very busy and full week so it was nice to go to a restaurant that had a very nice atmosphere, great service, and delicious food, and spend time with Patty. It was like an unexpected blessing from God. The only problem was that it certainly didn’t help me out with my diet, but I make exceptions quite regularly!

I am memorizing the book of Colossians and I just got started on chapter three. Colossians 3:2 says, “Set your mind on the things above not on the things that are on earth.” With all the things going on in the world, every day I think, today is the day that I am going to heaven. That will be better than an unexpected date at a nice restaurant, for sure!

Every sin that we commit has a price tag on it. We have been forgiven for our sins because of our faith in the gospel so that we are headed for heaven instead of hell. But now as Christians God disciplines us for the sins we commit.

Hebrews 12:6-7
For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines,
And He scourges every son whom He receives.”
It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?

If we go into a store every item has a price tag on it, and the same is true of our sinning, every sin has a price tag on it.

Galatians 6:7
Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.

But there is a buffering action that we can take that will reduce the cost of our mess-ups.

Matthew 5:7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

Matthew 7:1-2 “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

The amount of mercy we give to others who violate our rights and who hurt our feelings is the amount of mercy God will give to us. The standard we use on people in our lives is the standard God will use on us. That truth motivates me to forgive anybody of anything because I need a lot of mercy.