Proverbs 14:12 There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

I was reading a news commentary and the writer wrote, “Truth is fluid.” That statement is very untrue, but many in today’s culture believe it to be true, which is a perfect illustration of Proverbs 14:12.

At the trial of Jesus by Pontus Pilate he seems frustrated by the fluid truth of his day. John 18:38 Pilate said to Him, “What is truth?”

Truth is absolute with no fluidity whatsoever. God is truth, He communicates truth, He establishes truth, He decides what is true, He enforces truth.

John 14:6 Jesus *said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.

John 8:32 you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

John 17:17
Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.

Read the Bible everyday, it is the source of truth, it is the Word of God.

Proverbs 13:13 The one who despises the word will be in debt to it, But the one who fears the commandment will be rewarded.

What I am doing for a while, anyway, is picking a verse out of the chapter of Proverbs that corresponds with the day of the month. Today is March 13th so I picked a verse from the 13th chapter of Proverbs to write about. The hardest part of writing a daily blog is coming up with a topic, and this should help some. I still have to pick the verse and write the commentary, but this should end the sometimes hours of indecision about what to write about.

The Bible is the living Word of God, and apart from it, we can’t have a relationship with God. We grow in our relationship with God by reading, memorizing, and meditating on His Word. Our flesh is not inclined towards knowing God more or doing His will, so our flesh is constantly pulling us away from faithfully reading, studying, or memorizing it. Our flesh is a significant anchor in our life regarding spiritual goals; it is like trying to run a marathon pushing a wheelbarrow with a hundred-pound sack of chicken food in it.

The devil wants to run our life, he wants to destroy our life, he wants to pull us away from God, and he wants us to ignore the Word of God. He works at controlling our life by talking to us, and we hear him in our thoughts. Have you ever had the thought pop into your head, “I am so tired tonight; I will read my Bible tomorrow night?” Where did that thought come from?

There are over a hundred different blessings that come into our life from faithfully reading and memorizing the Bible. God wants us to read His Word, so He motivates us by giving us rewards when we read it. Here are just a few;

– great peace, supernatural wisdom, restores our soul, we will know the perfect will of God for our life, we will grow spiritually, the joy of the Lord, inner strength to manage pressures and trials, more significant and increasing faith, and increasing power in our prayers to God.

That is just a few of the clearly started blessings that come from God when we honor Him by reading and living His Word. The key to faithfully reading and memorizing His Word is to set a goal. Then to become part of an accountability group that meets regularly, weekly is best, who will encourage you to be faithful to the Word of God every day.

Proverbs 12:15 A wise man is he who listens to counsel.

Back when Patty and I only had one child, and were still farming, we drove 2 hours every week one way for three months to get counseling on how to raise godly children. The counsel that we received lasted just 15 minutes at each session, but it was very profound, wise, incredibly practical, and when the 15 minutes were up each week we knew exactly what to do with what we had heard.

We went to numerous seminars on raising children that lasted several hours each evening and lasted from 2 days to as long as a week. We read dozens of books on the topic of raising godly kids, and we visited informally with parents who seemed to be doing an excellent job with their kids.

We did all of that because we both wanted to raise terrific kids who would love the Lord with all of their hearts, and we both felt very inadequate for the job of raising a child that belonged to God with the results of our parenting lasting for eternity.

Seeking wise counsel and advice from others on how to have a good marriage, how to raise champions for God, how to manage our money, how to grow in our faith, how to succeed at our business, how to study the Bible, and dozens of other life skills is very Biblical and one that God honors. God is opposed to the proud (one who thinks he already knows how to do it) but gives the humble grace.

There are too many critical skills needed in life to try and learn them by trial and error. There is too much at stake to allow our pride to keep us from learning from others. We go to school to learn how to read and do math, where we learn from others, but we are sort of forced into that role, but we ought to be lifelong learners and seekers of wisdom. There are wise people all around us if we look for them, but our pride keeps us in the fool category.

1 Corinthians 13:13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Paul basically is saying that love, faith, and hope are the best, the greatest, the most powerful of all words. We can see that for faith and love, but hope? Why is hope in the “big three?” Our problem is that we understand hope with the definition of, “maybe we will, maybe we won’t; I hope it happens, but I am not sure it will.” Hope doesn’t seem all that important, all that powerful with a definition like that.

But Paul uses the word hope to mean “a positive expectation of a future event, ” and the future event is eternal life with Jesus and a brand new body that is just like His to boot. The Biblical command is to fix our mind, our thoughts completely on the hope to be revealed to us when we die or when Jesus returns. “The hope” is the event, the day, the moment we see Jesus, but “hope” is also a condition of our heart where we know without a doubt that we are headed for heaven and anticipating it with great eagerness.

Those with great hope instead of a little hope have zero fear of death, in fact they are looking forward to the day they die physically and are resurrected spiritually to be in the presence of the Lord. Zero fear of death, there are a lot of people who would have lived life with so much more joy and freedom during this last year with all of the COVID paranoia if they had some hope.

I found out today that my good friend Brad Ils and his wife Trina lost their youngest daughter yesterday. Aleeya was 16 years old and had a blood clot land in her lungs, and she died instantly while she and Brad were shopping together at Target. Brad pastors one of our daughter churches, Turning Point Church, that meets in Turner.

Unexpected deaths are hard, especially if it is a 16-year-old daughter. Life is often a puzzle as we try to figure out why God does certain things a certain way, and this kind of event is probably one of the most difficult to make sense of. We all would like the “why” question answered for a lot of things, but God doesn’t usually come through on that question. Job asked “why” a dozen times and he never got an answer. Someone asked me once if I thought God would give us answers once we were in heaven. I think that when we get to heaven, we will know all the answers, and they will make perfect sense and will demonstrate both God’s wisdom and His love.

Brad and Trina have a great advantage over many other people who go through this kind of trial because they have a strong faith and a close relationship with the Lord. They know that Aleeya is in heaven with Jesus experiencing incomprehensible joy because she loved the Lord and was in His family. We don’t mourn because Aleeya somehow got a bum rap and missed out on so much of life. There is nothing she would have done in this life that comes close to what she is experiencing and doing now. We mourn because of our own loss of someone we loved and will miss. But we will see her again very soon by God’s standard of time. That is why the Bible says we mourn, but not like the world does because they have no hope.

I fell Sunday morning going down the steps off of our back porch at 2:00 am headed out to rescue Patty’s chickens from a coon or whatever was making them sqwack like crazy. As a result, I bruised my tailbone and stayed in bed most of the day, missing church and three teaching responsibilities that I had. I slept an extra 10 hours yesterday recovering from my adventure. As a result of the extra rest I am feeling much better today, and Patty is bossing me around, giving me “low impact, ” as she calls them, jobs to do. I noticed several other things about the extra sleep and rest. I have about a dozen little growths on my forehead, like most older people do, and have them burned off with liquid nitrogen periodically. Well, this morning they are all gone, at least significantly reduced in size. I don’t know for sure that it was all the extra sleep that was the cause, but seems reasonable to conclude that it was. The other very noticeable thing was my mood, I was feeling good emotionally this morning and very positive and energetic. I work at staying positive in my thinking, but sometimes I just feel sort of flat.

I get in the habit of leaving my one hour of exercise, my Bible reading and memory work, my prayer time, my book reading, and my blog writing until the evening and often it is midnight or 1:00 am before I get everything done and go to bed. I get up at 5:00 am five mornings a week, and if I go fishing on one of the other two mornings I get up at 4:00 am. As an ex dairy farmer I have done that most of my life, and have functioned fine, but I think I need to change my habits some as an older man now. I was reviewing my goals yesterday and added that I will be in bed by 10:00 am at least five nights a week. I have come to this conclusion before and have made goals to improve in this area, but I am determined to make it happen now. The problem is that I have so many things on my “todo list” that I want to get one more crossed off, just one more, than it ends up being two. . . I exercise religiously an hour every day for my health, and I am always dieting working at keeping my weight in check and eliminating most sugar from my diet, again for my health. I am not trying to live forever, just to serve the Lord well with the time I have left, so it seems reasonable that I can motivate myself to get adequate sleep and rest in order to stay healthy and energetic.

Last night at about 2:00 am, I heard Patty’s chickens squawking, so I went out to chase off whatever was harassing them, and I fell going down the steps from our back deck and landed on my tailbone. It was just awkwardness on my part; the steps weren’t wet or icy; I just stepped wrong and lost my balance. This morning when I got up to go to 7:00 am prayer at JBC for our services, I was in extreme pain and couldn’t walk or stand, so I went back to bed. I called the church and told them I couldn’t teach my two leadership classes or my Prophecy Classes. Patty got up and got me five ibuprofen pills, helped me to the bathroom, and now I am on my way to full recovery. I think I bruised my tailbone pretty good, but I don’t think there is any serious damage done. I am getting waited on and pampered, and Roscoe is lying on the bed with me, commiserating with me as he licks my face.

It just goes to show you the unpredictableness of life, going out to rescue chickens and end up stuck in bed. That wasn’t my plan, but now I have a new plan. Get well rested up, do a bunch of extra memorizing of Bible verses, write a couple of different blogs on my Ipad to get ahead on that, and get my Wednesday night service sermon done. I am taking it by faith that I will be up to teaching on Wednesday night. My main concern is that I am scheduled to go steelhead fishing on Friday on the Siletz river, and I for sure don’t want to miss that.

The main thing that I try to remember now and practice is to don’t do the “shoulda, if only, why me, poor me, ” self-talk. Instead, “thank You Lord that I still get to do something that matters, even if it is from the bed, thank You for the needed rest, thank You for my caring family and dog, and thank You for my many friends who are praying for me.”

Wow, this so much fun I think I will do it again tomorrow😀!

Dear Jesus,

I confess to You that I am a sinner, and I have broken many of Your laws.

I admit that I don’t deserve Heaven and never will.

I accept Your free gift of eternal life that You are offering to me.

I believe that You, Jesus are God, equal with the Father.

I believe that you emptied Yourself of all that You were as God, and that You left Heaven, and became just exactly like me in every way.

I believe that You never sinned, not even a little one, not even in thought or attitude.

I believe that You were nailed to a cross, and while You hung there God the Father took all of my sins, past, present and future and put them on You, and looked at You as if you actually committed the sins that I committed, and punished You, for my sins.

I believe that You physically died on that cross, that You were buried, and that three days later You rose from the dead, and that You are alive today.

I commit my life to You. You have purchased me with Your blood, I belong to You.

I declare You to be Lord of my life.

I will obey You and do whatever You ask and I will follow You and serve You all the days of my life.

I know that I will fail many times as Your disciple. Thank you for Your continual forgiveness of me. I will not take advantage of Your forgiveness, mercy, and grace, to live the way I want, but I will accept Your forgiveness and live my life free from the fear of failing.

I admit that I can’t live for You and follow You in my strength, but I do believe that the Holy Spirit now lives in me and gives me the power to grow and please You with my life.

Proverbs 24:3-4 By wisdom a house is built,
And by understanding it is established;
And by knowledge the rooms are filled
With all precious and pleasant riches.

I use that phrase a lot when talking about parenting. That ought to be our goal in our parenting, to raise and train champions. A champion is someone who consistently wins at almost everything they put their hand to because they want to win. Wanting to win is not driven by a desire to beat someone else but to be the best they can be. A champion does what needs to be done when they feel like it, and when they don’t feel like it because it needs to be done. A champion knows that the key to winning is hard work, lots of it, and they have learned to enjoy the feeling of being exhausted at the end of a hard day. A champion gets bored quickly with the status quo, with things being the same, with easy, with comfortable, they are always raising the bar, adding some more weight to the bar, writing more challenging goals. A champion is humble. They know that there is no such thing as a self-made champion, we all need help, need encouragement, need counsel, need a kick in the butt, and they are always looking for it, and when they get it, they say thank you. A champion has eliminated the phrase, “it’s hard” from their vocabulary; they don’t complain, gripe, fuss, or grumble; they just don’t.

No one is born a champion, they are trained into being a champion by wise parents. I am teaching a class on how to raise champions starting April 11th, Sunday mornings, at 10:15 till 11:15 am at JBC in the Discipleship Center upstairs in room 202.

Proverbs 23:7 says, “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he, ” which means what you think about predominately is what you will become or already are. In reverse, choose to think and meditate on being the kind of person you want to become and you will meditate and envision yourself into that kind of person. 2 Corinthians 10:5 says that we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. The most important discipline in life is taking captive every thought and choosing to think thoughts that are positive, wholesome, holy, thoughts about activities and ways of acting and talking that are pleasing to Christ. Because our mind is such an independent thing inside us, we have to be continually listening to what our mind is thinking; this is such a fundamental part of growing mature. It is worth reminding ourselves constantly to stay on top of this discipline.

It is easy to begin thinking critical, judgmental thoughts about others, but it so important not to let your mind go there. It may be true the thoughts you are having about others, but those thoughts don’t change them, and they just make you an unhappy person.