James 5:16 says, “Pray for one another.”Ephesians 6:18 says, “With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints.”
A basic principle in the New Testament called “Body life,” is that what we do for others is much more effective than what we do for ourselves, including prayer. God made it that way to make us interdependent. We need each other. All that He has done, He has done to make the church more unified, needing each other, pulling us together. I pray for you, and you pray for me, which works well, but me praying for my own needs and you praying for your own needs doesn’t work well at all. A corollary principle is that the more I pray for others, the more others will pray for me, God sees to it.

This week is our “Five Days of Prayer,” where we pray from 5:00 to 10:00 am and 5:00 to 10:00 pm, Monday through Friday. We are praying for our Missionaries and their ministries around the world. When we pray as a church God works in and through the Missionaries, and He will see to it that our church gets prayed for and that each person participating in the “Five Days of Prayer” gets prayed for.

Such is the wisdom of God.

Almost all our kids and grandkids have been staying together with us at a lodge we rented on the coast for three days. It is a beautiful place that easily holds all of us and is just a few minutes walk from the beach. And a significant bonus is that we have had fantastic weather for the last two days. The place has a pool table, a ping pong table, lots of puzzles, cards, and a bunch of table games. We have played hearts, Yahtzee, pool, and ping pong tonight. The kids are playing Uno and building forts with the cushions on the couches.

The grandkids, all cousins or siblings, have been well-parented, have excellent manners, and get along incredibly well. Many of them don’t see each other except a couple of times a year and are 16 years old, down to six, so this kind of unity and love is amazing.

In 1969, when Patty and I got married, we had no idea what the future held for us. We just lived life and tried hard to follow the Lord’s will and lead in our lives.

Now, we are both 75 years old, and heaven is the main thing in our future. We do not know what that will look, feel, or sound like, but it will be wonderful. We are going there because we have trusted Jesus Christ as our personal Savior and are following Him and loving Him with all of our hearts, souls, and might.

We pray for all of our kids, their spouses, and grandkids at least weekly, that God will protect them from evil, that He will lead them into His perfect will for their lives, and that we will live with them all in heaven forever. Life is short; heaven is forever.

My favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers, lost the Super Bowl today; I was disappointed, but not like I lost a big fish I was fighting or anything like that. In most competitions I am in, I have some part to play to determine the winner, but in the Super Bowl, I had zero influence on the outcome. I was simply a spectator watching the game on TV, hoping my team would win. It is over now, and I can move on to basketball, both College and NBA. I have favorites in both areas, but it doesn’t take much for me to switch loyalties, so I don’t need counseling when my favorite team loses. I used to be involved in playing basketball and softball, shooting my bow competitively, playing baseball in College, running in a lot of long-distance races, and competing in golf, though I never won. The most competitive events I am involved in now are playing poker and pinochle and catching the biggest or most fish.

The competitive nature I have had most of my life is now with myself in accomplishing my goals. I have several adversaries that I compete against; one is my flesh; it is what I live in. My flesh is lazy, hates to change, and despises doing anything hard or sacrificing. My flesh is totally against any and all of my goals, and it puts up quite a battle with my will to accomplish them.

”My second adversary is the devil who wants me to be lukewarm in my service to Christ as Lord of my life, and he wants me to sin a lot, to be selfish, prideful, angry, undisciplined, and grumpy. He has assigned demons to follow me around and tempt me 24/7.

I am determined to win the battle between me and my flesh and between me and the devil. My goals are my tools for winning; when I accomplish my goals, I win; when I don’t, I lose, and I want to win.

I sat in a chair watching young kids trying to climb a “climbing wall” today for several hours at JBC’s annual “Sportsman’s Show.” There were a lot of kids who harnessed up and made the try. It is a 30-foot high wall with little hand and foot holds. The climbers have a harness attached to a safety rope someone else holds. Most will slip and fall before they reach the top and call it quits when they do, but a couple of boys about 14 years old kept climbing after each fall. One must have attempted it ten times, each time getting slightly higher. I was so impressed with his tenacity and endurance. It takes a lot out of you to climb it once, but ten times must have been exhausting. It was encouraging for me to see young boys with that kind of endurance and fierce determination to succeed. I thought to myself, they will amount to something in life. I also thought to myself that kind of determination is rare. I was doubly encouraged because those boys were my grandsons.

The admonition in Hebrews 12 is to run the race of life with endurance. Life is hard, and those who run without quitting and endure will win.

In 2015, I went to the Portland Sportsman’s Show, which is a funny statement because I have attended it every year since I was 15 years old, except for a couple of years ago when it got canceled because of COVID. There are hundreds of guides there, both hunting and fishing, with booths advertising their business. There was a booth advertising long-range fishing out of San Diego. The trips were anywhere from three days to twelve days long, and they had hours of videos playing in the booth of the fishing on these trips. The whole concept fascinated me, and I stood there and watched their videos for hours. Everybody with whom I had come to the Show was ready to head home, and I was still watching more videos. That night, I added a new goal to my list, “Go fishing on a ten-day fishing trip out of San Diego before the end of 2025.” It was a long-range fishing trip for ten days, so I thought I would make a long-range goal to be completed before ten years. A pastor friend read my goals recently, saw that one, and commented that he knew a guy who made that trip every other year. He gave me his phone number. I texted him, and we decided to have a cup of coffee and talk about fishing. He connected me with the Captain of the boat, and I am now signed up and scheduled to go fishing for tuna for ten days in 2025.

I have made a lot of long-range goals over the years. I try not to have more than six at any one time so I don’t lose motivation on any one of the goals. I have read this goal and others daily for years, but I was never sure how to take the first step. Actually, I knew how to take the first step, but there were so many things I didn’t know that I was intimidated to take the first step. Making this new friend who had done it eight times before, who knew exactly what to do, and said that I could tag along with him gave me the confidence to take the jump. So, I signed up on the dotted line and sent in my $500 registration fee; it is now official.

There is a lot of power in writing out our dreams for years in the future and reading them every day. Because of that constant reminder, we regularly do little things that gradually open doors for our dreams to happen.

Twenty-eight years ago, all eight of our kids were living at home. The oldest was 20, and the youngest was eight. Back up ten years, our oldest was twelve, and our youngest was a baby. For about thirty years, we were raising and training kids. That was a lot of years ago. Now, they are all doing what we were doing.

Most of our kids are visiting for a few weeks, and I am enjoying the time very much. I keep having flashbacks of memories of different events we had with them over those thirty years. I love those memories.

The family consisting of a Dad, a Mom, and kids have been, from the very beginning, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Seth, and nobody knows how many more existed at the beginning of the story. The basic family unit has existed in many countries and cultures for thousands of years. It has endured because it is God’s plan from the beginning.

Our family has been the most significant source of joy in my life. They have been the greatest source of fulfillment and meaning in life.

I am also part of God’s family. He is my Father, and I will live with Him forever. He calls me son, and Jesus calls me brother. It sometimes seems like a long time before I will be with Him, but time does fly, and it won’t be long now.

One of the things that I aggressively do is look for open doors with great anticipation. God orchestrates our lives, and He will provide opportunities to serve Him if we want to serve Him more and ask him for those opportunities. An open door is an opportunity God gives us to do something for Him that matters. We must look for them; they aren’t easy to spot unless we look carefully. We won’t look unless we want to do something great with our lives for Jesus. And we need to ask and pray, over and over again, that God will take us off the bench and put us in the game.

Often, we miss an opportunity because we are tired and don’t want to do anything more. Sometimes, we miss an opportunity because we are so distracted by all the activities of the world. And then there are those wide-open doors we choose not to step through because we are lazy or fearful of failing.

I am over at the coast teaching a group of Pastors for three days because I got a phone call and an invitation. I didn’t want to do it because of my schedule and the time it would take, but I have prayed every day, asking God to provide opportunities like this one; I couldn’t say no.

1 Corinthians 16:9 for a wide door for effective service has opened to me.

2 Corinthians 2:12 Now when I came to Troas for the gospel of Christ a door was opened for me in the Lord,

Colossians 4:3 praying at the same time for us as well, that God will open up to us a door for the word.

Revelation 3:8 ‘I know your deeds. Behold, I have put before you an open door which no one can shut, because you have a little power, and have kept My word, and have not denied My name.

In my last blog that I wrote about family, I said that we hadn’t had any major crisis except our parents dying. Later, I thought, “Well, sure we have; our son-in-law, Thomas, broke his neck in a farming accident and is paralyzed and in a wheelchair. What is even stranger about forgetting about that is that he, Sherri, and their two kids live with us.

I think the reason that I skipped over Thomas’s accident in my mind is because they and everyone else in our family managed it so well. Everyone has such a strong faith in the love of God that we all believed that God would bless, provide, and use this for His glory and in our growth in our relationship with Jesus. It isn’t that we weren’t sad about all the restrictions and hardships that had now come into Thomas’s life and in his family’s life, but we all trusted the Lord that He was causing the best to happen from His perspective to happen.

There is a lot of complaining, grumbling, and self-pity happening in most people’s lives over every trial and inconvenience that comes into their lives. Very few people faithfully practice James 1:2-4 “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result so you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

God dramatically uses those who rejoice instead of grumble during trials, grow to be like Him in character, and will be near Jesus for eternity.

I am so excited I can hardly stand it! Almost all eight of our kids and grandkids will be here in the next few weeks. Of the 45 total in our family, 40 will be here. It is funny how you get used to them being gone, but when they come back to visit, it is a major source of joy. We poured our life into those kids with the goal that they would move away, get married, have kids, and do their own thing, but it is sure fun when they come back for a visit. A major blessing for us is that I grew up in a very healthy family, and Patty did as well. Our own family was unified and loving, and each of our kids has a family that is close and abounding in love for each other. As a Pastor, I have seen so many very dysfunctional families, especially in this day where there are so many drug and alcohol problems. We have worked hard to have a good marriage and raise good kids who love Jesus, and all the work we put into that was well worth the effort.

So far, we have been fortunate that my parents and Patty’s parents dying has been the only major crisis of any kind in our family, with no significant sickness or accidents. It is only a matter of time before a major crisis happens to someone; we know that, that is how life is, but we have the hope of eternal life coming up. So many people don’t have that hope; I don’t know how they manage cancer and other severe diseases and unexpected death.

I just got back from three days at Cannon Beach, where I was attending the annual “Prayer Summit.” The first was in 1989, and there has been one every year since, except for a two-year break for COVID in 2021 and 2022. I have been to every Summit that has been held, that is, 34 “Prayer Summits” that I have been to.

I would have gone back to farming in 1989 had it not been for the spiritual renewal I received at the first one. As a result of that first Summit, I became a Pastor devoted to prayer, and JBC became a church devoted to prayer. Every Summit since then has been good, but nothing equals that first one for me in terms of life change and spiritual growth.

Several “coincidences” resulted in me being at that first Summit, but none of them forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. God opened some doors and made choosing to go relatively easy, but I still needed to choose.

God is constantly opening up doors and making it easy to choose to do things that will produce spiritual growth in us. We must look expectantly every day for those events and times that are the perfect environment for growth.

My Mom made me go to every VACATION Bible School event near us, and I went to Summer Camp every summer. My Mom used to say that events like those that got you away from everyday life and focused on the Lord were always life-changing with a capital C.

Many Christians seldom choose to go to retreats, camps, seminars, and classes because they are too busy, but the real reason is that they are not passionate about growing in their faith. If you want to grow close to Jesus and bear much fruit for Him, take advantage of every opportunity to get away to an event that focuses on Him.