I have memorized 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 and have been reviewing it and meditating on it a lot lately. There have been so many people dying in our church this last year; most of them were good friends, and yesterday, my brother, Jeff’s son-in-law, died of cancer at 41 years of age. One of our kids remarked that Micah was the first of our huge family, besides Mom and Dad, to die. Paul starts this passage by saying, “We know.” That means we are very confident in this truth, not hoping or wishing, but “we know.”

2 Corinthians 5:1 For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

One of the most important phrases in these verses to me is 2 Corinthians 5:7

“for we walk by faith, not by sight.” It would be so cool if God would allow us to have a five-minute tour of heaven. It would be so much easier to live life with courage and confidence and to have zero fear or remorse over death. But it seems that our faith is important to God, so we have to believe the Bible and meditate on it until the words become embedded in our hearts and souls, and we have courage and confidence even though we have not seen or experienced what is beyond that veil of death.

Paul goes on and says, in 2 Corinthians 5:8, “We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.”

I sometimes wonder who is next in our church or our family. I wonder who is going first, Patty or me? When we all get to heaven, it will seem like a second from beginning to end, but now our days drag on in uncertainty, and we experience the repeated sadness of friends and family dying ahead of us.

2 Corinthians 5:6 Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord—

Sitting in my chair this evening reading, I smelled smoke. I got up to investigate, and Patty said there were some field fires in the Talbot area, but she thought they were contained. That reminded me of a field fire next to our house about seven years ago. It started from a short between two power lines, and a burning piece of insulation fell into the wheat field next to our house. The weather conditions were about the same as what we have now, and the fire spread rapidly through the field. It was burning towards our home, and when it was about 50 yards away, I went out and began beating on it with my coat. It wasn’t very long before a bunch of fire trucks showed up and got it contained and out in about an hour. When they first arrived, one of the firefighters approached me and said, “Good work, Charles Engels, we will take it from here.” I appreciated his humor!

Every summer, field, forest, and brush fires are everywhere in the news. We don’t have tornadoes or hurricanes, but we do have fires. Unexpected emergencies are part of life. Most of the time, we just read about them on Facebook or hear about them on the news. Still, occasionally, we all have unexpected emergencies that cost us money, time, injuries, and sometimes even death. We all do our best to prepare for those unexpected and unwanted events and do all we can to prevent them, but as the Bible says, “Man was born for troubles as sparks fly upwards.”

So, it is just a matter of time before the unexpected and unwanted come into our lives. There are mostly small ones, but there will eventually be a crisis that takes our breath away. The Bible gives us six ways to respond when a crisis comes into our lives.

1. Don’t think or feel like a victim, that God is mistreating you, or that He doesn’t care or doesn’t love you. God designed life to be full of trials, so don’t be surprised when they come into your life.

1 Peter 4:12-13 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing.

2. Ask God for the strength to endure, not that He would fix, change, or take away the trial. The Lord loves to give His strength to those who ask for it, so ask a lot. The most often prayed prayer in the Bible is the one asking for strength. And remember, God usually gives us strength through other people’s encouragement, so don’t be too proud or self-sufficient not to accept and appreciate gracious words from others.

3. Trust God that He cares for you and knows what He is doing. Tell Him, “I trust You, Lord. I don’t understand why this is happening, but I trust You.”

4. Don’t whine or complain about your fire, but rejoice always. If you do, God will give you His strength and cause incredible character growth in your heart.

5. Don’t be passive in your trust; be like David with Goliath, Samson, Gideon, and the rest of God’s mighty warriors; fix what you can fix, change what you can change, and conquer what you can conquer.

6. When the fire is out and life returns to normal, look for others who are going through what you went through and help them, encourage them, and pray for them. God will use us tremendously so that what we experienced isn’t wasted.

One of the more painful things for me is listening to the recording of one of my sermons that I have preached. When I coach other pastors on their preaching, I always make that the first discipline for them to do to help them improve their preaching quality. Often, when a pastor I have made this recommendation to, listens to one of their own sermons, they will say to me, “That was an eye-opening experience; I didn’t realize how poorly I communicate.” My next suggestion to them is to write out their sermon word for word. When we write, we periodically read what we have written as we write new information. By doing that, our thoughts are connected and make sense. It is a simple way of reviewing what we will say before we say it.

A major problem in relationships is that we communicate poorly. A law of verbal communication is, “I didn’t say what I thought I said; I said what you heard and understood me to say.” Those two are often miles apart. It is too bad that we can’t write out a conversation we will have with someone before we have it and put it on a teleprompter! But that is not possible, but what is possible is to acquire the skill of listening to ourselves as we talk; most people don’t do that; in fact, most people can’t do that because they haven’t learned how.

Whenever I have an experience in a conversation with another person where it is evident by their countenance that I have said something that offended them, they disagreed with or confused them, I immediately try to replay what I said in my mind. I don’t usually purposely say things that will cause the other person to be upset or confused, but I often do because what I thought I said wasn’t what they heard or understood me to say. Sometimes, people will quote me as having said something that I am sure I didn’t say. But the law of communication again is, “I didn’t say what I thought I said; I said what you heard and understood me to say.”

A few other laws of communication;

1. Listen twice as much as you talk, and listen attentively, trying to hear what the other person intended to say.

2. If you get emotional in a conversation, especially angry or hurt, listen four times as much as you talk, working diligently to understand what is intended to be communicated.

3. Ask questions instead of giving your opinion or reacting.

4. Take full responsibility for the outcome of a conversation with anybody.

I violate these laws often and regularly, but I try hard to humbly recognize when I do and learn from my mistakes so I can commit them less frequently in the future.

I have many more of these laws of communication that I review so that I can grow as a teacher, as a listener, and as a friend.

This Sunday is Jefferson Baptist Church’s annual baptism at Lake Charles. Over the years, I was blessed to be able to baptize all eight of our kids. It was a great honor to do that, and this Sunday, I have the honor of baptizing one of my grandsons, Courage. I have forgotten a lot of events with our kids, but I remember each of their baptisms very clearly; I fell in when I baptized one of them, I won’t say which one. When Sarah, our oldest, was baptized, she gave a ten-minute testimony that was amazingly good for a twelve-year-old. I remember thinking that she was for sure going to be a gifted teacher someday. The most memorable of all the people I have baptized were my Dad and Mom. It was just a couple of weeks before Dad died of liver cancer. He had lost so much weight that he didn’t weigh a hundred pounds. I remember thinking how strange it was that I had in my hands the man who taught me more than any other person, who had influenced me tremendously and was the main person who shaped me into the man I had become. As I think about it now, I don’t think any other event in my life is as significant as that baptism. I remember my baptism; I was a senior in High School. I remember Patty’s baptism about a year after our marriage. Jesus was baptized when He was thirty and immediately began His ministry. God intended for our baptism to be a significant event. It is a ceremonial picture of our dying to ourselves, no longer being the one running our life, and being resurrected to a new life where Jesus is now King. Do you remember your baptism? It is a good idea to reflect on our baptism, remind ourselves what it meant, and recommit to following Jesus as the Lord of our life.

There is a lot of talk in the news lately about senility. It makes me wonder about myself. I wonder if I start getting senile if I will be personally aware of what I am or if I will be oblivious to it. Many things have changed as I get older, and I am mindful of those growing limitations and try to compensate for them. Most of those have to do with what I cannot do anymore because of decreased energy and drive. I am trying to slow the average decline in physical ability through exercise and strenuous activities as best I can. I am also working at keeping my brain sharp by memorizing Bible verses. I keep track of how long I work on my verses and how much I get reviewed or memorized and compare it with what I have done in the past. So far, I have been improving a little bit at a time, but improving.

I consider that good news for me. The cool thing about the 30 minutes I spend every day memorizing Bible verses is that it is not only good exercise for my brain but also excellent exercise for my soul. I get physically tired now much easier and sooner than I did 20 years ago, but my mental ability to memorize a chapter in the Bible is way ahead of what I could have done 20 years ago. Whenever I see someone at church in the foyer and can’t remember their name, I get more motivated to work on my scripture memory. Patty and I drove to The Dalles, Oregon, yesterday, and I preached at a friend’s church today. While teaching the Bible in the service, I felt confident I was being clear, understandable, and motivational. Afterward, I asked Patty how I did; she was very complimentary. My doing well in preaching isn’t an ego thing; it is a “want to serve the Lord well for many more years thing.”

I had a very good friend in High School and College. He was a strong Christian who was planning on going into ministry. He was one of those guys who oozed confidence and personality, an obvious future success in whatever he did in life. I hadn’t heard from him or anything about him for over 30 years. And then, recently, I heard that he had been in the Oregon State Prison for the last ten years and had recently gotten out. I don’t know anything about the details of his life, but it doesn’t look like it is ending like it started. I wonder why? He is my age, so he doesn’t have much time to turn things around and do something with his life that matters. In conversations with people, I hear things like this often: people who have made a train wreck of their lives. I wonder why? How does that happen? I know it is because of bad choices, but why do they make those choices that end up in a mess? Knowing what is good and right often doesn’t matter; they still do it. It is a mystery to me, but every time I hear another story about someone messing up their lives and the lives of many other people around them, I am more determined than ever to pray for my grandkids that God will guide them and protect them from the evil one. As a Pastor, I pray a little for many people, but for my grandkids, I pray a lot. They are my responsibility; God has given me authority with Him on their behalf, and I will not neglect that gift of power with Him for them.

I am convinced, without a doubt, that the most important of all my disciplines is scripture memory. I say that not only because of all that it has done for me but because very few Christians have any systematic Bible memory plan in their life. The most important things are the things that the devil works hardest to keep out of our lives. Most don’t do the hard stuff that takes focus and self-discipline.

Let me challenge you to do a Bible study on meditating on scripture. Look up every reference on meditate/meditating and record all the benefits and blessings God promises that will come into your life. It is a fantastic list, and the most amazing thing is that those blessings don’t motivate many people to memorize the Word of God as a part of their Christian life. I believe that meditating on scripture and memorizing it is basically the same thing.

My goal is to spend 30 minutes every day working on memorizing new verses and reviewing old verses. A tool that I use that helps me a lot is the App “Bible Memory.” It is a fantastic tool that has increased the effectiveness of my time memorizing.

The app usually costs $9.99 for a lifetime; if that wasn’t enough of a bargain, they offered it for $5.00 for the next week. Go to https://biblememory.com/pro/freedom/ and spend $5.00 on the best thing you will ever buy for $5.00.

I wonder how those who get a gold medal hung around their neck at the Olympics feel. I bet it is surreal; you would feel like pinching yourself to ensure it is real. I have had some honors that were very special to me; in fact, they were so special that I still go back and look at pictures of the event and try to recapture some of the emotion. The level of joy felt when being honored is determined by my relationship to the person or people who are honoring me. The person who could make me feel most special was my Dad, and now it is my wife, kids, grandkids, and friends.

The honor and glory that I hope that I will get from Jesus at the end of my life is the most motivating honor there is in my life. I will stand before Him at the end of my life at the Judgment Seat of Christ and I hope that I will hear Him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master.”

The desire to hear His praise for me keeps me going when I don’t feel like it.

I don’t know who is going to be elected President. I don’t know if I am going to kill an elk this year. I don’t know how many salmon I will catch in Alaska this month. I don’t know what is going to happen in Israel. I don’t know when Jesus is coming. I don’t know when I will die. And a thousand other things that I don’t know no matter how hard I try to figure them out.

Often the unknown drives us crazy as we fret about what will happen in the future. Also we often get very agitated about events in the news because of the level of injustice in the world that we can’t do anything about except pray.

There are about a dozen verses among all those that I have memorized that I pull out of my memory and meditate on almost daily as I live this life, one of them is,

Psalms 37:7 Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him; Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, Because of the man who carries out wicked schemes.

It is amazing the power that verse has on my mind when I start fretting about things I have no control over, but wish that I could change. God’s Word is supernaturally powerful to give me strength, peace and joy in the midst of the worst circumstances.

Make a goal to memorize a verse or two every month and to meditate on them for just a couple of minutes every day. It will change your life, I guarantee it.