Self-confidence is a character trait that those who accomplish a lot in their life all have. It is also a character trait of those who are tough and have endurance as they face challenges in life. The problem is that pride and arrogance can easily masquerade as confidence, but almost always result in failure and difficulties. A person who lives life with endurance and who is tough has confidence. 1990 a report entitled “Toward a State of Esteem” was published. In the report, low self-esteem was declared a contributing factor to many social problems, including drug and alcohol abuse, crime and violence, poverty and welfare dependency, and family and workplace problems. The 161-page report reads like the group had found the key to fixing society. It states just that on page 21: “Self-esteem is the likeliest candidate for a social vaccine, something that empowers us to live responsibly and that inoculates us against the lures of crime, violence, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, child abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and educational failure.” Public education jumped on this and began “participation awards” instead of “achievement awards.” The frequency of slogans like “Believe in yourself and anything is possible” skyrocketed in the ’80s and ’90s. Posters with positive sayings covered the walls of school classrooms throughout the nation. The obvious problem is that when self-esteem becomes the goal that is pursued rather than the byproduct of proper behavior, we begin to seek it from people, and our self-worth is determined by what we think others think of us. When high self-esteem becomes the goal, the result is low self-esteem. With low self-esteem comes a lack of confidence, which is replaced with arrogance, a counterfeit confidence. Probably no area of life was more infected with this philosophy than sports. Kids were told to act confident and you would become confident, think like a winner and you would become a winner, talk like a champion and you would become one. As a 76-year-old man who has raised eight kids, pastored hundreds of people, and seen the best and worst of what people can do, I have concluded that accurate, healthy self-esteem results from sensing God’s pleasure in me. As a member of God’s family, because of my faith in Jesus Christ, I have His Holy Spirit in me, and as a result, I can sense God’s pleasure in me when I obey Him and do His will. My sense of worth and value doesn’t come from people but from God.

Hebrews 11:5 “By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death; and he was not found because God took him up; for he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God.”

Proverbs 16:7 When a man’s ways are pleasing to the Lord, He makes even his enemies at peace with him.

2 Corinthians 5:9, we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to the Lord.

 1 Thessalonians 2:4 but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not as pleasing men, but God, who examines our hearts.

1 John 3:22 and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.

As a senior in High School, I was on the High School track team. We had a small school with about 15 boys in the High School, and most of them participated in all three sports that our school offered: cross country, track, and basketball. I was not a very good athlete in High School, but I greatly enjoyed the experience and camaraderie. One of the events I ran was the mile; my fastest time was over 7  minutes. That is pretty slow. Another senior in another high school ran the mile in under 5:00 minutes and lapped me when our schools were in the same meet. Not many people can say they have been lapped in the mile. That was one of my finer accomplishments in High School athletics. For my first two years in College, I went to a small college of about 500 students and played basketball and baseball. I was a little better than in High School, but not much.

As an adult I have competed in softball, golf, racquetball, ping pong, and basketball and have been mediocre at best. I think golf is the only competitive sport I plan on attempting to get better at in my old age. I might try pickleball, but probably not. In all my years of participating in competitive sports, beginning in grade school, I have been fiercely competitive and have tried hard to win in everything I did. I trained and competed, trying my hardest to win. I never got discouraged, even when I got laughed at for getting lapped in the mile, and I never quit. As I try to help people run the race of the Christian life with endurance without getting discouraged and quitting, I try to help married couples stay in their marriage, being faithful to their marriage vows. As I try to motivate believers in Christ to do something with their life that matters for eternity instead of just coasting,  I often wonder what is missing in many people. I had an inner confidence, assurance, and self-worth as a young person that didn’t come from accomplishments. It kept me in the game, trying my hardest, enjoying the experiences, and comfortable with who I was. As I think about my life and where that came from I give the credit to three things, my healthy family life, my healthy church experiences, and the fact that I read the Bible through when I was 13 years old because of the encouragement of a 20 year old camp counselor, and at least that every year since. The Bible is God’s living, supernatural Word, and it is amazingly powerful to change us from the inside out. I am who I am because of God’s working, but He did His work in me through other people, parents, pastors, camp counselors, and many others. I pray that God will use me to do the same for many others. The main point is “read your Bible every day, every day, every day.”

I am reading a book on the “science of true toughness.” Reading through it, I find it amazing how much it aligns with Biblical principles. One line I underlined said, “stress clouds our ability to evaluate a situation or a problem accurately. Stress causes us to greatly overestimate the difficulty of what lies ahead of us and greatly underestimate our ability to conquer the problem. Philippians 4:6 says, “Be anxious for nothing, but pray about everything.” It goes on to say in verse 7 that if we do that, God will give us a fantastic peace. Prayer is not only the key to living a stress-free life, but James chapter 1 says that if we lack wisdom, we should pray for it and God will give us wisdom so we can solve problems and think accurately about any challenge that comes into our lives. Another prayer that God will always answer is requesting His strength to manage any situation. God’s peace, wisdom, and strength sound like the perfect formula for being tough so that we can run the race that God has set before us with endurance. The basic key to toughness is to pray a lot. “Little prayer = little toughness, no prayer = a wimpy life, much prayer = tough as nails.” You can do it if you pray. Running the race with endurance doesn’t mean gutting it out but making time for prayer.

Today I went fishing with a couple of friends. We got up at 4:00 am, left Jefferson at 5:00 am, and drove 3 hours up the Columbia River gorge to the mouth of the John Day River, where we planned to fish for Walleye. The problem we ran into was that the wind blew 20-plus miles per hour all day, and we had a tough time fishing. We drove all that way, so we worked hard at it and caught a few fish after fishing for about 6 hours. We then drove 4 hours home. It took us 4 hours to go home because we went through Portland at 5:00 pm. So, all in all, you would call that a rotten day, but we had fun with the challenges and just being outside on the river. That is the cool thing about fishing: you don’t have to catch fish every outing to have a good time.

A key to running the race of life with endurance is to have fun even on bad days. It is possible if you think right and are with the right people. I always have fun with certain people, no matter what we do or how bad it turns out, and I rarely have fun with others, no matter how successful the event is.

Running the race of life with endurance without getting weary, losing heart, and quitting is not easy. Those who are the tough ones who keep going and don’t quit are not doing that based on willpower, but on thinking right, taking wrong thoughts captive, and replacing them with right thoughts. Maybe we can say it this way, taking wimpy thoughts captive and replacing them with strong thoughts. Our body has a built-in self-preservation mode, and when it thinks we are killing ourselves, it will intervene. I ran 12 marathons between my 50th birthday and my 65th birthday. Before I ran my first one, I read many books written by people who had run many marathons. They all talked about this voice inside of us that started screaming at us to stop because we were killing ourselves between mile 18 and mile 22. It was called the “wall” that we hit. The key to running through the wall was knowing it was coming and being prepared to replace negative self-talk with positive. Most marathons I ran had “aid stations” about every two miles with little Dixie cups of water or sports drinks on tables that you could grab as you ran by. I would stop running and walk by these stations, pour a cup of water over my head, drink a sports drink, and then start running again. But at mile 18, mile 20, and mile 22, I would walk for one minute before I started running again. It was so much easier for me to manage that wimpy voice in my head screaming at me to quit before I killed myself when  I was walking than when I was running. The same thing happened when I used to climb Mt Adams right at the 10,000-foot mark. This inner voice in us is wired for easy, for comfortable, and when we start moving into the hard, it talks to us, attempting to get us to take it easy. We also have demons around us constantly speaking to us to take the easy way, if not the wrong and sinful way. If you think you are tired, you will be exhausted; if you think hard, you will become discouraged; if you think quit, it won’t be long before you do quit. The most powerful discipline for me in controlling my thoughts and not letting them control me is memorizing Bible verses. The discipline it takes to memorize Bible verses gives us the self-control to take wrong, wimpy thoughts captive and replace them with the thinking of an overcomer. Most Christians don’t learn many Bible verses because their mind tells them it is too hard and they can’t do it. I wonder where those thoughts came from.

I have read several books about the journey of guys who became Navy Seals. I have also read several books about ultramarathon runners. I had several goals in reading those books. The first was to learn how those guys could accomplish what they did, and the keys or components of their toughness. I know that they were not simply born that way. They had all learned a skill set, an attitude, and a way of thinking that helped them manage and overcome major roadblocks and physical pain. The second goal was to figure out how to describe what they did and put it into writing in an organized way so that I could apply it to my own life and teach others. The word that I use is endurance instead of toughness or grit; the reason is that it is the word that is used in the Bible, though toughness or grit could both be used in most cases as synonyms. I also studied the life of Jesus as the ultimate example of toughness, but it was easy to see all the similarities between them as they lived life with endurance. Endurance is a key character trait in all of the champions in the Bible, and one that we all need to have to grow and to bear much fruit for God.

Hebrews 12:1-3 Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so you will not grow weary and lose heart.

Hebrews 10:32 But remember the former days, when, after being enlightened, you endured a significant conflict of sufferings,

Hebrews 10:36 For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.

The first of many principles on how to be tough in the midst of pain and problems is not to will ourselves through it but to think ourselves through it. The way we think about our pain and problems determines whether we will endure or not.

Yesterday, I overdid my exercise routine in my recovery process from my hip surgery. My leg swelled up a bunch, and it hurt much more than usual, so today I am taking it easy and doing a lot of icing of my leg. The main reason I overdid it is because of my competitive nature. You would think that when a person gets to be my age, they would relax a little bit and not get so worked up about winning and being first. I have an app on my phone given to me by ROC Orthopedics in Oregon City,  the medical group that did my hip replacement. It lists daily exercises, videos on how to do them, and a way of checking off the ones you have done. It also keeps track of my walking via my cell phone. Carrying my phone can sense my steps and give me a daily total of steps taken, the average speed I walked, and record it. The problem for me is that all those who have had hip replacement surgery and used this App are in the database, and I can see my rank compared to the others in the system. I realize that many of those I am competing with are younger and probably recover and heal faster, but it is still tough for me not to do more when I see that I am in the middle of the pack. I never did very well in sports growing up, I was pretty slow when I was into running marathons and half marathons in my 50s and 60s. But I still try to win most things I do, even if it is playing checkers with a grandkid.

One of the interesting things about the “Judgment Seat of Christ” is that one of the rewards is our proximity to Jesus in the Millennium. The disciples argued over who would sit at Jesus’s right and left hands. Jesus didn’t say no one would; He just explained how to be the one who did. Someone is going to be first in the Kingdom, and someone is going to be last.

Revelation 3:21-22: He who overcomes, I will grant him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

Overcomers are more than just being a born-again Christian.

Mark 9:35 Sitting down, He called the twelve and *said to them, “If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all.”

1 Corinthians 9:24 Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.

I know that I will be far from first in the Kingdom, but I do want to be close to Jesus and sit with Him there. 

One problem I have been having with my hip replacement surgery is that I can’t put my left sock on without help. Patty and the grandkids have been helping me to do that. This morning everyone was gone so I improvised, and I found a pair of prongs that are used to grab baked potatoes with in one of the kitchen drawers. It took a little practice, but I got my sock on with no problem. God created us with creative minds and we are regularly learning, improvising, and inventing because of problems and barriers in our lives. The difference in the world between when I was a kid and now is amazing. When I was in High School we had a party phone line. That meant there were ten households on one line so if you wanted to call someone you had to pick up the phone and listen to see if someone else was on the line. It also meant that you had to be careful what you said while talking on the phone because any number of different people could be listening in. Now we have cell phones that we carry with us and that do everything but make coffee. With all the many inventions that have come into our life to solve hundreds of problems one problem that we can never solve on our own, is our sin problem. We cannot pay what is the penalty for our sin and we cannot stop sinning on our own. We are all slaves to sin and it is impossible to conquer it. Along with our sin problem is our death problem. Modern medicine is amazing in what they can now do for our health, but we will all still die, sooner or later, that problem is staring us all in the face. God has solved our problem for us. God sent His son into the world to die for us and pay the penalty of our sins and to  give us eternal life with Him. Those who accept this gift from God and trust Christ as their Savior are also given the gift of the Holy Spirit to live inside of us so we now have the will and the strength to conquer sin. Tomorrow Patty or one of the grandkids will want to help me put my sock on, but I will tell them that I can do it by myself. So many people think they can save themselves and ignore God’s free gift.

One key component of effective praying is importunity. That means we pray over and over for the same thing because we know it is God’s will, and we know that God wants us to ask again and again until He does it. Our persistence isn’t a sign of low faith; on the contrary, it is a sign of great faith.

 Matthew 15:21-28 Jesus went away from there and withdrew into the district of Tyre and Sidon. And a Canaanite woman from that region came out and began to cry out, saying, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed.” But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and implored Him, saying, “Send her away because she keeps shouting at us.” But He replied, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and began to bow down before Him, saying, “Lord, help me!” He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But she said, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus told her, “O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed at once.

I didn’t have peace and freedom from anxiety about my hip replacement surgery at first, but I kept asking God for His strength and peace until He gave it to me. It is God’s will that I have His strength. It is His will that I have His incomprehensible peace. So, I have to ask and keep asking until His will is a reality in my life.

I have completed two weeks of rehabilitation since my hip replacement surgery. I went in for my two-week follow-up exam yesterday, and they took the bandage off and said everything looked good. I have graduated from a walker to a cane, and my goal is to throw away the cane in one week. This last week, I have walked 3000 steps daily plus 30 minutes on the stationary bike and 30 minutes of doing exercises assigned to me by my physical therapist. This week, I aim to walk 5000 steps daily, spend 45 minutes on the bike, and exercise for 30 minutes.

I like goals; they motivate me to press on and do more. I especially like goals that I can measure. Goals with numbers are my favorite. I asked the doctor yesterday about my physical therapy. While I am in there twice a week for an hour, they show me exercises and watch me as I do them. I have them all down now and do the assigned number and more at home every day. I asked the doctor if there was any reason I needed to keep going twice a week. He commented that most people don’t exercise at home after surgery; they only do what gets done during the hour-long sessions at physical therapy.  I assured him I was being faithful in doing them every day. So, I go once this week and once next week, and then I am done with physical therapy, and my final doctor’s exam is on July 10th. Then, on July 14th, I head to Alaska for one month of salmon and halibut fishing, hallelujah!

I also have spiritual goals for every day. I read my Bible every day for a specific amount of time and number of chapters, I spend a particular amount of time in private prayer, I pray with Patty, I have a weekly goal for corporate prayer, I read a certain number of pages in a good book, I spend time every day memorizing Bible verses, I write daily in my journal, I write on this blog, and I write notes, emails, and text messages to different people every day to encourage and motivate them in their Christian walk. I keep track of my work and send weekly email reports to several people I am accountable to for my disciplines.

I wasn’t surprised when I heard that most people who have had surgery like mine don’t exercise much. That is the way we are as people, but if we want to get better faster, exercise is essential. But the most important thing is that we spend time with God every day in daily spiritual disciplines. It is just like brushing our teeth or walking on the treadmill: do it every day, every day, with a few breaks.