Proverbs 17:27-28
He who restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is considered prudent.

One time when I was talking to an old veteran pastor who was an amazingly good preacher of the Word, I asked him for some advice on how to become a good preacher. I said to him, “I would be so happy if I could preach half as good as you do, ” that was my attempt at honoring him and staying humble, but I will never forget his response, “unless you want to preach twice as good as I do, you won’t amount to a hill of beans!”

The second thing he said was, “don’t be a jabber box!” I think he could see my look of confusion and he said, ”the more you talk all day long the less passion you will have in your preaching.” He went on to say, “the early church fathers used to say, ‘If you want the oven to stay hot, don’t open the door all the time.’”

It is a balancing act for me, I need to talk to people, to work on growing in my relationship with those that I am called to Pastor, but not to be a jabber box. I need to talk to Patty, she enjoys conversation, but one thing I know is that if I listen attentively she will do most of the talking.

One thing I know is true is that the more I talk, the more apt I am to sin, and a corollary to that is, the more I talk, the less wise I seem to be.

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

When there is a problem in a marriage, who’s fault is it? When there is disagreement between a parent and their kid, who’s fault is it? When there is a conflict between people at their workplace, whose fault is it? When there is conflict between two neighbors, whose fault is it?

When we were raising our eight kids, and two of them got into a fight about something, and Patty or I intervened, usually the first words out of one or both of their mouths was, “It is his fault.” That statement seemed to justify whatever behavior issues were taking place.

I have done many hours of counseling over the last 40 years with people who are in the midst of a disagreement, and when I ask about the reason for the conflict one or both point to the other person as the reason for the lack of unity in their relationship, “it is their fault.”

In conflicts that I have been involved with as a counselor, neither person asked any of these questions, “what is God’s role in this situation in our relationship?” “Could God make us one, could He fix this conflict?” “What would it take for God to become an active third party in my marriage?” “What would I need to do for God to change my son’s heart?”

Proverbs 16:7 has been my main “go-to” verse for years in any conflict that I have been part of, which prompts me to ask myself the question, “what do I need to do to prompt God to work in my ‘enemies’ heart, ” and then a follow-up question to myself, “what things possibly need to be changed in my heart for God to be pleased with me?”

In summary, God loves peace and unity; He has the power to change any person’s heart and behavior easily; when one person humbly says, “Lord, change me, ” He will, and then He will change the other person as well.

Proverbs 16:7 works incredibly well, but someone has to say, “it is my fault, ” before God gets involved.

Proverbs 15:13 A joyful heart makes a cheerful face,
But when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken.

Proverbs 17:22 A joyful heart is good medicine,
But a broken spirit dries up the bones.

Philippians 4:4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!

I am happy because I choose to be happy. I choose to be happy by thinking of the good things in life, and even on my worst day, there are many.

I am happy because I choose to be happy. I choose to be happy by rejoicing always, even in the worst trials because God loves me, and is infinite in wisdom and knows exactly what I need to experience at any given time in my life so as to grow at maximum speed toward Christ like character and to bear much fruit for Him.

I am happy because I choose to be happy. I choose to be happy by thinking about heaven and imagining all that I will experience there. Heaven is going to be such an amazing place that I can’t come close to imagining now, but I will give it my best shot.

I am happy because I choose to be happy. I choose to be happy because I can choose to be happy, it is within my power that God has given me to choose to rise above the problem and trials of life and be happy.

Am I ever sad? Yes, but not because of my circumstances being bad. I am sad because so many are happy or sad based on the circumstances of their life, they are truly victims. And what is really sad is that many who are sad because of their circumstances are Christians, followers of Jesus, and they have no testimony, no witness for Jesus. Lost people who are headed for hell forever are attracted to people who have hope displayed in their countenance, especially in hard times.

Proverbs 14:12 There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

I was reading a news commentary and the writer wrote, “Truth is fluid.” That statement is very untrue, but many in today’s culture believe it to be true, which is a perfect illustration of Proverbs 14:12.

At the trial of Jesus by Pontus Pilate he seems frustrated by the fluid truth of his day. John 18:38 Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”

Truth is absolute with no fluidity whatsoever. God is truth, He communicates truth, He establishes truth, He decides what is true, He enforces truth.

John 14:6 Jesus *said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.

John 8:32 you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

John 17:17
Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.

Read the Bible everyday, it is the source of truth, it is the Word of God.

Proverbs 13:13 The one who despises the word will be in debt to it, But the one who fears the commandment will be rewarded.

What I am doing for a while, anyway, is picking a verse out of the chapter of Proverbs that corresponds with the day of the month. Today is March 13th so I picked a verse from the 13th chapter of Proverbs to write about. The hardest part of writing a daily blog is coming up with a topic, and this should help some. I still have to pick the verse and write the commentary, but this should end the sometimes hours of indecision about what to write about.

The Bible is the living Word of God, and apart from it, we can’t have a relationship with God. We grow in our relationship with God by reading, memorizing, and meditating on His Word. Our flesh is not inclined towards knowing God more or doing His will, so our flesh is constantly pulling us away from faithfully reading, studying, or memorizing it. Our flesh is a significant anchor in our life regarding spiritual goals; it is like trying to run a marathon pushing a wheelbarrow with a hundred-pound sack of chicken food in it.

The devil wants to run our life, he wants to destroy our life, he wants to pull us away from God, and he wants us to ignore the Word of God. He works at controlling our life by talking to us, and we hear him in our thoughts. Have you ever had the thought pop into your head, “I am so tired tonight; I will read my Bible tomorrow night?” Where did that thought come from?

There are over a hundred different blessings that come into our life from faithfully reading and memorizing the Bible. God wants us to read His Word, so He motivates us by giving us rewards when we read it. Here are just a few;

– great peace, supernatural wisdom, restores our soul, we will know the perfect will of God for our life, we will grow spiritually, the joy of the Lord, inner strength to manage pressures and trials, more significant and increasing faith, and increasing power in our prayers to God.

That is just a few of the clearly started blessings that come from God when we honor Him by reading and living His Word. The key to faithfully reading and memorizing His Word is to set a goal. Then to become part of an accountability group that meets regularly, weekly is best, who will encourage you to be faithful to the Word of God every day.

Proverbs 12:15 A wise man is he who listens to counsel.

Back when Patty and I only had one child, and were still farming, we drove 2 hours every week one way for three months to get counseling on how to raise godly children. The counsel that we received lasted just 15 minutes at each session, but it was very profound, wise, incredibly practical, and when the 15 minutes were up each week we knew exactly what to do with what we had heard.

We went to numerous seminars on raising children that lasted several hours each evening and lasted from 2 days to as long as a week. We read dozens of books on the topic of raising godly kids, and we visited informally with parents who seemed to be doing an excellent job with their kids.

We did all of that because we both wanted to raise terrific kids who would love the Lord with all of their hearts, and we both felt very inadequate for the job of raising a child that belonged to God with the results of our parenting lasting for eternity.

Seeking wise counsel and advice from others on how to have a good marriage, how to raise champions for God, how to manage our money, how to grow in our faith, how to succeed at our business, how to study the Bible, and dozens of other life skills is very Biblical and one that God honors. God is opposed to the proud (one who thinks he already knows how to do it) but gives the humble grace.

There are too many critical skills needed in life to try and learn them by trial and error. There is too much at stake to allow our pride to keep us from learning from others. We go to school to learn how to read and do math, where we learn from others, but we are sort of forced into that role, but we ought to be lifelong learners and seekers of wisdom. There are wise people all around us if we look for them, but our pride keeps us in the fool category.

1 Corinthians 13:13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Paul basically is saying that love, faith, and hope are the best, the greatest, the most powerful of all words. We can see that for faith and love, but hope? Why is hope in the “big three?” Our problem is that we understand hope with the definition of, “maybe we will, maybe we won’t; I hope it happens, but I am not sure it will.” Hope doesn’t seem all that important, all that powerful with a definition like that.

But Paul uses the word hope to mean “a positive expectation of a future event, ” and the future event is eternal life with Jesus and a brand new body that is just like His to boot. The Biblical command is to fix our mind, our thoughts completely on the hope to be revealed to us when we die or when Jesus returns. “The hope” is the event, the day, the moment we see Jesus, but “hope” is also a condition of our heart where we know without a doubt that we are headed for heaven and anticipating it with great eagerness.

Those with great hope instead of a little hope have zero fear of death, in fact they are looking forward to the day they die physically and are resurrected spiritually to be in the presence of the Lord. Zero fear of death, there are a lot of people who would have lived life with so much more joy and freedom during this last year with all of the COVID paranoia if they had some hope.

I found out today that my good friend Brad Ils and his wife Trina lost their youngest daughter yesterday. Aleeya was 16 years old and had a blood clot land in her lungs, and she died instantly while she and Brad were shopping together at Target. Brad pastors one of our daughter churches, Turning Point Church, that meets in Turner.

Unexpected deaths are hard, especially if it is a 16-year-old daughter. Life is often a puzzle as we try to figure out why God does certain things a certain way, and this kind of event is probably one of the most difficult to make sense of. We all would like the “why” question answered for a lot of things, but God doesn’t usually come through on that question. Job asked “why” a dozen times and he never got an answer. Someone asked me once if I thought God would give us answers once we were in heaven. I think that when we get to heaven, we will know all the answers, and they will make perfect sense and will demonstrate both God’s wisdom and His love.

Brad and Trina have a great advantage over many other people who go through this kind of trial because they have a strong faith and a close relationship with the Lord. They know that Aleeya is in heaven with Jesus experiencing incomprehensible joy because she loved the Lord and was in His family. We don’t mourn because Aleeya somehow got a bum rap and missed out on so much of life. There is nothing she would have done in this life that comes close to what she is experiencing and doing now. We mourn because of our own loss of someone we loved and will miss. But we will see her again very soon by God’s standard of time. That is why the Bible says we mourn, but not like the world does because they have no hope.

I fell Sunday morning going down the steps off of our back porch at 2:00 am headed out to rescue Patty’s chickens from a coon or whatever was making them sqwack like crazy. As a result, I bruised my tailbone and stayed in bed most of the day, missing church and three teaching responsibilities that I had. I slept an extra 10 hours yesterday recovering from my adventure. As a result of the extra rest I am feeling much better today, and Patty is bossing me around, giving me “low impact, ” as she calls them, jobs to do. I noticed several other things about the extra sleep and rest. I have about a dozen little growths on my forehead, like most older people do, and have them burned off with liquid nitrogen periodically. Well, this morning they are all gone, at least significantly reduced in size. I don’t know for sure that it was all the extra sleep that was the cause, but seems reasonable to conclude that it was. The other very noticeable thing was my mood, I was feeling good emotionally this morning and very positive and energetic. I work at staying positive in my thinking, but sometimes I just feel sort of flat.

I get in the habit of leaving my one hour of exercise, my Bible reading and memory work, my prayer time, my book reading, and my blog writing until the evening and often it is midnight or 1:00 am before I get everything done and go to bed. I get up at 5:00 am five mornings a week, and if I go fishing on one of the other two mornings I get up at 4:00 am. As an ex dairy farmer I have done that most of my life, and have functioned fine, but I think I need to change my habits some as an older man now. I was reviewing my goals yesterday and added that I will be in bed by 10:00 am at least five nights a week. I have come to this conclusion before and have made goals to improve in this area, but I am determined to make it happen now. The problem is that I have so many things on my “todo list” that I want to get one more crossed off, just one more, than it ends up being two. . . I exercise religiously an hour every day for my health, and I am always dieting working at keeping my weight in check and eliminating most sugar from my diet, again for my health. I am not trying to live forever, just to serve the Lord well with the time I have left, so it seems reasonable that I can motivate myself to get adequate sleep and rest in order to stay healthy and energetic.

Last night at about 2:00 am, I heard Patty’s chickens squawking, so I went out to chase off whatever was harassing them, and I fell going down the steps from our back deck and landed on my tailbone. It was just awkwardness on my part; the steps weren’t wet or icy; I just stepped wrong and lost my balance. This morning when I got up to go to 7:00 am prayer at JBC for our services, I was in extreme pain and couldn’t walk or stand, so I went back to bed. I called the church and told them I couldn’t teach my two leadership classes or my Prophecy Classes. Patty got up and got me five ibuprofen pills, helped me to the bathroom, and now I am on my way to full recovery. I think I bruised my tailbone pretty good, but I don’t think there is any serious damage done. I am getting waited on and pampered, and Roscoe is lying on the bed with me, commiserating with me as he licks my face.

It just goes to show you the unpredictableness of life, going out to rescue chickens and end up stuck in bed. That wasn’t my plan, but now I have a new plan. Get well rested up, do a bunch of extra memorizing of Bible verses, write a couple of different blogs on my Ipad to get ahead on that, and get my Wednesday night service sermon done. I am taking it by faith that I will be up to teaching on Wednesday night. My main concern is that I am scheduled to go steelhead fishing on Friday on the Siletz river, and I for sure don’t want to miss that.

The main thing that I try to remember now and practice is to don’t do the “shoulda, if only, why me, poor me, ” self-talk. Instead, “thank You Lord that I still get to do something that matters, even if it is from the bed, thank You for the needed rest, thank You for my caring family and dog, and thank You for my many friends who are praying for me.”

Wow, this so much fun I think I will do it again tomorrow😀!