Several weeks ago I heard that someone in our church had major surgery, and because he couldn’t work as he was healing up he lost his job, and then with no income had their car repossessed. When I heard this I thought of the car we had that was an extra one that someone had given to us. We hadn’t driven it for a year because the starter had gone out and I hadn’t taken the time to replace it. I replaced the starter, had a friend fix a window that wouldn’t go up, put a new headlight bulb in, washed it and then waxed it and buffed it, cleaned up the inside, and did a dozen other little things to it. They came and got it this afternoon, and as they were driving out our drive way I remembered the verse in the Bible that Jesus quoted. He said, it is more blessed to give than to receive, meaning, you will get way more joy from giving a car away to someone who needs it then you will have if someone gives you a car.

Pastor  Mike Dedera preached on love this weekend at Jefferson Baptist Church. The gist of the message was that love is a commitment we make before it is an emotion we feel. The greatest commandment in the Bible is to love. The point is that it is a commandment that we choose to obey, or choose to disobey. Those who fall in and out of love will mess up their lives and the lives of others around them. Love is patient by choice, love is kind by choice, love does not take into account a wrong suffered by choice, and love puts the other person first by choice. We choose to love our husband or wife, we choose to love those we like, we choose to love our enemies, and we choose to love the really difficult to love. The result of choosing to love by choice, by commitment instead of following our emotions is that we have good marriages, we have unified families, we have healthy relationships that bring great joy into our lives.

We have physical bodies that we try to take care of so that we will have good health and won’t get sick. We also have a soul, our inner person, the real us, and we can have a healthy soul or a sick soul. When we choose to love those around us our soul becomes healthy and strong, resulting in joy, peace, confidence, freedom from fear, strong self worth, and a deep contentment.

When we choose to hate people, to be bitter towards them, to slander them, to refuse to help them, to wish the worst for them, and to rejoice when they suffer or fail, we cause our own souls to be sick and weak. It is funny, though I guess funny is a poor choice of words here, that those who hate somehow think that they are changing things or making people pay, but the only one that pays is themselves.

Truman was President when I was born. I don’t remember him except that my Dad liked him, and compared every President after that to him. I remember quite a bit about Eisenhower, and I was a Freshman in High school when Kennedy was assassinated. I was in Mr. Berkeley’s geometry class when we heard the news. Of all our Presidents Obama was my least favorite. I was so sad when he was elected for a second term. But I faithfully prayed for him every week, and asked God to bless him, to fill him with a knowledge of His will, to protect him from evil, and to give him great wisdom as he led our country. I refused to make jokes about him that were dishonoring or to enter into discussions that were not honoring of him as our president, no matter how much I disagreed with his decisions. I voted for President Trump, but if Hilary Clinton had been elected I would have made the same commitment in regards to her. The reason is because I believe in God, and I believe that He is a sovereign God, that is, He is in charge of everything, every detail, even the smallest, most insignificant. I often don’t understand God and what He is doing, but He is not required to explain Himself to me, He is God and I am not.  I also believe He has communicated clearly His will for me, and how I am supposed to act. I can’t dictate that to others, but I am committed to loving God with all my heart, serving Him with all my strength, and obeying Him in every detail of my life. He has said to honor our rulers, to pray for them, and to trust God. I choose to do that, and a blessing that I have from Him because I trust Him and work at obeying Him is great peace and joy.

We basically are the sum of the choices that we have made over our lifetime. Wisdom is when we choose to do those things that move us toward good character growth, and a growing relationship  with Jesus and others, and significant accomplishments in our life.  There are millions of choices in our lives, and the number is growing everyday. It can be very overwhelming as we try and figure out what is best for our life. Here are a half dozen guidelines that I have used for a number of years in the choosing process in my life. I actually started making this list way back in 1976 when I was struggling with whether I should stay on the dairy or become a pastor.

(1) Ask God for His wisdom and guidance every morning before you start the day. God loves to give His wisdom to those who ask for it.

(2) take some time and think through what your values and priorities in life are. The goal here is to greatly simplify your life and reduce the number of choices that pop up in your life everyday. It is like if you lived in the wilderness in a little log cabin all by yourself with a bow and arrows, a knife, and an axe. Most of the choices that you are regularly faced with now would never enter your head. Prune your life as much as possible of low value activity, simplify, simplify, simplify and the number of choices will drop off tremendously. spend your time doing the things that result in significant accomplishment.

(3) Don’t make important choices until you have to so you can think, get counsel, and ponder on the results of the various choices once made, but when it is time make the choice decisively, don’t procrastinate.

(4) Get as much counsel as time allows from the wisest, most experienced people you know. Our pride often keeps us from this, but this principle is the bulk of what the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is teaching.  The basic message of Proverbs is, the more counsel you get the less apt you are to make a poor choice.

(5) we are all asked to make many choices that are unimportant, that is it really doesn’t matter much which way we choose. Give those choices away to others. We all tend to be control freaks by nature, that is we want to decide about everything for ourselves and others. Train yourself to stop that by giving most of your choices away. Ask the waiter what he recommends on the menu and go with it. Ask your wife what would be good for you to wear to church. Choosing is very tiring so eliminate all choices from your life but the very important ones, and you will have the mental and emotional energy left to think clearly.

(6) If you make a bad choice and you know it, think about what you should have done and why, think about what prompted you to make the wrong choice, make whatever restitution may be required because of the consequence of the wrong choice, and then forget about it. You can’t literally forget about it but you can choose not to dwell on it and replay it in your mind over and over again.

I have three gas tanks in my physical body, my physical energy gas tank, my emotional energy gas tank, and my mental energy gas tank. If any one of those three run out of gas I don’t do very well. I have learned how to read the gas gauges of my body to tell when any one of those three gas tanks is getting down to quarter full, and I have learned how to fill them up again fairly rapidly. That is a skill that many have never learned, and they pay the price. The basic way of filling our gas tanks is to rest. That rest can be sleep, recreation, hobbies, fellowship, solitude, and travel.

When I used to run marathons I discovered that if I would run 10 minutes and walk 1 minute I would finish the race faster than if I ran the whole thing. On our cross country bicycle trips across the USA to the Atlantic Ocean where we averaged 70 miles every day for 60 days we would take a short stand up break every 5 miles. We would stand over our bike and drink a bit of water, take a picture of the scenery, talk for a minute and then off we would go. Every 10 miles we would lean the bicycle up on a post and walk around a bit, drink some water, eat some trail mix, look at our maps, and chat about how things were going. We would take a full hour break at noon and take a day off every 7 days.

I have been teaching at our annual seminar the last three days, and now Patty and I are over at the coast in a nice motel for three days resting up. I am looking forward to getting back at it this weekend, and I will do it with three full gas tanks.

Jesus said that God the father was glorified when we bear fruit. He said if we do not bear fruit we are worthless. Also if we do bear some fruit God will work with us, nurture us, strengthen us, equip us, and provide the resources so that we can bear more fruit. Fruit is the good changes, the growth, and the character that happens in other people’s lives because of our influence.  Bearing fruit becomes very addicting. It feels so good to know that you have influenced another person to grow, change, choose for the better in their life.

This past two days I have been teaching about 150 people who have come from various places, some as far away as Los Angeles about prayer, how to increase the amount of prayer in their life, how to motivate others to pray, and the power of prayer to change other people in their life.

Prayer is the mightiest force on earth and when people pray their marriages improve, their kids improve, their health improves, their joy goes up, and they change things in their own  life.

It is Patty’s Birthday today. We went to the Olive Garden today after church and celebrated. She is the world’s all time best wife ever. Wednesday after I get done teaching in the seminar we are doing at our church we are headed over to the “Inn of he Spanish Head” for a little down time. I look forward to many more years with this wonderful life partner.

A psychological principle is that making decisions takes huge amounts of mental energy, and after making a number of decisions our ability to make good and wise decisions goes down. It is called “decision fatigue”.  In our culture today there are more decisions to be made on a daily basis than there ever have been, as a result many people are suffering from this “decision fatigue”. One of the things I have done is sit down and make as many decisions as I can think of that will be coming up in my life in the days ahead. Because this is premeditated decision making there is little pressure, therefore low energy loss, and I can intelligently pray about each decision asking for God’s wisdom, guidance and energy. These decisions tend to be ones that are repeated over and over so I have to be disciplined not to revisit the decision but to go with my commitment, which is what a decision becomes if you decide to stick with it every time it comes up. An example in my life is I used to get phone calls or letters from other churches who were without a pastor asking me if I would consider coming to be their pastor. The first couple times it happened I went through this agonizing time of trying to decide what to do. After the second time I made the decision at a 4 day prayer retreat that I was going to stay at JBC until I died. After that I never went back and revisited that decision, it was a commitment. Now I am so old I don’t get those calls and letters any more.

Related to that is the fact that many worry about upcoming decisions and what they are going to do, but it never happens, so there was “decision fatigue” over a decision that didn’t even need to be made. I have another commitment that I don’t make a decision for the future unless I am absolutely sure it will need to be made. There are few things worse than wasting energy on a decision that doesn’t need to be made.

Some people live their life in such a way that they leave a big wake behind them, that is they accomplish significant things with their life that changes people and things, they make a difference, a good difference. Why do some do this and many others do not. Let me suggest some reasons why some “bear much fruit”, while most others just mow their lawn, feed the cat, take out garbage, and wash their car.

(1) Those who do something significant with their life do so because they want to. This isn’t a casual, it would be nice if I could, passing thought, kind of want, it is an obsession, a very strong desire, a consuming drive and vision for a better tomorrow that they want to make happen. This “want to” is usually caught like a cold from someone who has it. If you know that you are a lukewarm person, look around and find a hot person and hang around with them.

(2). Those who make things happen do so because they choose to with courage and conviction. People don’t live lives of significance by accident, they make choices that open up doors of opportunity to influence their world. Most of those proactive choices have an element of risk involved even if it is as simple as the risk to be thought weird. Most people play it safe and avoid any risk so the default setting for their life is mediocrity.

(3) Often the reason for the shift from being a “do nothing”, mediocre, “play it safe” kind of person to a “change agent” is because of the growing boredom, frustration, depression, and an increasing sense of worthlessness that a mediocre lifestyle produces. Some to be sure get comfortable with a boring, insignificant life and stay there until they die. But God created us for accomplishment, for “fruit bearing”, and has assigned to each of us  uniquely “much work” to be done for Him.  God has put desire in us, and for it not to motivate us we must resist it.

I pray for every person in our church by name every week, and one of my prayer requests for many is that God will increase the desire in their life and that they will become hot.

I use the term “wake” to refer to the influence of our life in the lives of others over the years that we have lived. Some people have a big “wake” and some have none, at least not a positive one.  When I was about 13 years old I went to Summer Bible Camp which I usually did, and the counselor for our cabin of about 10 boys was a young man named Mr. Titus.  He was single, never married, and sold insurance for a living, and he loved working with Junior High Boys. He had brought to camp a box of leather bound Bibles, and every day during devotions he would tell us how important it was to read our Bibles, every day, every day, every day, and that we should make a goal to read the Bible through every year of our lives. After every one of his devotions he would make us an offer of one of the Bible’s he had brought with him if we would promise him that we would read it through the next year. It seemed like a daunting task to me so I didn’t jump at the chance for a nice, new, leather, obviously expensive Bible until the last day of camp when I agreed to read it through in the next year. I did read it through, and I have read the Bible at least once each year since that year at Bible camp. As a pastor I have taught, reminded, persuaded, and nagged people to read their Bibles every day, every day, every day for years and very many have and do faithfully. I think someday Mr. Titus is going to be standing before Jesus and he will be surprised at how many people have read their Bibles because of his influence, that is a wake.