God’s grace is not a replacement for good works, but it is the power to perform or accomplish good works.

1 Timothy 6:18 Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share,

Titus 2:13-15 Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.

Titus 3:8 This is a trustworthy statement; and concerning these things I want you to speak confidently, so that those who have believed God will be careful to engage in good deeds.

Titus 3:14 Our people must also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, so that they will not be unfruitful.

-When I see a need and choose to do a good deed to meet the need, the power of God which is resident in me in the person of the Holy Spirit is activated in me.

-Good deeds require us to be constantly looking for an opportunity to do something or say something that makes a difference in another person’s life. God will open doors and will open our eyes to see the divine appointments.

-Good deeds sometimes require money to complete, sometimes it is actually giving money to someone in need. God will often provide or replenish the funds given so we can give some more and meet some more needs.

-The good deeds that we do for people who are not believers in Jesus will often give us the privilege of sharing our faith and personal story of the difference Jesus has made in our life.

Grace is a big word in that it has many definitions and facets. The old traditional definition, “God’s unmerited favor” is fairly narrow and really only applies in a few references. Some other definitions that apply are, “God doing for us what only He can do”, and “God’s enabling power”. Some words that are a part of the whole definition would be, “mercy”, “power”, “patience”, “forgiveness”, and “enabling”. A definition that many claim, but is totally false is, “The freedom to do what I want with no consequences”. I often say, “Grace isn’t the freedom to do what I want, but the power to do what God wants”. When I was a kid we had a hand pump to get water, but before you pumped the handle up and down you had to prime it by pouring about a pint of water down the well. You could then pump the handle up and down and get pots of water. If you poured the water down the well and waited to long the water would leak out and the water would be wasted. In a very real sense God primes us with grace for salvation, for spiritual growth, and for service, but we can ignore that grace and it will have been given to us in vain.

2 Corinthians 6:1 And working together with Him, we also urge you not to receive the grace of God in vain—

God will stay just ahead of us priming the pump of our soul and as we respond, obey, and do something He will continue to do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

1 Corinthians 15:10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me.

Bad emotions or feelings such as anger, lust, coveteousness, bitterness, revenge, self-pity, and others will negatively affect our behaviour if we allow them to control us. The saying that I have taught and quoted for many years, “You don’t have to act the way you feel” is very true, but super difficult to actually pull off in regular living situations. Our emotions are very powerful, and we can hold them at bay for awhile, but sooner or later we will probably give into acting them out. A much more successfull and enjoyable way to live is to eliminate or at least greatly reduce the bad emotions and strengthen the good emotions. The strategy for doing this is like learning to play tennis, train yourself over time by practice. As followers of Jesus we faithfully practice  basic disciplines of the Christian life, here are a five that work for me:

1. Read the Bible every day, spend time weekly studing it, and systmatically memorize and meditate on what you have memorized. God’s Word is supernaturally powerful and it will transform every area of our life, including our emotions.
2. Spend time with God in prayer every day.  This discipline works best if you have a place and a time, a date with God every day. Have a notebook and write prayers and make lists of people and needs. Pray for strength, wisdom, opportunities, and pray for the people in your life. The more time we spend with God the more we become like Him in character and emotions. I use an App on my Ipad called “Prayermate” that works great.
3. Reflect on who you are, what your motives are, what your relationship with Christ really is, your weaknesses, your strengths, life mission, goals, and sins. Self-examination and reflection is a super powerful way to figure out why negative emotions pop up in your life, and once you have figured out the “why” you can eliminate the “buttons” in you that get pushed by people, events and circumstances in life to elicit the bad emotions. This discipline is impossible in my opinion without writing. A personal journal is a powerful tool and acts as a mirror into your soul.
4. Find a friend to talk with about your struggles in conquoring and eliminating negative emotions from your life. God created us incapable of changing on our own, by ourselves. He created us for community, mutual grace giving, fellowship, and without it we will go in circles in our pursuit of godly character and self-control.
5. Worship God well. In corporate worship focus on God, and concerntrate on directing the words you sing to Him as an expression of your love and adoration. Sing as loud as you can, and don’t worry if you don’t sing well, the people next to you don’t really care. Don’t ever fuss about any aspect of the worship in your church which would be a clear indicator that it isn’t about Him. Work hard at never grumbling or complaining during the day about anything, and thank God for everything all day long. Journal about this discipline and you will get better and better at it.

When we use the above phrase, we are assuming that we are talking about bad feelings. The good feelings of love, peace, joy, compassion, mercy, passion to accomplish a good idea, passion to build something good , we don’t resist, in fact we seek them in order to be good and motivated. The emotion of joy makes us feel very good, as does the emotion of love and peace, and we wouldn’t think of not allowing ourselves to act fully the way we feel. On the other hand when we are having strong emotions of lust, we try not to let that emotion control our behavior, the same goes for anger and bitterness. We can tackle these bad emotions head on and resist them so they don’t force us into a way of acting that will have huge consequences. But a better way of dealing with them is to get rid of them completely out of our life. It would be so cool,if we could just go with our emotions, and let them be a full part of who we are without having to be concerned that one of the bad boys would stick their head up in our life, and mess things up, big time. But how do we get rid of the emotions that lead us into sin and replace them with good, healthy, positive emotions that make us feel alive? That is a very good question, but let’s wait until tomorrow to attempt to answer that one.

One of the things about God’s principles is that they are the opposite of human wisdom so we won’t figure them out on our own, we discover them in the Bible and then live them, obey them by faith. Once we put them into practice, and discover that they work we have a new personal law of life. As our list of these laws of God grows our success in every area of life will grow, and we will accomplish more and more with our life.

Isaiah 55:8-9 For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.

One of these laws is, “Make yourself last and God will make you first, but if you make yourself first, God will make you last.” This law is repeated in the Bible about a dozen times so it is one that God wants us to know and follow. Jesus illustrates this law beautifully with His own life.

Philippians 2:5-11 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus humbled Himself more than any person ever has, and God the Father exalted Him above every person on earth and in heaven. The humbling that Jesus did had to do with thinking only of other people’s needs not His own, and doing whatever He could, paying any price to meet other’s needs.

Jesus taught repeatedly this principle to those who were His disciples,

Luke 9:23-24 And He was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.

This principle always works, be the one who initiates peace, be the one who meets others needs ahead of your own, be the one who takes the blame in a relational conflict, don’t be quick to defend yourself when falsely accused, and when someone is mean to you sincerely pray for them and look for an opportunity to do something good for them. It doesn’t feel right, but it is, and this is a principle that God loves, and He is generous with His rewards towards the person who lives this law of life.

Take a month and work really hard at practicing this principle in your life and see what happens. Begin by memorizing Philippians 2:5-11 and reciting it a couple times everyday in your mind, a dozen times is very much better. Journal about events and circumstances where you lived it successfully, and also times when you blew it. This principle is a huge game changer, huge.

They came so close! Oh well, I guess I will root for Kansas City to go all the way now. Cheering and rooting for a favorite team is fun, but I don’t know anybody on the Seahawks, I have never met anybody on the Seahawks, and I have only been to one actual game in my life, and it was a very bad experience because I thought I was going to freeze to death before we got out of there. So why was I rooting for the Seahawks? They are the closest thing to a home team that there is, and it seems like the right thing to do. The truth is watching sports on television loses its fun if there isn’t favorite players and teams that are tracked, read about, scores checked, and excitement if they win and disappointment if they lose. Add to that the camaraderie of friends rooting for opposite teams during a game, and eating fried chicken as well. So this is a cool time of year with the College National Championship football game between LSU and Clemson tomorrow night, I am rooting for Clemson, and then the Super Bowl the first Sunday in February.

I don’t watch a lot of sports on Television, just key games, because it eats up to much time. I watch just enough to make it a special treat, and and a source of enjoyment and camaraderie with friends. So if my team loses, I say, “Awe shucks” next time.

I try very hard to get along with every person in my life, but there are a few that are a major challenge. It isn’t that they upset me, but that I am regularly offending them. I try very hard not to, but it doesn’t seem to matter how hard I try, I still do things, and say things that hurt their feelings. There are 2 problems, the first is these people are hyper sensitive to slights, words or deeds that put them down . The second problem is that I am very focused in my thinking, so when I am thinking about something I don’t notice things around me, and if I happen to be around some of these sensitive people they regularly interpret my lack of attentiveness toward them as I don’t like them, or I am upset with them, or whatever. I eventually hear about “our problems”, and go and see if I can reconcile with them by “eating dirt”, that is I take all the blame and al the responsibility for the relational difficulty. I usually get things worked out between us until the next time. It isn’t like a weekly event or anything like that, more like twice a year. If it were weekly I probably would stop all mental activity any time I was around them so I wouldn’t goof up . I have thought about this challenge in my life and ministry, and I have come to the conclusion that I need to practice what Jocko Willink calls “Extreme Ownership”, which means I own the responsibility 100% of every relational failure in my life, the little hiccups and the full blown, major conflicts. The result in my life according to Jocko in his book, “Extreme Ownership” is that I will grow rapidly in character, and I will grow in the skill of being able to do two things at once, that would be nice.

Philippians 2:3 Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves;

This verse is clear on what to do or what not to do, but how do we make it happen? 1-don’t be conceited, never, ever. 2 – The same goes for selfishness. 3 – Always be humble. 4 – Always put everybody else in your life ahead of yourself when it come to meeting needs. If there is a verse that most goes against the normal behavior in our culture today this has got to be it!

Impossible commands in the Bible become very possible with God’s help and strength. The key thing to understand is that God works when we choose to do what He commands. The moment we take a step in the direction of doing his will, He begins to work and empower us. It is like operating a backhoe, we move the levers and amazing hydraulic power is released. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” is a cool verse (Philippians 4:13), but God doesn’t choose for me, and He doesn’t force me into acting, I must do that.

I coach and speak frequently about managing time. My definition of time management is, “Getting a lot of things done that matter.” A lot of people get a lot done in a day, but much of what they do is busy work that doesn’t have a very high impact. The basic principle is that 20% of what we do accomplishes 80% of the results in our life that really matter. So the goal of time management is to reverse those numbers, we want 80% of what we spend our time on as the high impact activities of our life, and 20% of our time on busy work. The problem that we have to overcome is that the low impact activities are the squeaky wheel stuff in our life, they clamor for our attention so if we are operating our life out of our head we will be pulled to the “noisy” jobs and activities as apposed to the really important. The only really successful way to overcome this pull of the urgent rather than the important is to write a daily “To Do” list based on our personal goals. Now we have another problem to overcome. Most people won’t take the time to write goals or a daily “to do” list, because they don’t have time to. Makes about as much sense as not stopping to put gas in your car when it is on empty because you will be late where you are going if you do.

When I was a kid I was in 4-H. I had a Jersey calf, that grew to be a heifer, and then become a cow. I raised her and then milked her back in the day when we milked cows by hand. In the Fall our 4-H club would go to the local County fair, and we would all take our projects and “Show” them. There were various classes of dairy animals mostly based on age so when we “Showed” our animal we were competing with the same breed and the same age animals. We would lead our animal around the ring, and a judge would line us up in order, the best on the left and the worst on the right. We were then given ribbons according to the place that we were awarded in the line. I also got involved in doing the judging of the cows. A group of us kids, in an age group would rank a group of cows, usually a group of 4. An official judge would determine the official placing and then we would be ranked on how close we were to the official judge’s picks. I usually won this competition the years that I was involved, from the 6th grade up until the end of my sophomore year in High School. Several years I got to go to the Pacific International Dairy Show and one year I got to go to the National Dairy Show at “The Cow Palace” in San Francisco. Those years were a lot of fun, and I remember the good times traveling with other dairy kids to the big cities to judge cows. There was a criteria that we learned to use in judging the cows to determine which one was the best. Today I am into hunting, fishing, and restoring old cars, and I have regular discussions with like minded enthusiasts on what is the best bow, the best gun, the best fishing rod, the best boat, the best old car, the best engine, the best motor oil, and on the list goes. When I buy things at Cabella’s I usually check the reviews and see how many stars the item has and how many people rated it. I don’t want to buy any junk, just the best.

So as a person, based on how I act, specifically, how I treat other people, what is my rank? In Matthew 19:30 Jesus was comparing this life with the Kingdom of Heaven, and He said “But many who are first will be last; and the last, first.” That is many who are ranked first in this life will be ranked last in the Kingdom, and many of those ranked last in life will be first in the Kingdom. And then in Matthew 20 Jesus says “if you want to be ranked first by God then choose to become a servant for everybody, that is put everybody else’s needs ahead of your own.” There appears to be several judges that we can “Show” for, the world, the people around us, ourselves, or God.

So, I will work at being the best in God’s eyes.With God it is all about being kind, thoughtful, valuing people, gracious, putting yourself last, and loving. If everyone was working at being the “Best” in God’s eyes it would be so much easier, but many are working at being the best in their own eyes and the world’s eyes and the standard is position, power, possessions, and prestige. Now, in order to be the best you have to love your enemies and be nice to those who are mean to you. I won’t be able to pull this one off without lots of help from God.