For me personally the thing I desire more than anything else is God’s strength. God is powerful, infinitely so, and He loves to give His strength to people who seek it, and declare that apart from Him they can do nothing.

If you read the Bible through and while doing so you highlight every prayer that you read with blue crayon. Then when you finish go back and read all of the blue highlighted verses and ask the question, “what is being prayed for?” You will find that the prayer for strength is the most often prayed prayer. It seems that God is sending a message, “I am God, I am all-powerful, and I give my power to those who ask for it, and the more you ask the more I give.”

Every morning I ask God for His strength and I also ask for His wisdom, He promises to give both to those who are humble and ask because they know that they need them. and with those two they can conquer anything. Wisdom is knowing what to do and say in any situation God sovereignly puts us in.

Patty and I were married on August 24th, 1969. I was 20 years old and Patty was 21. It seems like just yesterday, but it also seems like a loooong time ago, so much has happened! The Bible says “the two shall be one.” I can’t imagine being any more one than we are. We are total opposites in every way but it is like we have the same brain. God has blessed our marriage, our family, our ministry. Life has been full of challenges, disappointments, and trials, but they seem so trivial amid all the blessings. The key thing in our marriage is that every decision, big and very small, has been in pursuit of God’s will and serving Him. We are a team not seeking the good life but seeking to please our creator, our Savior, and our Lord, and it has turned into the good life. Over the years the more we have made everything about serving Him the closer we have become. At this point our relationship seems so natural, intuitive, like flying.

People are regularly rude to me. They don’t talk to me, make eye contact with me, or in any way acknowledge my presence. Why would they do that? Most of the time it is because they know that I am a pastor and they are intimated by what I believe and teach even though they may never have listened to me, or they are opposed or disagree with what I would believe to be true. At times it is because I am conservative politically, and that leaks out. Occasionally it is another believer who has gotten upset at me for something I have said or done. Sometimes people are mad at God and I become the lightening rod, as it were. The Bible is very clear on this point, we are commanded to honor every person, to be kind, gracious, and nice.

One of my memory verses is 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?

When someone is giving me the cold shoulder I wonder what they are thinking, and what their goal is with such behavior. I personally work very hard not to treat anyone with any less respect than I would treat one of my own kids, and with difficult people going out of my way to say Hi and chat for a minute. I want to be a man that loves kindness, and goes the second mile. God blesses those who are nice to difficult people.

How can a person say “I love You, Jesus.” You can’t see Jesus, you can’t hear Him like your wife or husband, so if you say that you love Jesus, what do you mean? How can you measure that? Isn’t that just a statement that people make, but has no substance to it. It is difficult to discuss this because everything that is used as proof by most people is inside feelings and emotions that can’t really be weighed or counted.

Don’t get me wrong, I say, “I love You Jesus” a lot, all the time. It is very important that we love God, it is the foremost commandment in the Bible. In fact when we define what a Christian is using the Bible as our authority the only definition that really works is “a Christian is someone who loves Jesus.”

John 14:23 Jesus said, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.”

1 Corinthians 16:22 If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed.

It is so important that we genuinely love the Lord, not just say, “ I love you” with little understanding if we really do or not. It has been my observation that many people who are quick to say, “ I love You, Jesus,” have been trained to say it by their church, by the words in our worship songs and the “church language culture,” we want to fit in and appear spiritual so we talk the talk. It is incredibly easy to become self-decieved.

My love for my wife can be measured by what I do for her, how I treat her, the sacrifices that I make in order to make her happy. What I feel doesn’t really matter, it is what I do that matters.

The church is called “The Bride of Christ,” “The Body of Christ.” “The Body of Christ,” is used over a dozen times in the New Testament, and it means, “The body which is Christ.” Jesus Christ is manifesting His presence in the world through the church.

I state my love and commitment for Jesus this way; “My love for my church is my love for Jesus, my commitment to my church is my commitment to Jesus.” I can see by my actions my level of love, I am not guessing or being deceived by words only.

It is easy to see from Revelation 2 and 3, and from life that there are many unhealthy churches, liberal churches, so it is very important that we find a good church and love them, serve them, learn from them, worship Jesus with them. I love You, Jesus, with all my heart.

When we were raising our eight kids, and now with 27 grandkids, we often heard them say, “I can’t wait.” They could wait because they usually had no choice, but they were expressing their excitement and great anticipation for a particular event. I am often in the same state of mind; two months before I was scheduled to head to Alaska for salmon fishing I could hardly think of anything else, and now with archery season just a week away, whoooeeee, I can hardly wait.

But the most anticipated event in my life is the return of Jesus or my death, both of which will result in me being in heaven with Jesus. As 1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him.”

Hebrews 9:28 so Christ. . . will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.

Philippians 3:20-21 For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.

I am “eagerly awaiting” my departure from this life to the next. Many are fearful of their impending death, I am anticipating it eagerly. While I am here on this earth, I will live my life to the fullest, accomplishing as much as I possibly can, growing in character as much as I possibly can, but every day I think about this perhaps being the day that I cross the finish line, I can hardly wait.

One of the common statements by older people is that they forgot. Senility, dementia and Alzheimer’s are words that are common to old age. As we age, our body doesn’t function as well as it used to, including our brain.

I want to get wiser as I get older. I want my brain to function at an optimal level. I want to remember, to think logically, clearly, to have great understanding and knowledge. Anybody can do the research on how to stay mentally sharp, but our minds our like our muscles, work them hard, regularly and they stay strong, be lazy and they get weak quickly.

I have a plan, a strategy to keep my brain strong, I am reading good, intellectually challenging books regularly. My goal is to read 50 pages a week. That isn’t a lot but it does seem to keep my mind thinking about stuff logically. I am also writing at least 300 words daily in my blog. Writing well takes a lot of thought and it is great exercise for my brain. I am also memorizing Bible verses and meditating on them. My goal is to spend 30 minutes every day reviewing old verses and learning new verses. I just finished memorizing the book of Philippians and am working on the book of Colossians. The Bible is the Word of God, the very mind of Jesus Christ, so it isn’t just the exercise of memorizing that is good, but the supernatural power of God’s Word in my brain doing it’s work.

1 Corinthians 9:26 Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air;

Archery season opens August 24th and I have been practicing with my bow quite a lot this last month. I try to shoot ten arrows ten times every day. One of my main goals in my practicing is to have a smooth release and not a jerky one. Even a small jerk when releasing the arrow can mean a miss even at a short distance and for sure at distances over 30 yards.

One of the problems I have with my Parkinson’s is the disconnect between my brain and my muscles. So when my brain says squeeze slowly my muscles will jerk violently and I put another hole in the side of my shop. So I have been shooting over and over at very short distances so as not to put another hole in my shop and ruin another arrow. The repetition is helping a lot, but the main thing is I need to focus intently on the bullseye and my trigger finger. The more I focus the better I do, and the more I practice the more focused I become.

One of the descriptions my Dad would use for people that didn’t do very well in life was “scatter brain.” That is a person who can’t seem to keep their eye on the finish line and as a result they are not very faithful, consistent, or reliable.

A key reason I am such a strong believer in personal goals is that they become the bullseye on my targetS in life. The more I review and strategize about my goals the more focused I become on them and the more success I will have in accomplishing them.

A waitress comes to our table and asks us, “ what do want?” After looking at the menu I decided that I wanted “fish and chips.” In life, what do I want, what are my strongest desires in life. If I had a vision in the middle of the night like Solomon had what would be my answer to that question, “what do you want?”

I think my answer is, “I want to be as holy, righteous, and perfect as Jesus was as a man.” I know that I am growing towards that, and I am now expected to pursue holiness and righteousness, but if I were there now it seems like I could do a bunch more ministry for the lord.

Regardless if it happens now or the last thing in my life, it is still the strongest desire in my life. Growth in righteousness causes the most personal excitement and sense of accomplishment in me of all the things I pursue, and not much else makes me feel like dirt as much as messing up living my life as an ambassador for Jesus.

I want my desire for purity to stay white hot so it is important that I don’t excuse any failures on my part and that I read the Bible every day.

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Don’t eat sugar. Don’t eat anything with processed wheat in it. Don’t eat more calories than I burn. Ride 30 minutes minimum on my stationary bike every night. Run/walk on my tread mill at least 30 minutes every day. Lift weights for one hour, three times each week. Read the Bible for 30 minutes every day. Work on my Bible memory program 30 minutes every day. Spend 30 minutes minimum with God in private prayer every day. Read in a good book for 30 minutes every day. Pray with Patty ten minutes, three times each week, write in my blog for one hour each day. Listen to a sermon or lecture via podcast for 30 minutes every day while bike riding or running. That is a total of about 4 and a half hours of disciplined practice every day. Those numbers are my goals, but I have successfully done all of them probably once in my lifetime. The rest of the days I get anywhere from none to most accomplished. The days that I don’t do well is usually because of a competing activity such as fishing. Every night when I write down my successes and failures, I scold myself, encourage myself, and reward myself accordingly. I have been doing this for quite a few years, and over those years have slowly, very slowly gotten more and more self-controlled. My main Bible passage is 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, and the phrase that I want to be true of me is “I discipline my body and make it my slave.” I teach this in my leadership classes and have those in the class that get almost all of the disciplines done and many who struggle a lot to get any done. These disciplines are like the practice that a piano player does each day. The more and the better they practice the better they play the piano and the more people will listen to their playing. The more we faithfully do the spiritual disciplines the better we will do living the Christian life and the more people will listen to us. One of the major keys to success is being part of an accountability group where each member encourages the others in the group and prays for their growing success.

God gives strength, self-control, and willpower, but He doesn’t give it to those who make little effort to grow, to those who do not press on to maturity.