A lot of people during these weird times are struggling with insomnia or having trouble falling asleep at night when they go to bed. I used to have that problem, but now I have several disciplines that have made that problem a thing of the past. In yesterday’s blog I talked about praying and how powerful prayer is to replace anxiety with peace resulting in a very restful sleep.

A second discipline that works as well is meditating on memorized Bible verses or passages. I started this as a result of a seminar that I went to several years ago. The seminar was on “Spiritual Warfare”, the trouble and problems that the devil and his demons are able to bring into our life, and how to overcome them. The devil and his demons primarily work in our life by talking to us. They are spirit beings so we can’t see them, but they are there, all around us, probably most of the time. They talk to us and we hear them subliminally in the form of thoughts. Because we can’t see them we rarely associate various thoughts that pop into our minds as coming from outside our own mind. Have you ever tried to fall asleep while your wife is talking to you, it isn’t easy to do. How about if a bunch of demons are talking to you, and for sure the content would not be “warm fuzzies”. They know how your day has gone, and what the issues are in your life. Their methods are to introduce things into our thinking that are not true and will cause anxiety in our life. The devil tempted Jesus by talking to Him, “If you are the Son of God turn these stones into bread”. Jesus didn’t debate with the devil; He simply quoted Bible verses that He had obviously memorized, and after several more attempts to harass and tempt Him the devil “left Him”. The speaker in the seminar said these words that stuck with me, “If it worked for Jesus it most certainly will work for us, but the problem is that we don’t have very many Bible verses memorized well enough to meditate on for very long as we close eyes to go to sleep”. I have over 500 verses memorized well and I can pull them up in my thoughts and meditate on them, mull them over in my thinking, pondering how to apply them to my life. Whenever anxious thoughts, angry thoughts, bitter thoughts, or fearful thoughts pop into my mind as I close my eyes to go to sleep, I know the source of them and I start in on “scripture meditation”. It works well, it doesn’t take long before I am sound asleep.

Falling asleep at night used to be a major challenge for me. I would lie awake and think about all the things I should have done or that I shouldn’t have done, about the things that were going to happen the next day or that I hoped would happen or hoped wouldn’t happen. I felt so frustrated lying there fretting, knowing that I was going to wake up tired instead of refreshed, and not knowing how to fix the problem.

In 1989 I had a major spiritual awakening in my life at an event held at the Oregon coast called ”Pastor’s Prayer Summit.” As a result of that four day event prayer became the highest priority of my life. I made some very lofty goals in regards to the amount of time that I was going to spend praying primarily for the people in my church. One of the things that would frustrate me was that I would fall asleep while I was praying. It made me feel like a lazy disciple of Jesus. One day I got to thinking about why prayer made me sleepy, was it boring? As I continued to ponder this for several weeks I concluded that when I prayed I relaxed, that when I prayed a peace sort of invaded my thoughts, and the result was I fell asleep. David Brainard, a missionary to the American Indians during the early years of our country was a very committed prayer warrior, and he said, ”the sweetest and most refreshing sleep is that induced by the peace that comes from prayer”. So I started praying when I went to bed. One of the problems with praying in bed is that with no list to pray from your mind will wander, and you will be right back to fretting as before.

What works for me is to memorize several lists of things to pray for and to review the list each time my mind wanders. The easiest list to memorize and to pray for was our kids, their spouses, and our grandchildren. I can lay down and start with Sarah our oldest and all her family, then move to Sandee until I have prayed for all 42 of them, 43 counting Patty. I also have the staff and their families memorized, and the Elders as well. I never get through any one of the lists and I am dead asleep. The biggest challenge I have is trying to remember where I left off the next night.

I have a goal of having 700 Bible verses memorized by the end of 2020. I just finished memorizing the book of Philippians which has 4 chapters and 105 verses. I also have a goal of reviewing 100 of the verses that I already have memorized each day. A key reason is the Bible is the Word of God, the mind of Christ, the wisdom of God, the will of God, and it is living, active, supernatural, and guides me into the perfect will of God in my life. Another motive for my memorizing is to keep any dementia and any form of Alzheimer’s at bay, and to keep my mind as sharp as possible. I forget things so easy now, and sometimes find my mind just revolving around and around on some ridiculous subject for no apparent reason. I also read 20 pages every day, without fail, again to keep my mind sharp. I read theology, Bible, Leadership, current events/politics, how to books on building, welding, auto restoring, fishing, hunting, and bicycle touring. I write for an hour every day, which includes, my blog, sermons, lessons, prayers, letters, and strategies for accomplishing my goals. When I go on a fishing trip or some other trip where I will be so busy with activities that I forgo my mental disciplines for several days in a row I notice very quickly my mind losing it’s ability to focus, remember, and reason. I am then very motivated to get back at the disciplines and routines designed to keep my mind sharp.

I also am continually working at keeping my physical body from getting old and wimpy. I ride a stationary bike an hour a day, lift weights, go on annual bicycle trips of several thousand miles, attempt periodic crazy things like climbing Mt Adams, and run a half marathon. I don’t eat any refined sugar or gluten, and I weigh every day.

More important than my mental and physical health is the health and positive growth of my spirit and soul. The Bible talks about those whose devotion to Jesus Christ gets lukewarm, they fall away, others become worldly and Carmel, loving the world and the things in it more than Christ. Back sliding as a Christian is incredibly easy to let happen, especially when you get old and think you are set.

In order to motivate myself and hold myself accountable I have a list that I read and check off daily of my physical, mental and spiritual disciples. There are 12 of them, and I call them my ” Daily Dozen Disciplines” to success, joy, accomplishment, and perpetual youth.

I didn’t write this blog to impress you with myself, but to try and motivate you to pursue these daily routines so that you continually grow as a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ. The key is routine, no compromise, discipline, and endurance.

I ran into someone today who is a very good friend. I hadn’t seen him for about a year, and we had a great twenty minutes of conversation. It was one of those encounters that was fun, and refreshing and left me smiling and feeling good. A good friend is more than someone you know well, they are someone who you have a high level of commitment to as a person, their success makes you happy and their trials make you sad. Good friends don’t just happen by living life, they are forged over time with sacrifice, and commitment.

John 15:13 Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

Many men don’t have any real friends, just a lot of buddies. Those who have friends are those who have been a friend to others. We always reap what we sow. I feel very blessed in that I have many, very good friends in my life.

John 15:15 No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.

Probably the highest praise that Jesus could give to a person was to call them His friend.

James 2:23 And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God.

That is what I would like to be, forever.

Even just ten minutes of looking at pictures of the Nazi concentration camps where Jews were imprisoned during the Second World War is incredibly depressing not only because of the experiences that the Jews went through but also seeing and thinking about the cruelty and what people will do to other people.

The Nazi’s had a plan and strategy in mind as they inflicted incomprehensible cruelty on the Jewish people, and that was to get them to feel less than human.

The Roman invention of crucifixion wasn’t just to inflict pain, but to dehumanize a person in their death. Read the words of Jesus on the cross in Psalms 22:6-7,

”But I am a worm and not a man,
A reproach of men and despised by the people.
All who see me sneer at me;
They separate with the lip, they wag the head,”

When I was a kid, I had a dog, and we took her to the vet to get neutered so that she wouldn’t have puppies and be attracting all the male dogs in the area to our farm. To keep her from licking on her wound and taking the stitches out, the Vet put a plastic cone around her neck. When people saw her, they would laugh, and you could immediately see her head go down, her ears droop, her tail go down between her legs, and she would hide under the bed. Even dogs have a sense of dignity and worth that can get damaged.

When I wear one of these darn masks I feel just like my dog, they are dehumanizing. I personally do not believe that most of what we are being forced to do has anything to do with my health and the prevention of the spread of a killer virus. It is all about controlling people, and one of the principles of controlling people is if you dehumanize them they become like sheep.

I know many who are perfectly comfortable with wearing a mask, and possibly would accuse me of being prideful for the way I feel. I am sure that if they were asked to walk around with no cloths on they would refuse because it would be very embarrassing and thus dehumanizing, and it would be very hard to convince them that their nakedness was somehow protecting their health.

This control of people is being accomplished by the very high level of fear generated by the manipulation of information by the media, and others with a motive. The second way to control people is by the same thing that often controls young people, peer pressure. If everybody is doing it, I guess I will do it too.

I carry a mask with me and I wear it when I am asked to rather than create a scene, but I don’t like it, not because I am being forced to, but because when I wear the dumb thing I feel like a dog that just got neutered.

In Genesis it says that man was created in the image of God in order to ”rule” over creation.

Genesis 1:28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Psalms 8:4-6 What is man that You take thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,

At some point Jesus will become the literal ruler of the earth, and God’s Kingdom will be on the earth among us. Many will rule with Jesus by his side.

Revelation 3:21 He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne.

Only humble followers of Jesus will rule with Him, and He is in the process of discovering who those worthy of co-ruling with Him are. God entrusts authority on a trial basis, in order to see if they will remain under the authority of God. To be proud means to believe that your authority springs from your own self, and that no one else rules over you. To be humble means that however much authority and power and glory God gives you, you remain under His authority and rule, and always give Him all the praise and the glory. The purpose of God is to find people who are capable of handling authority and to whom, in the end, He can entrust the jobs of ruling over His creation, not merely as a trial run, but for all eternity.

Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?

Today we are seeing many in authority, such as the Governors in several States exercising their authority as if they deserved it, with an obvious disdain for God’s power over them.

Each of us is given authority from God, usually in little things to begin with, and as we prove faithful and humble, He gives us more and more power to influence and to lead others.

Matthew 25:21 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’

It is so important that we fully understand how addicting power and authority is in each of our own hearts, and that we would pursue walking humbly with our God with great diligence, fear, self-examination and transparency.

There is so much rude and crude communication between people anymore. I can’t believe that people think they are persuasive when they are loud and obnoxious. It would seem to me that what a person wants is to be heard, understood, and valued. It is so childish and immature to think that the loudest person is the most persuasive or influential, when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. Communicating with grace really is a wisdom thing. Read what God’s Word says in James 3:13-18, ”Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and so lie against the truth. This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy. And the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

Those who are regularly at odds with other people, whether it is politics, offenses, differences at work, misunderstanding, or whatever do not have godly wisdom, but natural, worldly, and demonic wisdom.

As a Pastor, one of my jobs is to counsel people, teach them, and train them to have unity in their marriage, raise good kids, and generally get along with others. Those who have the worst problem of not being gracious in their speech almost always are the hardest to convince that they have a problem. They are all almost totally convinced that it is everybody else’s problem, not theirs. The blindness to their own obnoxious behavior would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

Certain things I can dismiss out of my thinking, in fact, a lot of things. I decide I am not going to think about it anymore, and if it pops into my head, I consciously choose to think about something else. It usually only takes a couple of times of doing that, and it is gone. It is a good discipline to have so that I don’t fret about things. Sometimes some issues resist all my best efforts to dismiss or control, and this goal of successfully climbing to the top of Mt Adams is one; it is bugging the heck out of me! I am not sure if it is my pride or the intense desire that I have programmed into my head over the years not to be a wimp or allow myself to make excuses when I don’t accomplish a hard goal. Whatever is motivating me, when a thought persists despite my best efforts to bury it, I usually go with it, so I am making the commitment and goal to climb to the top of Mt Adams in 2021. If anyone wants to do it with me, let me know, and you can be part of planning the ascent.

In life, as we pursue goals that have a potential for a significant impact on other people’s lives or are noble in regards to God’s plan, failure is common because of the difficulty factor in such goals. The key thing when failure happens is to evaluate what the barriers were and then to adjust and compensate, and remake the goal with those changes built into the strategy of accomplishing it. Adapting to the obstacles, mountains, and unknown problems that regularly pop up into our life is what ”Overcomers” do, that is what ”winners” do, that is what high achievers do.

I regularly hear people say, ”Well, I guess God closed that door in my life”, when difficult things happen in pursuit of a dream in their life. God will occasionally shut a door as a way of guiding us into His will, but most often He opens doors as His guiding method. The bigger the dream, the nobler the goal, the more difficulties there will be, that is a law of life. Our awareness of that law is what keeps many from pursuing big goals and dreams, they don’t normally choose to do things that are guaranteed to bring problems into their life, and that choosing to enter the broad and easy door keeps many people poor in real and significant accomplishments in their life. Some day they will stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ and receive very few rewards from the Lord for the life they have lived.

So, I have mentally gone over every reason that I can think of for not accomplishing my goal of climbing to the top of Mt Adams, and I have established a plan and strategy to compensate for those reasons. If I fail to summit Mt Adams next year, it will probably be because I did a poor job of following my plan and strategy for success. Still, my level of motivation to succeed is high enough, I think, to overcome my natural apathy and laziness regarding the physical conditioning that I will need to do. We will see.

Friday three other guys joined me and we drove up to the starting point of climbing Mt Adams and we climbed it up to the 10,000 ft level carrying fairly heavy packs on our backs with tents, sleeping bags, and food. We pitched our tents and slept on the mountain last night and got up very early this morning to climb the remaining 3,000 feet to the top of the mountain. The other three guys with me all made it to the top, but I did not. About a 1,000 feet from the top I simply ran out of gas. On the ride home I began thinking of things to do and change so that I could make it next year. I heard that some old guys use little oxygen bottles to help out at the high altitudes where lack of oxygen is certainly an issue, I could try that. I could do some running in training for the climb instead of just bicycle riding. I could buy a super lightweight tent and sleeping bag so my pack wouldn’t be as heavy. I could plan on staying two nights on the mountain instead of just one, because the decision to turn around before reaching the top was influenced by the thought that I still had to take down my tent, pack my back pack and carry it off of the mountain. Then a thought popped into my mind, “is all that really worth getting to the top of Mt Adams one more time?” “Maybe you should just rejoice over the times you have made it to the top and consider that a chapter in your life that has passed.” Taking risks and doing hard things has been one of the goals of my life, but not just for the sake of saying I did a hard thing, but for the purpose of accomplishing something worthwhile while accomplishing the hard thing. The main goal of climbing Mt Adams in the past was to do something that required a great deal of will power to accomplish. Many of the barriers to summiting Adams are mental so overcoming and conquering those mental barriers was great training to accomplishing other things with my life that had very eternal significance. One of the things I need to consider as I contemplate retiring from climbing Mt Adams is the bad habit that many have of justifying and excusing failures of accomplishing something that is hard and difficult. I don’t want to do that. There certainly is wisdom required to being balanced in life as choices are made. Another added component is that I will be another year older and another year wimpier. I am going to start writing my goals for next year in a couple of months, we will see what happens.

I wrote in my blog yesterday that if you had enough wisdom you would have a powerful sense of discernment and you would know when something you hear or read is off base. It is becoming increasingly important that those who follow Jesus have great wisdom. Her is a short excerpt form a book I am reading ”The Manipulators: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives” by Peter Hasson.

Facebook wields enormous power over its users and has no qualms about exercising it. The tech giant collaborated with academics from Cornell and the University of California San Francisco to conduct experiments on the effects that tweaks to its News Feed algorithm had on users’ emotional states. The kicker: Facebook used its customers as guinea pigs in the experiment without their knowledge. In the experiment, which involved a jaw-dropping 689,000 users, Facebook manipulated individuals’ newsfeeds by increasing the share of positive material presented to some users and increasing the share of negative material to other users. In other words, Facebook tested its societal influence by tampering with the emotional states of private citizens without their consent. Facebook’s willingness to manipulate its users’ emotions—and its willingness to study the best way to do so—is important to keep in mind as the company pledges to manipulate America out of political polarization. Facebook has a history of quietly exerting its power to influence political opinions in America without its users’ knowledge. When the Black Lives Matter movement was still in its infantstage the Facebook employees who oversaw the company’s “trending topics” section received an order: push Black Lives Matter, and they did, and the rest is history.