It is Sunday night, and as is normal on Sunday night I am so dead dog tired. But I will still choose to be kind, gracious, pleasant, and loving to the people who are in my life on this night, even though I am so tired I can hardly see straight. I will choose to be nice, patient, and lovable in spite of my weariness because I can, God gave me the strength to make such choices so I will. I will choose and work hard to be the most pleasant person you have ever met in spite of the very busy and draining day, because it is the right thing to do. When I am as tired as I am tonight it seems like it takes a major effort just to hold my head up, but I will choose to listen attentively when Patty talks and I will smile and will offer intelligent response to her words to me. I will do this because I love her and want to communicate to her how much I love her, and because I can, I am able.

I am so stinking tired tonight, it is a bummer to get old. But, though I would very much like to skip, just for tonight, I am going to get on my stationary bike and ride as fast as I can for an hour. If I don’t the next time will so much easier to skip, and then before I know it I am a wimp. As I think about tomorrow a thought pops into my head, “You are very tired, sleep in tomorrow” my response to the demon who is talking to me, “I will sleep in when I get to heaven and you are cooking in the lake of fire”. Tomorrow is going to be a very busy day, and I am going to choose to work hard, I can do that and I will.

Patty and I have been at Odell Lake Lodge the last couple of days with 20 couples from Jefferson Baptist Church at our annual marriage retreat. This is the third year in a row of us doing this event here, and it has become one of my favorite events of the year. I enjoy it so much because it is so fun to get to know people beyond the normal “Hi, how are you” which is the case with so many people at JBC that I see at regular services, but don’t get to spend much time with. Here we work on our marriages together, eat together, play games together, talk about our lives and challenges together, and laugh together. It really is a great time, and we are going to have 2 more of them in the weekends ahead that Patty and I get to attend together as the teachers. It is very rewarding to be a couple months away from our 50th wedding anniversary and be able to teach what we have experienced and learned together on how to have a great marriage. In dealing with life and all the pressures, responsibilities, and disappointments that are almost a daily part of life, a great marriage is such a major gift and strength to face life and stay full of joy and peace. Almost anybody can have a great marriage if they are willing to work hard on it.

The failure to forgive anybody of anything is probably the biggest problem that most people have, and brings the greatest consequences into their life of anything that they do. Matthew 6:14-15 says, “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” That is a pretty black and white statement. Have you ever thought of all the consequences that will come into your life if God doesn’t forgive you of your sins, there are many and they are significant. If God doesn’t forgive you of your sins, He won’t answer your prayers, He won’t even listen to your prayers. If God doesn’t forgive you of your sins you will have little energy, you will be tired all the time, you will have no joy, and you will have a growing despondency. If God doesn’t forgive you of your sins He gives demons permission to make your life as miserable as they possibly can, and they have had a lot of years practicing on that fine art of theirs. And the list goes on, there are at least 30 different consequences that come into the life of the person who chooses not to forgive anybody of anything no matter how bad it might be, no matter how many times they have done it.

In our warped reasoning we think that we are punishing people for what they did or said by choosing not to forgive them. They don’t pay any price for our choosing not to forgive them, but we pay an awful price. Or we think that if we forgive them we are saying that what they did was no big deal. What we are saying is that my sins were a very big deal to God because He is holy, and just, and God, and He died for my sins so that I could be forgiven. He freely forgave me, and He asks us to forgive anybody else in the same way we have been forgiven.

Some have said, I can forgive, I just can’t forget. Every time you have a thought about what someone did to you, forgive them again, and again whenever a thought pops into your head. If you faithfully do that it won’t be that long before it is gone, God will see to that as you faithfully forgive every time you remember.

Bitterness is a poison and it will destroy you.

This is one of my favorite stories!

When I was a kid growing up on the dairy, occasionally we would have a cow die. We used to drag them out to a big rocky area and between the coyotes, the magpies, and the vultures they would soon just be a pile of bones. With the occasional addition of another cow to the rock pile, the pile of bones grew, and we gave it the name, “the bone yard”. It was about 400 yards to the bone yard from the back porch of our house, and we had one of our deer rifles sighted in at 400 yards, and we were able to get a coyote occasionally, and a bounty that went with the coyote. Then the inevitable came, the government said that leaving dead cows on the rock pile would pollute the world and that we needed to bury the cows. It was a very, long and hard job, but someone had to bury the cow whenever one died. We didn’t have a back hoe so we had to dig the grave with a shovel. So a key question comes up right about now, “how deep does a boy dig a grave for a cow?”, and the answer is, “just deep enough”. Several months after burying a cow, I was walking through one of our fields and I walked over the grave that I had dug. I fell through the small layer of dirt that had covered the cow into the grave. The cow had rotted away leaving the space taken up by the cow empty except for a couple feet of “soup” totally loaded with maggots. When I fell into the “soup” that the cow was reduced to, the smell totally overwhelmed me, and I was sure I had fallen right into hell! I managed to crawl out of the hole and escape from hell, but the “soup” had gone over the top of my rubber boots and filled them up. When I got back to the house my Mom wouldn’t let me into the house until I had taken off my boots, and pants and hosed off all residue of that rotten cow. After that experience I dug the future cow graves a little bit deeper.

It is funny how you can get hooked on certain activities almost like a drug. I have been spending an hour every day since the election reading the news. I have 5 different news apps that I read every day. I have realized in the past that this is not only wasting a lot of time, but it tends to make me irritated at what I read and watch and I carry that irritation into my day and my relationshipS. Today I made a commitment and a goal that I would not spend more than 15 minutes each day reading or watching the news. I have a stop watch as an app on my iPad and every time I start reading a news site I will hit that watch and when I am done reading I will record the time, and when I hit 15 minutes I am done for that day. I hate being controlled by anything other than God, but it seems that that I just rotate through the long list of activities that control my life periodically. Once I decide to quite it doesn’t take long to conquer, so it is strange that sometimes I am slow to have the desire to manage this activity. One of my life purpose statements is to seek to please the Lord with all that I do, and it is this particular purpose statement that motivated me to manage my life and my time.

Today I had a nice surprise, Saah Joseph called me from Liberia and we chatted for awhile. He is a Senator now so he is the Honorable Saah Joseph, but he still calls me Dad. I met Saah in 2002 when I made my first trip to Sierra Leone, and JBC officially started our ministry in the country by starting two churches and two schools. Since then I have made 22 trips to Sierra Leone, and we have started many more churches, schools, an orphanage, a Bible College, and a couple of well drilling companies. I gave up my role in our ministry there several years ago to younger guys as the 24 hour trips, time difference, and heat and humidity wore me out to much when I went over there. Saah said on the phone, “do you remember that first trip we did together driving across Sierra Leone” I told him that it was one of the most memorable events in my life, and he suggested that I make one more trip over and the two of us could drive all over Sierra Leone and visit all the churches. I told him that I would do one more trip for that experience with him. I don’t know if any thing will come of the conversation we had, but it was fun to remember with him those early days of ministry in a West Africa right after the war there was over.

Sierra Leone is one of those areas of my life that was and is a total God thing. I had no plans or dreams of going to Africa for any reason, but a series of events unfolded seemingly by chance that resulted in a major ministry in this country that I had trouble spelling right. One of my personal motto statements is, ” God leads and I will follow”. Most of the time I don’t know where the adventure will end, but I follow to the best of my ability.

We all have values. Different things in our life have value or worth to us. The easiest way to picture it is simply to say that everything in our life, people, activities, things, possessions, and God are all ranked in our mind, the thing that we give the greatest value to is first all the way down to that which is dead last. We don’t usually formally rank them, we just make choices in life based on this personal subconscious value system. God expects that He is going to be first place in our life, but very few people have Him first, most not even 2nd or 3rd. Most live their life acknowledging God, but basically forgetting about Him in the midst of the business of life. God knows everything about us, and He has this to say to those who don’t have Him as number one in their life in Psalms 50:22 “Now consider this, you who forget God, or I will tear you in pieces, and there will be none to deliver.” I don’t think God often literally tears people in pieces, but I do think that He makes the things that we value ahead of Him disappear, and life goes from bad to worse. Many people have very little joy in their life, they have lots of anxiety, many of their relationships are full of conflict, they are unmotivated, and they live life in a state of confusion. There is no one to blame for this sad state of affairs, but themselves. When God is first place in our life, He blesses us, when He isn’t first place in our lives He doesn’t bless us. It takes constant self-examination, and vigilance to keep Him first, but that is where He ought to be, He is God, our creator, our savior.

One of my favorite basketball teams over the last 40 years is Duke University, the Blue Devils, coached by My Mike Krzyzewski. It probably isn’t a mystery why they are one of my favorites, I just like the name of the school. 😀 They lost yesterday by 1 point to Michigan State, having reached the “Elite Eight” with their goal being the National Championship. I wonder what the team is thinking and feeling today, especially any of the players who made mistakes or didn’t play up to their potential. Coach Krzyzewski is 72 years old, one year older than I am, not many years left to win another National Championship. The bulk of his starters were Freshman and will most likely enter the NBA and be done with college basketball. The pain and disappointment of losing or failing to accomplish the goal or reach the goal is the number one reason people don’t set goals. In our subconscious mind we decide that it is more comfortable not having goals that can potentially make us feel like losers if we don’t accomplish them. All kinds of reasons are given, some even sound very spiritual, like “I am going to just trust God for whatever He wants to give me”, but the real reason is the fear of failure and the pain and disappointment that failure brings. A main reason for mediocrity in life is the failure to set goals. Goals motivate us, they cause us to focus, they elicit cooperation from others who can help us accomplish our goals, and on the flip side of losing, there isn’t much that satisfies as the accomplishment of a meaningful goal. I set a lot of goals every year, some fairly simple, like “build a 10 foot pram boat”, but others are much more significant, like “start 2 satellite churches” this year as we pursue the goal of becoming a “multi-site” church. As I get older the natural desire is to slow down, take it easy, and sleep more grows stronger in me. I use the goals that I choose to set as a motivator and gas pedal in my life so that though my flesh wants to slow down, my heart wants to speed up. Whenever I get to feeling a bit “sluggish”, I read my goals and then off I go.

I leave on a 2,000 mile bicycle trip to Glacier National Park on June 3rd and get back July 3rd. Now as we come into April we have just 2 months until we leave. There are so many things that I need to get done that it is easy to get overwhelmed and to think, ” there is no way on God’s green earth I can get all that done before June 3rd”!! We all have those kinds of situations in our life. Some people will get every thing done but most will not even get close to completing the required list. The key difference between these two groups of people is how they think. The ones who will get everything done that is on the list think in a disciplined way, and those who won’t get everything done think in an undisciplined and reactive way. The undisciplined thinkers will dwell on the impossibility of the task, they will think thoughts on how tired they are, how busy they are, and how stressed they are. Our self talk is a fundamental key to success or failure in life.

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In conversations with people who have little to no faith in Jesus as their savior, one of the reoccurring reasons that is given by them is that there is no real evidence that what I believe in, is really true. I respond by saying, that is super, now you can have faith because Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” “Not seen” means, no evidence for. If there is hard evidence faith is not required, and Hebrews 11:6 says,”without faith it is impossible to please a God”. When we choose to believe and trust in God because of the awareness of God that He has put in every person He will honor that faith by increasing it in us, and we will know and believe without a doubt. It isn’t our reasoning or intellect that brings us to God, it is faith, the conviction of things not seen. 1 Corinthians 1:21 says, ” in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God”.

The nation of Israel had as much evidence of God as a group of people can have when they were led out of Egypt by Moses witnessing miracle after miracle, and then in Exodus 19:9-11, it says, “The Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will come to you in a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you…for on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.”

So all the people saw the Red Sea opened up so they could cross on dry ground, they witnessed all the plaques of God against the Egyptians while they were spared, and then at Mt Sinai they heard God speak and saw Him or a symbol of Him like a fire or bright cloud. But even with all that evidence all of them failed to follow and believe in the promises of God except for Caleb and Joshua. Jesus tells a parable in which He says, “If people won’t believe because of what is written in God’s Word, they won’t believe even if someone were miraculously raised from the dead”.

Choose to believe what the Bible says, and God will cause that little faith to grow and then do something that requires faith and He will grow it some more, and before long you will be moving mountains.