There are 328 million people in the United States, and I am just one person, you are just one person. When you read or watch the news and see all the crazy stuff going on, and Oregon one of the craziest it is very easy to feel like a victim. A victim because you didn’t cause what is happening to happen, and you don’t have any way to change or stop much of anything. It is like being in a big flood of water with a life jacket on being carried away by the water trying hard to keep your head up out of the water with no clue where you are being washed away to.

Jesus was one man , and He accomplished a lot with His life, with most of it being in just three years.

John 21:25 And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.

But Jesus was God, you say, but He was living and functioning as a man, a human being,

John 14:12-14 Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.

This is one of the coolest passages in the Bible. I have the potential to do greater works to accomplish more that matters than Jesus Himself. Every Christian hast potential, but very, very few do much of anything to influence their culture.

1. You have to believe you can. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed you can move mountains. The best way to grow strong in faith is to read your Bible every day, more than a couple of verses. Memorize and meditate on key Bible verses. I have memorized John 14:12-14 and often fall asleep going over it in my mind.

2. Pray a lot for and about every injustice you see or hear about. Notice the second half of John 14:12-14. “Whatever you ask in my name, that will I do!”

Luke 18:7 now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them?

Notice the phrase, “day and night, ” which means to pray a lot.

Most could very easily read their Bibles for 15 minutes and then pray for 15 minutes. That 30 minutes a day will move you into the category of being a champion for God, a Daniel, a David, an Esther.

The Bible is full of stories of one person making a huge difference in the world.

Ezekiel 22:30I searched for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before Me for the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one.

In this verse God is saying He only needs one person to work through to change history. The book of Esther is about one man and one lady that save the nation of Israel from extinction. The book of Daniel is about one man who made a huge difference in history, so what was their power?

Our nation in one year has gone incredibly crazy, very lost, and rushing away from God and His blessings. God calls me to be salt and light, to make a difference, to be a leader, an influencer, so what can I do?

Let me share my strategy on how to be a world-changer with you.

1. It is so important to remember that God is doing the changing, the fixing, and the conquering. But He doesn’t do what he does except through a person, and He only uses qualified people, so be one. The people God does great things through are humble above all else, they are kind to others, they seek God through Bible reading and prayer.

2. Our greatest world-changing weapon is prayer. The kind of praying that God honors is that which costs us time, not easy, convenient, prayer. Prayer warriors are systematic, not sporadic, they have a place and a time and are faithful to it. They set goals, make commitments, and keep them.

3. If you are pursuing righteousness and being the kind of person God uses keep an eye open for opportunities that God will provide, don’t miss them because of your busy schedule.

I think a lot about the future. It is a combination of planning and anticipation. The thinking that I do is a major source of energy and joy for me, it simply gets me excited.

I am going to go fishing one day this week. I am going to go fishing at least one day next week. I am going to have three more meetings this week with groups of guys that love Jesus and want to grow, and next week I am going to have seven of those extraordinary meetings. This Sunday is our annual baptism service with over 20 people getting baptized and an enormous pot luck with great food and I am going to walk around and talk to many, many different people, all of whom I love and pray for every week. In ten days I am leaving for Alaska to go fishing for sockeye salmon with a bunch of guys from the church, it is going to be such a fun time. In August I am going to climb Mt Adams, 12,307 feet high. I am going to camp at the 10,000-foot level and have a great time looking out on what looks like the whole world beneath me. In September I am going elk and deer hunting with my bow in the Steens Mts, the most beautiful place in the world. In the first weekend of October I am starting my Leadership classes. I will teach a total of six different classes each week, and I am so excited about the impact I know the classes will have on those attending. At some point in August I am going tuna fishing. I have never been and I am so excited about this new experience. In January I am going to teach a seminar to a bunch of Pastors that will totally change their ministries, I can hardly wait for this to come. There so many other really cool things on the calendar in the next six months.

If you are like me, a lot of the new words being thrown around in the news today are confusing. One of them is “ Critical Theory” and another is “Wokeism”.

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is a term referring to awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial equality, and it has also been used to refer to awareness about broader social inequality on issues such as gender and sexual orientation.

There is a new religion called wokeism. It is growing very fast in our country. This religion masquerades under the guise of compassion and justice, but underneath it is evil. This movement did not start in Minneapolis on May 25th, when George Floyd was killed, it has been growing for decades.

When I graduated from High School in 1967 and went off to a Christian College I learned about Secular Humanism. In one of my classes we read the Humanist Manefesto written in 1933. In the Manefesto was this statement, “Humanism is a new “religion”, and Humanism as a religious movement will transcend and replace all previous religions that are based on allegations of supernatural revelation.” Since the first Manifesto, there have been a succession of new ones written intended to update and clarify the doctrine of Secular Humanism, the last one being in 2008. A few of the doctrines, principles, and goals are; (1) Evolution is our God, (2) No deity will save us; we must save ourselves, (3) We are responsible for what we are and for what we will be, (4) abortion should be free and available to everyone, (5) ethical relativism, the belief that no absolute moral code exists, and therefore man must adjust his ethical standards in each situation according to his own judgment. Humanist Max Hocutt says that human beings “may, and do, make up their own rules… Morality is not discovered; it is made.” (6). A one-world court and government would be most effective for achieving equality (7) The pursuit of personal property and riches, capitalism, is the main cause of evil and inequality in the world (8) racism is the ultimate expression of inequality, as is sexism, and judgmentalism toward someone else’s sexual orientation.

When I was a Freshman in college, it was recognized that secular Humanism was rapidly taking over secular Colleges and Universities in the United States which was their stated goal in the second Manefesto written at the end of World War II. Today most would agree that the “takeover” is complete, and is now moving into public education and has moved aggressively into Christian Schools as well.

Out of Humanism comes the idea that the more government controls a culture the more equality will exist, which results in the welfare state, Socialism and Communism.

In the early 20th century, a German school of philosophy called the Frankfurt School developed a social philosophy based on Humanism, called Critical Theory. The stated purpose is to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them, that which is oppressive.” In Critical Theory, the only things that exist are hierarchies of power, and those hierarchies must be torn down.

Critical Theory started to become prominent in the United States in the 90s and eventually infiltrated almost every university. In recent years, the ideology has left the university and has made the jump to media and corporate culture, establishing itself as the primary moral culture of our country.

Concepts such as logic, wisdom, natural law, and reason are viewed as tools of the oppressors, as are values like individualism, hard work, punctuality and delayed gratification. Critical Theory has become much more than a social philosophy and is the primary philosophical driving force behind the new civil religion of wokeism.

God is oppressive, saying something is right is oppressive, the expectation put on me to be responsible is oppressive, the fact that others have more than I do is oppressive. . .

Those who have convinced themselves that they are oppressed, that they have been treated unjustly scream, yell, and make a big fuss in an attempt to be free and equal, but it doesn’t work.

The only hope for our country is Jesus Christ.

My Dad was a patriot. He fought in World War II and had four ships sunk under him. He was a patriot as a matter of principle; if you lived in a country you supported it, you fought for it, and you were loyal to it, that was just the right thing to do. To my Dad to live in a country like the United States, to have a job, a house, to be protected, and have freedom and then to be critical of that country was the height of self-centeredness and childish thinking and acting.

During the Vietnam war there was a young farmer in our community who hung the U.S. flag upside down on a flagpole in his yard in protest of the war. I don’t ever remember seeing my Dad so angry about anything before. He started up a petition trying to get all the other dairy farmers in the area to sign it to get Mayflower the company that bought and picked up our milk to refuse to take his milk. It didn’t succeed but it did succeed in getting the young farmer to honor the flag, he quit flying it upside down, and it seemed to me that the reason was that the guy feared my Dad. In my opinion a very smart thing to do.

Over the last 30 years I have been in about 20 different countries on short-term mission trips. I have been in Vietnam, China, Mongolia, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Bosnia, and others and seen first hand the restrictions, the corruption, the control that government attempts to exert over people.

Many people were interviewed over the fourth who were critical of the United States, and listening to or reading their comments ; it was easy to see that they have no clue. I thought to myself as I read or heard what they said, they need to live for a year in Vietnam or Mauritania.

Even in our present state of liberalism, and wokeism as a nation we are still the country that people in every nation in the world want to come to, we are still the country where you have a chance to do something with your life that matters and to move up in life.

My main thing as a concerned citizen of the greatest nation on earth is to pray diligently every day that God will bring revival to the United States of America.

Reflective thinking is a learned skill that very few people have learned.

God’s goal for us is that we would become righteous and holy as He is. He will work on us, around us, and in us to make us like Himself, but there is a level of cooperation that we must bring to the process for what He does to work. That is why we are commanded in the Bible to pursue righteousness over and over again.

One of the most important things we need to do to grow in righteousness is to accurately and honestly evaluate who we are, where we are, what our flaws are, what blind spots do we have, what our motives are, and what is our character like. That evaluation of ourselves is called reflective thinking, it is looking in the mirror, as it were so that we can see our own heart.

This self-examination is not a morbid self-lothing, it is a result of our very strong desire to please Christ and to be like Him in character. As I said, very few followers of Jesus do this routinely as a discipline of life. The primary reason is because our flesh hates it. Our flesh ignores, justifies, blames, and denies our character flaws, we learned to do that as children and most have refined that skill ever since so that we have no clue who we really are on the inside.

Psalms 36:2 For it flatters him in his own eyes
concerning the discovery of his iniquity and the hatred of it.

Proverbs 12:15 The way of a fool is right in his own eyes.

Proverbs 21:2 Every man’s way is right in his own eyes.

Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Who can understand it?
“

If I evaluate my level of pride on a scale of 1 to 100, and God does the same, how close will my evaluation be to His? It all depends; if I evaluate myself in cooperation with Him, asking for Him to open my eyes to see myself clearly, and with the desire to grow and become like Him, I believe they will be very close.

Jeremiah 17:10 I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind.

For me, the best time to think reflectively about who I am is when I have any relational conflict. My character flaws show up in my relationships. The natural tendency is to think I am right and others are at fault, but if I assume that tension, strife, hurt feelings, hurtful words, and irritation are my fault, and use that conflict to honestly examine my words, attitude, and behavior I will probably learn a lot about my character and heart.

Reflective thinking, how much do you do? How accurate is it?

Proverbs 16:5 Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord.

An abomination to the Lord! Wow, how bad is that. The Lord has an opinion of every person. Some people in the Bible, such as Daniel are called God’s favorites, obviously God’s opinion of him was very high. Abraham was called God’s friend. I don’t know how important it is to you to be well thought of by the Lord, by the God of the universe, the all-wise, holy, all-powerful God. The apostle Paul declared that his goal in life was to be pleasing to the Lord in every respect.

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

That is my ambition in life, to please the Lord in all that I do. I am obsessed with it, thinking all the time about how I am doing. Wondering what God thinks of me as He watches all that I do, listens to how I talk, and hears all of my thoughts. The Bible says that “God weighs the motives of a man’s heart, ” I wonder what He thinks of my motives. It is hard for me sometimes to know what my motives really are, but He knows.

As people we have the ability to sense God’s pleasure in us, and we can refine that ability so that we are very in tune with his opinion of us. When pleasing the Lord is our greatest desire and we have grown to sense His pleasure in us we become highly motivated people.

Just as we can refine our sense of His joy in us, we can also dull it to the point of being totally unaware of his pleasure and also His displeasure to the point of being an abomination to Him. How sad to be an abomination to the Lord and not even be aware of it. How do we do that to our own heart?

The primary way is to become motivated by the approval of people rather than God, to be more concerned about the opinion of those around you instead of God’s opinion. It is subtle, it happens slowly, but it happens to most, we become “people pleasers.”

Colossians 3:23 Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men,

Galatians 1:10 For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ.

Reflective thinking is when I examine my heart and my motives, asking the question of myself, am I striving to please the Lord or people. God is so desirous of our hearts to be entirely devoted to Him that He will help us in our effort to figure out why we do what we do.

Self-worth, self-esteem is a critical human need. Self-worth is not really our own opinion of ourselves, it is our perceived opinion of either other people of us or God’s opinion of us. Which do you think is healthy self-worth? Self-esteem that comes from people’s opinions of us turns to pride.

I went to JBC’s Vacation Bible School program tonight. It was a lot of fun and very inspiring to see all those kids on the stage singing about Jesus. Jesus said that if we wanted to be great in the kingdom of heaven we needed to become like a little child. It was easy to see tonight what Jesus must have seen in the hearts of kids during his day that endeared them to Him.

My Mom took me to Vacation Bible School when I was a kid. In fact if there were four churches relatively close to us and their VBS dates were different she would take me to all four. I got a lot of good early teaching and training when I was a kid because of those faithful people who took time out of their busy schedules to teach a bunch of rowdy kids for five days.

Sometimes people will ask me when I got saved, and I will say in Vacation Bible School, in fact I got saved many times in VBS. At the end of each of the different programs there would be a gospel presentation and then the person who gave the lesson would say “anybody who wants to accept Jesus as their savior raise your hand.” I would raise my hand and pray with the teacher. If I went to four VBS’s I would get saved four times, and again the next year, and the next. As a kid I had a very strong sense of eternity, I thought about it a lot, and I did not want to go to hell. Back in those days preachers preached about hell more than they do today, and I had heard a number of them at an early age that put the fear of God into me. So every time there was an invitation I raised my hand, just to be sure.

We raised our eight kids taking them to school in the back of a Volkswagon pickup with no seats and no seat belts. They sat on the floor of the pickup though we did have a canopy so they didn’t get wet from the rain, but there was no heater or windows. Then we moved up to a Volkswagon bus with no car seats or seat belts. They are all alive and well and are quite bold and unafraid of taking a risk today.

Staying safe has become a religion. “Safetyism,” as it is called, like all religions, places what it values — in this case, being safe — above other values. Safetyism explains the willingness of Americans to give up their most cherished values — including liberty — in the name of safety for the last year and a half.

Millions of Americans not only gave up their right to go to work, earn a living, attend church, and visit friends and relatives, but they even gave up their right to visit dying relatives and friends. One can assume that nearly every person recorded as having died of COVID died without having a single loved one at their bedside from the moment they entered a hospital until their death. The acceptance of such cruelty — irrational and unscientific cruelty, one might add — can only be explained by the desire for safety above all else.

The religion of Safetyism has increasingly deprived Americans of joys as well as freedoms. Children, in particular, have been so coddled that American children of the last two generations have probably had far less joy and far more fear than children of any previous American generation. Young children cannot take walks on their own lest child protective services be called; and monkey bars and seesaws have been removed from playgrounds. As an article in the Australian website Babyology headlined: “Monkey bars are dangerous and must be removed from playgrounds, experts say.”

Two Norwegian scientists, Ellen Sandseter (Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education) and Leif Kennair (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), wrote a study on children and risky play published in Evolutionary Psychology in which they concluded: “We may observe an increased neuroticism or psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age-adequate risky play.”

One of the most prevalent comments I get from people when I tell them about my bicycle trips across the country is, “that sounds terribly dangerous!”

Take five minutes to watch the video of my son-in-law and my grandkids. I guarantee that you will be blown away by the risk and danger these kids who are 6, 8, and 10 years old face. This is an amazing video of parents teaching their kids to take risks and to not be afraid of danger. I put it on my Facebook page a few months ago. Cut and paste this to your internet to watch.

A growing area of pseudo-science today driven by liberal politicians is the “man-caused global warming crisis.” The global warming frenzy and resulting fear in our culture is a deliberate plan to control our culture. If weather and temperature change is happening, it is God-caused, and He is doing it for a reason.

“There are other voices – climate realists and real scientists – who have been speaking out for years about the pseudoscience associated with climate alarmism. One of them is Dr. Fulks. Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. is a physicist, originally from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research. He is currently one of the Directors of the CO2 Coalition, a group of prominent scientists and economists who point out that carbon dioxide and water vapor are the entirely beneficial byproducts of our civilization. He has been fighting the good fight against knaves and fools pushing climate alarmists’ draconian economic solutions for a nonexistent problem that have become manifested in a “Green New Deal.””

Evolution is a theory with no real scientific support. Over the years those who believe in evolution would declare that those who believed that God created everything that exists in six days were ignoring the science and were dumbheads. This attack was repeated so much that strong, Bible believing Christians would often compromise their belief so as not to appear dumb to the unbelieving world. There are many real scientists who have proven that the supposed science that supports evolution is indeed pseudo-science.

The worst thing about the mask mandate, the business shut down, and the isolation of people to the point of shutting down schools and churches this last year was the claim that it was based on science, “just follow the science.” It was pseudo-science driven by the media, politicians, and medical companies. Now that the push and pressure to get everyone to conform is coming to an end, the lack of real scientific support is becoming more and more evident. It had about as much real science backing as my Dad’s belief that castrating our pigs under a full moon would result in faster-growing pigs!

There are many real scientists out there in the world, but they don’t get quoted by the politicians or media; in fact, they most often get ignored, restricted, fined, ridiculed, and falsely attacked.

The best sign that something is being driven by psedo-science is when it starts being used as a club to intimate and force people to a particular agenda, and when it produces disunity.