One of my favorite things is reading the goals people send me. It is a required assignment in the three leadership classes I teach, so I get to read those, along with many others who have maintained the discipline of goal setting after graduating from leadership class. Many of the goals are basic goals of exercise, weight loss, Bible reading, and prayer. But there are also some significant goals of starting a ministry, getting involved in a ministry, learning a second language, going on a mission trip, taking swimming lessons, getting a concealed carry permit, building a house, getting out of debt, returning to college, reading 50 books, and finding a wife! I made a goal when I started college to find a wife who met the seven standards I had set for a wife, and by the end of my sophomore year in College, I was engaged. I have set many marriage goals in the last 55 years we have been married. One of my goals was to have a dozen kids, but one of Patty’s was to have no children after 40; her goal won out. Together, we made many parenting goals, ministry goals, financial goals, purchasing goals, travel goals, and extended family goals.

Most people don’t set goals. That is like floating down a river on an inner tube; you go where the current takes you, at the speed the current takes you. Being in a jet sled is much more fun, so you can go where you want and fast. I know it is much more relaxing to float along with life, but when you get to the end of your life, you won’t have much fruit for God, not many real significant accomplishments. Many people defend this kind of laissez-faire lifestyle as trusting in the Lord and letting Him guide them. Jesus said that if we really love Him, we will keep His commandments, like go and make disciples, pursue righteousness, meet the needs of others, bear fruit, and many others that will require choosing, pre-meditated planning, and sacrifice to accomplish. Leisurely floating down the river of life will usually become a “broad and easy way” of living instead of a “narrow and hard way” of living.

Make some goals before January 1st; a dozen is a good starting number. Make them measurable, attainable, Nobel, and very clear. I would love it if you would send me a copy when you finish them.

In John 15:8, Jesus said, “This glorifies My Father, that you bear much fruit.” You won’t do that, letting the current of life direct you. Pray, think, ponder, ask God for some ideas and challenges, and then ask Him for strength, wisdom, and resources to accomplish the big goals He has directed you to set. It is the only way to live.

I have a goal that every year, I will make a goal to go someplace I have never been to, to do something I have never done, and to learn a new skill. I had not made those goals yet, but I just did. I just finished buying tickets to Oahu, where our daughter Sally and her family live. While there, I will fly to Molokai with my son-in-law, my grandson, and a friend, and we will hunt axis deer. And I just finished booking those tickets as well. I have never been to Molokai and never hunted for axis deer, but in a few months, I will have. Now, I need to think of a new skill to learn.

It is getting close to 2025, and of course you will want to have your goals for the new year done. Be sure you have a Bible reading goal, a scripture memory goal, a book reading goal, and prayer goals. One of your prayer goals should be to pray with your spouse three times a week or more. The prayer of a husband and wife is the most powerful force on earth for influencing our kids and grandkids. How could you neglect that prayer activity? Another super important prayer goal would be how many hours you will pray during the four five-day prayer events at JBC. If you don’t attend JBC, how many hours with your own church family? Corporate prayer is the most powerful force on earth for reaching lost people with the gospel. God didn’t give us prayer as a tool for living a more comfortable life here on earth but as a “big gun” for reaching people who are living far away from God and are headed for an eternity in hell.

Goal setters do much more with their life for God than non-goal setters. Goal setters are the movers and shakers, they change things. Make a goal right now to write some goals, a dozen is a good start.

The devil has no defense against our praying. The more we pray, the less he can do in people’s lives the less he can blind and control. His only defense is an aggressive offense against us to keep us from praying. He influences us by talking to us, and when it comes to praying, he and his demons speak a lot to persuade us to make prayer a tiny part of our lives. We hear them in our thoughts, and the sheer volume of all the thoughts on why we don’t need to pray persuades us to settle for short token prayers that require minimal sacrifice. Many factors determine the level of power we have in our praying, but nothing is as essential as simply the time we give in our praying. We have been conditioned to see prayer as merely asking for something, and God either does it, or He doesn’t, like, “Please pass the potatoes.” Prayer is a supernatural battle against the forces of darkness, and if we are going to win, we will have to persevere.

This next week is JBC’s “Five Days of Prayer.” We pray from 5:00 am to 10:00 am every morning, Monday through Friday, and from 5:00 pm to 10:00 pm every evening, Monday through Friday.

Many people will think, “I only need to pray for one hour next week.” Where do you think that thought came from? Others will think, “Plenty of people are praying; I don’t need to go.” Where did that thought come from? Or how about this one? “Prayer intimidates me; it just isn’t my thing.” I bet you can’t guess where that one came from. And the most prevalent, “I am just too busy or too tired, or too something.” I lose card games to my grandkids, I lose softball games to other teams, and I lose arguments with my wife, but I am not going to lose to the devil and his demons; they aren’t going to push me around. I will pray, and I will pray a lot, and I will be a force against the kingdom of darkness so that God’s message of grace can spread rapidly to many people.

How about you? Are you going to win or lose?

Well, it is Monday, December 2nd, 2024. It feels like being on the start line of a marathon. December is the busiest month of the year for me. Lots of family stuff, with Christmas shopping, dinners, grandkids’ school programs, and Christmas Day festivities. Also, there are many church activities, such as the “Five Days of Prayer,” Christmas programs, outreach concerts, Christmas Eve service, staff parties, and regular meetings and services. This year, I am pastoring the Jefferson Evangelical Church, and I also have responsibilities at JBC, so church time has increased significantly. The key to managing it well is to put everything on paper, or instead, on my iPad and my calendar in great detail, including my study time, personal prayer time, exercise, Bible reading, and sleep goals. A problem many people have as their schedule fills up is a sense of being overwhelmed with all the responsibilities and activities. With that sense of being overwhelmed comes a psychological sense of weariness. A sense of weariness steals the joy out of our lives.

I read over the list of things to do for the next week each day and pray three things regarding that list.

1. Thank You, Lord, for giving me so much to do for You; I love being in the game, not on the bench.
2. Please give me the energy and strength to accomplish each thing well so that people are blessed and You are glorified. Apart from You, I can do nothing, but I can do all things that are Your will for me by Your strength; I believe that.
3. Please give me Your wisdom to navigate life well, make the right choices, and always speak words that edify those who hear me.

It feels good to be busy and to be doing something with my life that matters.

Today, I received an email from a fellow who had heard a recording of a message I had given somewhere in my travels about my prayer journey with JBC. The message had to be old because he listened to the message recorded on cassette. He no longer has the recording and is trying to find one, so I sent him to our sermon archives. If he doesn’t find it, I will see if one of our remarkably proficient secretaries can find it for him. Loren is a republican State Senator for the State of Nebraska. I am not sure how he found my name, but it is cool to think about influencing the life of someone in Nebraska via a recording. I get emails regularly from people who hear me on the radio and read my blog, and it is always encouraging that God can use me even while I am in my recliner, in bed, or fishing through the marvels of electronics. That is why we record Pastor Mike’s sermons, mine, and everyone who speaks. They are all available online for whoever wants to listen to them. We trust God to direct people to the website, radio program, or blog site; they will listen or read, be blessed, and then tell their friends. In 2023, my blog was read by people in 13 different countries, including Israel.

My prayer every morning and every night is that God will use me more and more. You can also pray that prayer if you genuinely want God to put you in the game and use you for His glory. He usually starts small but gives you more and more to do as you prove faithful. And He always gives the resources, the time, the energy, and the wisdom to succeed at whatever He assigns to you. Go ahead, don’t be a chicken, go for it, pray and ask Him for something cool to do.

Many good things don’t get done because we forget; nothing reminds us to do them. Thanking the Lord for everything, rejoicing always, and praising Him continually is a significant emphasis in the Bible. Considering all the blessings in my life, I don’t thank the Lord nearly as much as I ought to. My only excuse is I forget. Thanksgiving is a day that reminds us to be thankful, but one day a year hardly meets the need to be grateful. In church, we have worship times that are supposed to lead us into worship each week, but as Jesus said, “They honor me with their words, but their heart is far away.” We seem to need that string around our fingers, and we mustn’t forget what the string is there for. I want to be a grateful person who continually thanks the Lord for every blessing in my life, so I do three things religiously to help make that happen.

1. Every morning, I pray a prayer of commitment, and one of the commitments is, “Today, I will grumble about nothing and rejoice about everything.” Praying that prayer every morning begins to push me toward actually doing it.
2. I read the Bible daily; part of my reading is five chapters in Psalms. Much of Psalms praise God, and I use those passages to remind me to think of things that happened that day for which I am thankful.
3. I journal daily and include things I am thankful for.

A significant advantage I have over many people is that I have established daily disciplines over the years. I rarely don’t get them done. We all have disciplines and habits of some sort. When I began my daily morning prayer of commitment, I wrapped a bunch of masking tape around the handle of my toothbrush. I always brush my teeth in the morning. On the tape, I drew a cross with a felt pen, reminding me of Jesus’s words, “Pick up your cross daily,” so I committed to Him to do the same.

You brush your teeth, take showers, go to work, change the oil in your car, and a whole host of other habits and routines you have established hook up a new discipline to an old one. It works for me.

Many good things don’t get done because we forget; nothing reminds us to do them. Thanking the Lord for everything, rejoicing always, and praising Him continually is a significant emphasis in the Bible. Considering all the blessings in my life, I don’t thank the Lord nearly as much as I ought to. My only excuse is I forget. Thanksgiving is a day that reminds us to be thankful, but one day a year hardly meets the need to be grateful. In church, we have worship times that are supposed to lead us into worship each week, but as Jesus said, “They honor me with their words, but their heart is far away.” We seem to need that string around our fingers, and we mustn’t forget what the string is there for. I want to be a grateful person who continually thanks the Lord for every blessing in my life, so I do three things religiously to help make that happen.

1. Every morning, I pray a prayer of commitment, and one of the commitments is, “Today, I will grumble about nothing and rejoice about everything.” Praying that prayer every morning begins to push me toward actually doing it.
2. I read the Bible daily; part of my reading is five chapters in Psalms. Much of Psalms praise God, and I use those passages to remind me to think of things that happened that day for which I am thankful.
3. I journal daily and include things I am thankful for.

A significant advantage I have over many people is that I have established daily disciplines over the years. I rarely don’t get them done. We all have disciplines and habits of some sort. When I began my daily morning prayer of commitment, I wrapped a bunch of masking tape around the handle of my toothbrush. I always brush my teeth in the morning. On the tape, I drew a cross with a felt pen, reminding me of Jesus’s words, “Pick up your cross daily,” so I committed to Him to do the same.

You brush your teeth, take showers, go to work, change the oil in your car, and a whole host of other habits and routines you have established hook up a new discipline to an old one. It works for me.

About 23 years ago, my good friend and fishing partner and I went to the Portland Boat Show. While we were there, he bought a new jet sled. We decided to break it in the next week on a sturgeon fishing trip. We usually fished on the Colombia River below Bonneville Dam, but we decided to go on the Willamette River in Portland. We invited two other friends and launched from a boat ramp under the St John’s Bridge. About an hour after launching, a Coast Guard boat approached us, and I passed that information on to my friend. He said, “Oh, that is because I don’t have my hull numbers on the boat, they haven’t come in the mail yet; I have my temporary registration, though. Shortly after that, a Coast Guard guy on the boat coming toward us called to us with a bullhorn. He yelled, “Would everyone on the boat please come to the back with your hands up in the air.” I said, “Those guys take no hull numbers on a boat pretty seriously!” The Coast Guard boat came alongside ours, and four guys with guns came on board and ordered us to get on our knees, put our hands behind our heads, and cross our ankles. It isn’t easy to cross your ankles while on your knees; try it, and I couldn’t, so I asked one of the Coast Guard guys to help me. They towed us into the Coast Guard station and kept us in a room in the station while they inspected the boat on the inside and under the boat with divers.

The problem was that we were about a year removed from 9/11 and a week before the Portland Rose Festival, and they had brought in some Navy ships for the festival. We had never fished in this area and had a nice new fish finder on the boat, so we were cruising along slowly, back and forth, looking for fish. In the process, we got closer to the navy ships than we were supposed to, and they thought we were terrorists. Channel 12 news was there filming us, and we were on the news that night as a terrorist scare.

It was some time before they told us what this was all about. The guns, the hands on our heads, the solemn looks of the Coast Guard guys, the divers, and being kept in a room with a guard all made me nervous. So, I prayed and asked God for peace, joy, and strength. Shortly after that, we were released with an explanation for our arrest. I said to the main guy in charge, “Do we look like terrorists?” He said, “No, you look like four dumb fishermen, but we must be careful.” I said to one of the Coast Guard guys, I know you know where the best place to fish is, and you have used up three hours of our fishing time; how about telling us where to fish. He did, and we caught a bunch of sturgeon that day. After we got out and started fishing, talking among ourselves about what had just happened to us, we decided that they knew from the start that we were just fishing but decided to use us as a training session. Oh, well, it was an adventure, we caught fish, and I was reminded that events like this can be a fun adventure if we pray and ask God for His peace, joy, and strength.

One of my goals at 76 years of age is to live my life with purpose; my primary purpose is to serve God and influence people toward loving Him and living for Him through my actions and spoken and written words. I also want to live my life with balance. Besides my ministry, I want to spend as much time with my family as possible, enjoying their fellowship. Besides my family, I also have many terrific friends with whom I enjoy spending time with in a variety of ways. I also want to pursue activities that give me great joy, such as fishing, hunting, bicycling, traveling, building, and dozens of other minor things. And then I need to rest and relax doing nothing. Pursuing all those things with balance is not easy, but it is possible with diligent planning and record-keeping. I have found that the more balanced my life is, the happier and more energetic I am.

We had a milk/cream separator made by Delaval when I was a kid. At that time, we milked our cows by hand and separated the milk from the cream. We sold the cream to the creamery and fed the skim milk to the pigs. We would pour the milk into the top of the separator, and a bunch of blades spun inside to separate the lighter cream from the heavier milk. The milk would come out, one spout and the cream out of the other, with a bucket under each spout to catch the milk and cream. We put the cream in a big cream can and set it in the creek until we took it to the creamery. The separator had a handle on the side that someone would crank to spin the blades on the inside. The handle had to be spun at just the right speed. If it went too fast, milk would be mixed in with the cream, and if it went too slow, just the opposite. Either way was bad. The speed was one revolution per second. Our separator had a little bell that dinged every time the crank hit the bottom of the cycle. We had a big clock on the wall with a second hand, and the goal was to hear the bell ding every time the second hand jerked to the next number.

The goal with the separator was the perfect speed; that is my goal with my life. I don’t want to get milk mixed in with the cream, that would be bad.

Shortly after I started College as a Freshman, a friend loaned me the book, “ The Cost of Discipleship,” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He said, “You have got to read this book; it is amazing!” with that kind of encouragement, I read it through in a couple of days. I can identify about a dozen events in my life that I call “defining moments,” events that changed the course and direction of my life. Reading the “Cost of Discipleship” was one of those twelve. I was a young 18-year-old boy, just off the farm, from a very small community with only 30 kids in the High School I attended. I had no clue what I was going to do with my life; I was just, sort of feeling my way along, waiting for God to direct me. After reading the book, I still didn’t know what I was going to do, but I did know one thing: I wasn’t going to settle for mediocrity; I was going to take the narrow and hard way every time there was a fork in the road of my life.

Patty and I went to the movie, “ Bonhoeffer,” tonight. It was an incredible movie about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He, indeed, was a man who made tough choices as a Pastor in Germany during the days of Hitler. He was executed by Hitler just weeks before World War II ended. He could have easily saved his life on numerous occasions, but his courage and commitment kept him from the easy way. I was nervous about going tonight for fear that my memory of him from the book would be damaged, but it wasn’t at all.

I love to read stories about heroes who lived for a cause and changed history because of it. I also enjoy going to movies about great people who did extraordinary things with their lives.