We can choose what we think about, but very few do. Most think about what their brain chooses to think about, usually prompted by something we see or hear. It is almost like our brain has a will of it’s own, doing what it wants.

The problem with this out of control thinking is that what we think about determines our attitude, our emotions, our behavior, and our faith. Consciously choosing what we think about is called “mind set” in the Bible.

Philippians 3:19 “whose end is destruction, whose god is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who set their minds on earthly things.”

Romans 8:5-7 “For those who walk according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. . . For the mind set on the flesh is death. . . the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God.”

The Bible tells us in Colossians 3:2 to set our minds on heaven, “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.” I have memorized Philippians 3:20-21 well and choose to meditate on it all through the day, “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.”

Whenever I start to think anxious thoughts because of events I choose as an act of my will to quote Philippians 3:20-21 in my mind, visualizing what that day is going to be like, the day I enter heaven and get my new glorified body.

Whenever I start to think angry thoughts because of events around me I consciously choose to quote Philippians 3:20-21 in my mind, marveling over that gift that is mine.

Whenever I find myself getting frustrated because of the events happening around me, yep you got it, I choose to think about Philippians 3:20-21.

Choosing to set our mind on Bible verses that we have memorized well is amazingly powerful in controlling our emotions and attitude.

Deuteronomy 6:5-6 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.

Deuteronomy 11:18 “You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul;

Psalms 19:7 The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul;

Psalms 119:11 Your word I have treasured in my heart,
That I may not sin against You.

Psalms 37:31 The law of his God is in his heart;
His steps do not slip.

Psalms 40:8 I delight to do Your will, O my God;
Your Law is within my heart.”

I have discovered 30 blessings of memorizing various passages and verses in the Bible, and I read them weekly to help keep me motivated to be faithful to this very hard discipline.

One of the awesome blessings is a healthy soul. Our soul is the real us, the inner person, the seat of our mind, will and emotions. Think for a little while what the difference would be in you if you had a healthy soul as opposed to a sick soul.

3 John 1:2 Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers.

A major blessing of a healthy soul is a healthy physical body . Boy, the older I get the more important that one is to me.

I have about 700 verses memorized well, and I review 100 of those verses each day so I get through all 700 every week. It takes me about 40 minutes every day to work on a couple of new verses and to review the hundred due for that day. For all the blessings that come into my life that 40 minutes a day is a huge bargain from God. That 40 minutes each day is the most powerful, efficient, and pro-active use of time that there is, nothing comes close to the benefits received from hiding God’s Word in our heart and meditating on it.

Remember, don’t ever say “I can’t memorize” or “It is so hard to memorize”.

I hear that all the time when asking or encouraging people to memorize key Bible verses. They can, but it will take some time and mental focus. I am of the opinion that 15 minutes of daily work at memorizing key Scripture passages will produce more blessings than anything else we can do. There is the obvious blessings that come from putting the “living Word of God” in our minds and hearts, but also there is a great improvement in our ability to concentrate and to think clearly. Our brains like a muscle get stronger with exercise and memorizing is the ultimate exercise. We will have an increasingly stronger memory which any of us getting past 70 will value tremendously. A major plus for me is the ability to communicate clearly, to put into words what I am thinking and desire that others understand. A basic fact is that memorizing for those who haven’t done much is very hard, but as we persevere in the discipline it gets easier and easier, it really does.

Here is a list of a dozen blessings that come into the life of the person who will establish the discipline and habit of memorizing the Bible.

1. Great peace and freedom from anxiety and worry.

2. Increased power in our prayers.

3. Increased sense of worth and value.

4. Our soul, our inner person becomes healthy.

5. Increased growth in holiness, our ability to resist sin increases.

6. Growing wisdom.

7. A growing sense of God’s presence and pleasure in us.

8. The joy of the Lord becomes stronger and stronger in us in spite of circumstances.

9. A growing contentment with our present state in life financially and in what we possess.

10. Our character grows, we are transformed into the image of Jesus.

11. We are able to overcome all of the temptations of the evil one.

12. We bear much fruit with our life.

Pick some key verses and get started. Every day for 15 minutes and it won’t be long before it is a habit. Remember, if you persevere it will get easier and easier and even enjoyable. I have 30 blessings written down that I read almost every week to keep me motivated to not get lazy with this discipline. I will give you some more of them in the next couple of days, in the meantime read this blog often. Make a goal and establish a strategy. And don’t ever say again that you can’t memorize’ you can and saying you can’t is terribly demotivating, don’t even say it is hard.

In 1980 I went to a four day seminar that featured several of my favorite speakers, and one speaker that I had never heard of before. His name was Joseph and he had been a pastor in Soviet Romania. He pastored a very large church that was growing rapidly. The communist government ordered him to stop preaching and to stop meeting as a church, but he refused. The police would arrest him and torture him for hours. They would pull out his finger nails, burn him, shock him with high voltage electricity, beat him, and then he would go back and preach some more. They would arrest him again and increase the severity of the torture and when released he would go out and preach Christ on the steps of the police station. Finally the government had enough and told him they were going to kill him. When they said this he shared at the seminar, that he got very excited and thanked them because they would give him his greatest victory, being martyred for Jesus for preaching the Gospel. He went on to explain that those who are martyred for their faith get the greatest reward at the “Judgment Seat of Christ”, and are closer to Jesus for all eternity than others. His excitement over his impending death totally confused and unnerved the authorities who went back into a room to meet and talk about what to do with this person that they couldn’t control. They came out and declared that they weren’t going to give him his greatest victory, but instead they were going to kick him out of the country. I was glad for that punishment because I got to hear him speak as a result of his coming to the United States, which changed my life dramatically. I remember being absolutely mesmerized by Pastor Joseph as he spoke, thinking as I listened to him, this guy has something I can only dream about. He has absolutely zero fear of dying or of anything else, and therefore was totally free. I remember that after the first day I sat as close to the front as I could because I wanted to be close to him hoping that some of his spirit would infect me. I have been thinking about Pastor Joseph lately wondering what he would be doing in these days if he were pastoring my church.

Today I canceled our 2000 mile bicycle trip. There were just too many obstacles, mostly there were too many campgrounds closed. Riding a bicycle on a long trip requires that you ride between 50 and 80 miles each day, and with so many closed campgrounds it was impossible to find a place to camp about half of the nights. I rearranged the route about a hundred times trying to figure out how to make it work. I found every open campground in Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington and tried to connect the dots in a variety of ways, and finally at 4:00 pm in a fit of frustration I deleted everything on my computer that had anything to do with bicycle trips.

On my drive home this evening from the church after “Men’s Prayer”, I thought, well, at least I still have the salmon fishing trip to Alaska in July to look forward to. At dinner tonight Tim called and said he was cancelling the Alaska Salmon fishing trip because of lack of interest and all the hassles of trying to work with all the changing fishing rules caused by the fear of the coronavirus. Oh, great! I guess I will take my grandkids fishing more, and golf more this summer.

Managing disappointments is a skill that every person ought to have mastered by the time they are 20 years old. Life is full of disappointments and if you don’t have the mental discipline to rise above them you will become a perpetual Eeyore that no one enjoys being around.

For every disappointment there is a least one equal, if not greater positive event to see and focus on. If a person consciously works at looking for them and choosing to think about them after awhile your brain does it automatically and the transfer from the disappointment to the new positive becomes almost seamless.

It is going to be a good summer!

Our house is over 100 years old, and the main source of heat is our wood stove, so we burn a lot of wood each year. It is one of my summer projects every year to get enough wood to keep everyone warm for 8 months. My favorite part is when the grandkids come over and help me split and stack it all. One of the character traits that my Dad taught me well was diligence, and Patty and I had it as a major goal of our parenting of our kids, and it is so awesome to see that character trait being strongly instilled in my grandkids at an early age.

The thing about the character trait of diligence is, it isn’t just about physical work, but it is also about the desire to accomplish something significant with our life and time. Those who have a very strong level of diligence not only want to do something meaningful with their life, they want to accomplish a lot, they want to accomplish more, and more, and more. The most beautiful thing about a deeply embedded character trait of diligence is that accomplishment brings such joy.

Diligence moves into a much higher level when Colossians 3:23-24 becomes reality in our life,
“Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.”

There were 22 guys at Odell Lake this weekend camping, fishing, and hanging out. We ate really good, fished a lot and had wonderful fellowship. A major source of joy in my life is having a good time with friends.

I regularly, almost daily, ponder, meditate on, and visualize what heaven is going to be like. God created us to give Him joy for all eternity, and a major source of joy for Him is seeing us full of joy. This earth isn’t the primary place and time He is giving us joy, heaven is, but He gives us little hints and peeks of what it will be like when we get there. This weekend was just such a peek, a blessed time of joy.

I am memorizing the book of Philippians in the New Testament and this week I finished chapter 3. The last 2 verses in the chapter says, “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.

Only those who are legitimate followers of Jesus Christ in this life on this earth are citizens of heaven.

I use the word magic or magical occasionally, but I am not using it in a “Harry Potter” kind of way. My personal, made up definition is, “impossible to explain”. So, I often say, “fishing is magical”. When I go fishing I get this amazing peace, contentment, and joy that is impossible to explain to myself or to others the “how” or the “why” of it, it is just magic. The government may be becoming dictatorial and corrupt beyond belief, the economy may be tanking, possibly worse than the “Great Depression”, and half the population around me may die of a pandemic (not my opinion, but that of the hyper- exaggerating media), but if I can go fishing, life is good.

I am leaving in a few hours for Odell Lake pulling my 20 foot pontoon boat, and I am going to spend the next 4 days fishing for Kokanee. There will also be 20 guys from JBC fishing with me and camping together. My favorite form of fellowship with other men is fishing or hunting, you know, there is something magical about the camaraderie that happens, really!

Where we will be camping there is very limited cell service so I won’t be writing a blog until Tuesday, I will be to busy fishing anyway.

The Bible has several lists of requirements for a pastor or an Elder of a church. The lists are fairly extensive, and every time I read through them I cringe as I think about my own life. A short portion of one of those lists of requirements is in 1 Timothy 3:3

“not pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable,”

My Dad was in the Navy for 20 plus years, having joined prior to World War II. He retired when I was 12 years old in 1960, and from my birth until he retired we moved about 20 times. The Navy housing we usually stayed in was called “temporary housing” because it was for the families of sailors who would be there just a few months before they moved to the next port that their ship pulled into. The housing was packed tightly together, usually with a play ground in the center where lots of kids congregated. Because of my name I always got teased by the resident bully and his gang of friends minutes after our first visit to the playground, which would always result in a good fight. My brothers Cliff and Matt and I stuck pretty close together, so when any one of us got into a fight the other two would jump right in. The three of us took on the best the playground gangs could offer, and we whipped them all. One of the things that happened with the many moves and the many, many fights was that I got to enjoying the experience of the anticipation of the upcoming battle and the victory. After Dad retired and we bought our first farm and settled down I never got into another fight, at least physically. But I have gotten into lots of fights verbally and relationally. As I was thinking about some things I was planning on doing to resist the control of government over my life and the life of our church, I thought to myself, I sure enjoy a good fight, especially when I am sure I am right. I thought to myself, “that is probably the definition of pugnacious”.

What does that passage say, “The Lord’s servant must not be pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable”. Darn, being pugnacious sounds so much more fun.

I want to accomplish as much as possible with my life as I can. The Apostle Paul said that his preference was to “depart and be with the Lord, for that would be very much better”, but then he continued on by adding, “yet to remain on in the flesh will mean fruitful labor”. I don’t think that if given the choice by God I would stick around on this earth any longer, but He didn’t ask my opinion, and I am still here so I will do as much as I can. Part of the struggle presently is that my energy level seems to be waning a bit. I exercise faithfully, eat good foods, no sugar, get enough sleep, and talk to myself positively. So my new challenge is to learn how to pace myself throughout the day, and not overloading myself on any given day, but that is easier said than done for sure. I am leaving on 2000 mile bicycle trip on June 1st so I will need to keep my energy up each day for about 70 miles. One of the interesting observations that I have made about myself is that the constant irritation that I have been feeling towards the government, and the media lately with this shutdown and all the “stuff” that goes with it has increased my weariness by a factor of 10. I started up an old discipline of keeping track of how much time I spend reading the news and watching you tube testimonies by doctors and others on how stupid this whole thing is. It is so easy to get addicted to reading and watching all that crap, but my desire to not be so tired all the time will motivate me, I hope, we will see. Once I am on my bicycle trip I will be limited and the increased exercise seems to give me a major boost in my level of self-control as well.