Jesus said to take the log out of my own eye before I attempt to take a splinter out of someone else’s eye. If I am going to try and get something out of my own eye I will use a mirror, otherwise it will be very difficult. We understand that Jesus is talking about our faults, character flaws, weaknesses, and sin habits. Self examination and reflecting on who we are and how we can grow and improve is important. The main area of my life that I think about in trying to discern my weaknesses is in my relationships. How am I doing with others in treating them well, loving them, encouraging them, appreciating them, forgiving them quickly of anything, speaking grace into their life, holding them accountable in a way that is accepted and motivates, and being a friend. Most followers of Jesus spend very little time thinking and reflecting on their life, and how they can grow and improve. Many avoid the discipline because they tend to condemn themselves and feel badly about who they are. Many others have justified, and excused their flaws, and blamed them on others to the point that they have become blinded to their own weaknesses. If I hunger and thirst after maturity and growth, regularly examine my own life, make commitments and goals to improve and grow in the things I see that need fixing, constantly ask the Lord to show me the things in me that need work, and then call on Him for the grace to grow, the entire experience is one that gives me hope and confidence that I indeed can change and that I can be used by God to help others change. One of the best results of this process of taking logs out of my own eye is that my relationship with other people grows. But it all begins with the daily discipline of examining my own life, knowing that I have faults, blind spots, and character flaws, and wanting to grow past them in order to be pleasing to the Lord and useful to Him to help others.

I believe that God created everything in the universe, He thought up the design, the shape, and how everything fits and works together. Even a cursory study of science, astronomy, and geography will reveal incredible complexity and creativity in all that we see and often take for granted. The conclusion is that God is amazingly intelligent, in fact we use the term omniscient in describing Him, meaning that His intelligence is infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible. I can’t imagine what it is going to be like to actually communicate with Him when I get to heaven and get my new body and my new mind.

I am created by God in His image and likeness, meaning that in a greatly reduced way I am like God and function best when I function the way He does. I have creativity, I dream about the future, I work at thinking up new ways to do things, new things to do, and different ways to do them. Certain experiences and circumstances sort of push the creativity button in my mind. Monday through Thursday this week I am at the annual meetings for the Conservative Baptist Association of the North West and one of the things that happens at the meetings is preaching and teaching the Bible. The speakers speak specifically to pastors, and the speaker tonight was the new general directory for the Association, and for whatever reason he pushed my button and my mind started going a thousand miles an hour, creating all kinds of new sermon topics, new ways of doing everything in the church, and new adventures. I wrote as fast as I could because when the button is pushed the creative juices only flow for a little bit. But I wrote way more than I have years left to do. I always let new and creative ideas age for awhile and they either get better or die. It is my way of deciding what is God’s will or not. It is fun to be creative, even just on paper, but it is super exciting to put together a new plan or ministry, or sermon series. I look forward to the days ahead to see what will happen.

Ephesians 4:29 Was one of the main verses we used as a goal in our parenting of our kids, “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” The goal was simply, “Talk nice”. We dealt with even minor violations of this family standard, and we used a variety of methods and strategies to reinforce this expected discipline in talking to each other. Though it took time the kids all grew steadily more gracious in their speech to each other. This evening 4 of the 8 of our kids and their spouses and kids came over for dinner at our house. It was so enjoyable listening to the conversation between them all. As I sat listening to the flow of conversation between them all, including the normal banter and kidding, I thought nothing is more necessary for a good positive relationship than the discipline of talking nice. I thought to myself, how sad it is that there are so many grown adults who have not learned this most basic of relational skills.

Ephesians 4:29 is so simple and complete. It ought to be a verse that everyone who wants to improve their relationship with others memorizes and meditates on constantly. “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.”

In my morning prayer of commitment one of the commitments that I make is, “today I will love any person You, Lord sovereignly bring into my life, no matter how difficult they might be to love”. In order to keep that commitment I had to define what that meant to love them, it needed to be more than a nice fuzzy feeling toward them. So I came up with 5 expressions of my love towards them. First my declaration to love the hard to love was that I would not avoid them because they were unpleasant, boring, or irritating, I would give them some time. Second, I would listen attentively as they talked and I would respond and enter into conversation with them. Third, I would honor them as a child of God and I would be nice, gracious, and kind to them. Fourth, I would not gossip or talk unkindly about them to others. And fifth, I will pray for them that God will bless them and use them for His glory. Loving people is such a key part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, but it is easy to love the nice, personable, lovable, and pleasant people, but the real test of my faith and my obedience to Jesus as my Lord is loving the hard to love. I am a long ways from perfect, but I make a daily concerted effort to love everybody that God brings into my life, especially the unlovable. But I see others who are normally good Christians, but with certain people they are rude, grouchy, impatient, and gossip about them. Granted they bring a lot of that onto themselves because of their behavior but those who love the unlovable are special favorites with God.

I wrote this blog 3 years ago, and I thought I would republish it to go along with the blog 2 days ago on deference.

I taught on the character trait of deference in my last leadership class lesson. Deference is putting others ahead of myself. Pretend there was a parking lot with 1,000 cars in it, and the people who drove there and parked them were all going to the same event. The event goes very late and when it is finally over everyone heads for their cars, and the parking lot has just one single lane exit. If Patty and I were there and she was driving we would be the last ones out of the parking lot, because Patty has mastered the character trait of deference. If we weren’t the last ones to leave there would be someone with more deference than Patty, and I doubt that person exists . Deference is also defined as limiting my freedoms, my rights, and my opinions so that I don’t offend another person, who may have different beliefs and opinions. This doesn’t mean that we are weak, in fact those who consistently practice deference are some of the strongest and most confident people there are, because they don’t have to be right to feel good about themselves. Our goal isn’t to be right but to influence people toward faith in Christ. God greatly blesses the person with deference with great authority and many opportunities to make a difference in the lives of people.

One of the 26 character traits that I think I have grown the most in is patience. That is not to say that Patience is a strength, just that I have grown a lot in that area, but I recognize that I still have lots of growing to do. It used to be that when there were relational conflicts around me, either that I was part of or between family, friends, or church people I would come to a conclusion about what the problem was quickly, who was the problem and fix it now or attempt to fix it. I would either apologize, or confront, or teach, or scold, but I would do something in an attempt to create peace and unity. Now I wait longer, pray more, relax and don’t get as uptight in the midst of relational tensions as I used to. It isn’t that I don’t care about unity and peace between myself and others, or in the lives of those around me, it is just that I give things more time for God to work, people to grow, and for me to have more wisdom and insight into the solution. It wasn’t uncommon for me in the past to create more relational problems than I fixed because my initial conclusions were inaccurate and my solutions were impulsive and reactionary. Some of the little “sayings” that I use in my self-talk in this area are, “don’t give God a deadline to change people”, “wisdom is as much about when to do something as it is about what to do”, “if I can wait without things getting to much worse, I will because I will probably gain a whole lot more information, insight, and wisdom if I do”, “If I wait and think about a situation, my part in the conflict will probably accurately grow in my own mind from 5% to 90%, and that will certainly change what I do to fix it, I don’t want to be guilty of attempting to pick a splinter out of someone else’s eye, with a log in my own eye”, “almost everybody is growing, and often conflict will promote growth in those involved, so don’t be to quick to try and take it away”, and one of my favorite verses in the Bible, Proverbs 16:7 “When a man’s ways are pleasing to the Lord, He makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.”

So many people have conflicts with others. Husbands and wives have conflicts, kids and parents hurt and offend each other, and people in the work place are often bickering. Jesus prayed that we would be as unified as He and God the Father were. The Bible is full of guidelines on how to be at peace with everyone in your life. The most important principle is work very hard at it, do the hard things that need to be done to be at peace with those in your life.

Romans 14:19 So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another.

A second principle is to continually practice deference. Deference is a very important character trait that most people don’t have, at least not much. Deference is putting other people and their needs ahead of our own needs. Deference is guarding our mouth so as not to say things that offend other people. Deference is limiting our freedom so as not to be a reason that those around us are hurt. There are certain character traits that especially please God, and deference is right at the top of the list. It takes a lot of work to successfully practice deference, it takes a lot of self sacrifice, a lot of giving, a lot of self-control and a lot of humility to be the one who initiates reconciliation.

I started a program today of trying to gain some more progress with my Parkinson’s using biofeedback. It was very interesting today sitting in a chair with electrodes stuck all over my head watching all these brain waves on a big screen that were coming from my brain. It was even more interesting to see how it all changed when I moved my leg or arm or had one of my Parkinson tremors take place. The fellow I am working with was super nice and seemed very excited about working with me and helping me. This method of dealing with Parkinson’s is brand new and I am being somewhat of a Guinea Pig in this study that I am now a part of. It was quite fascinating listening to the Neurologist explain how my brain worked and see the evidence of it working on the big screen. I thought of the verse in Psalms 139 that says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made by God”

I don’t do very much any more by myself. Life is all about relationships, and relationships are built stronger by time together. I get God’s Grace through others as I spend time with them, and others get God’s Grace from me when I spend time with them. That principle comes right from the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit together, one in essence and purpose, but still three personalities. We are created in God’s image and likeness so together with others is good. Humility is recognizing that I need others to succeed and be truly happy, and pride is saying I can do it by myself.

I wish that I had learned this principle earlier in my life. I spent so much time doing things by myself because I thought I would recover from my weariness from preaching quicker, and that is what I did for years, isolate myself. Now I recognize the truth about myself and how God’s principles really work.

By the way, several have asked about going with me up Mt Adams and my answer is yeh! You can do the Saturday one day climb or you can join me as I climb the mountains in two days.

The goal is to climb Mt Adams on August 8th this year. I climbed it for the first time way back in the summer 1965. Since then I climbed it just about every year up until 2012, and I have not climbed it since. That last time I climbed it was very difficult for me with my Parkinson’s being a big issue, and I decided that I was done climbing. I am not sure why I decided to give it a shot again this year other than stupidity based on forgetting all the issue the last time I climbed. I am going to try something this year that I have never done, and vowed as a young climber that I would never do. I am going to start climbing on Friday instead of Saturday and camp overnight at what is called the “Lunch Counter”, a flat spot about half way up the mountain where there isn’t usually any snow because it all gets blown off. It will require climbing with a back pack with a tent, a warm sleeping bag, some food and water, setting up a little camp, hoping not to freeze to death in the night, finishing the climb on Saturday morning, then breaking camp and coming down. The reason is to give myself more time to climb up and come down than one day allows, also to help get adjusted to the altitude by camping at 10,000 feet. As I said, I have never done this before thinking it wasn’t necessary for real climbers who could easily do it in one day without the hassle of packing up a bunch of stuff on your back then packing it back. The biggest negative is that it gets very cold on Mt Adams at night at 10,000 feet, at least that is what I am told. We will see. It should make for a good blog post anyway.