Football season is almost here. One of my favorite things to do is watch football during the winter. NFL, college, High School, it doesn’t matter. I never watch TV. It is such a waste of time, except I do watch football, every chance I get. I have a goal of driving up to Trout Lake every other month to see my Mom. We have been planning on this Sunday after church driving up and then I realized that Sunday is the first preseason games and a number of them are on TV including the Philadelphia Eagles and the Indianapolis Colts. Wow, I wanted to watch that game so bad. Is this obsession sin? Maybe just poor use of time? I wonder what God thinks about it, my obsession. Football is so much like life.

I had a doctors appointment at OHSU at the Neurolgy department for my Parkinson’s and then we went to NE Portland to help our son Sam and his wife Shannon clean up and paint the house they own and have been renting out for the last several years. They are going to sell it so they can buy a house in Stsyton where Sam is pastoring. It was amazing to me how totally trashed their house was. When they lived there about 3 years ago it was a very nice, clean, cute house. Today the carpets were literally black, the house reeked with the smell of marijauna, and junk was everywhere. It is interesting how people live and the conditions they create that they live in. But in a couple of days with lots of paint, new carpet, and some work the house will look nice once again and someone will buy it and enjoy it and take good care of it. Probably the people who have lived in the house created an invironment that they were fine with though I have been in mud walled, grass roofed, dirt floored huts in Africa that looked better than this house. The Bible calls our body a house that we, our soul and spirit live in and some have a nice house and others have an ugly house but they don’t seem to notice and if they do notice they don’t really care. My inner house has God living in it so it is special.

In the early days of ministry Monday’s were awful. I wanted in the worst way to quit and go back to farming almost every Monday. I was emotionally wrung out, I felt like the sermon I preached was the worlds worst, and all I could think about was all the dumb things I had done and said that past week. Those days are in the past and I am so thankful. Occasionally I will have a bit of a blue Monday like today. Now when I am feeling blue it isn’t because of thinking about what I have done or not done, it is caused by thinking about others that I know who are drifting away from the Lord who used to be so in love with Him. As I think about these people and pray passionately for them I ponder about how that happens. The quick answer is the devil does it and I am sure he has a major role, but I think the major culprit is the world and the stuff in it. The Bible says, “if anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in him”. It is so easy to begin loving the world and the things in it in a subtle way that is not even measurable, but then it grows a little bit, and a little bit more and before long you have little love for God left in your heart and at that point if you recognize how far you have drifted you don’t even care. And almost everyone will say, that will never happen to me. I pray for everyone in the church every week and I keep people in my prayer journal for at least a year after the last time I have seen them in church. Today as I prayed it seemed like I was going through a large number of those people, and well, it just made me sad.

Most people don’t drive their car with their hands off of the steering wheel, you will wreck if you do. But many people live their life with their attitude being shaped by the culture. Philippians 2:5 says, “have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus”, which means I can choose my attitude. Controlling my attitude requires regular self-examination and then making ajustments by choosing. I regularly say to myself, “I choose to be content with what I have.” It is quite amazing how powerful a statement of conviction made to ourself over and over can shape us. I also say often to myself, “I hunger and thirst for righteousness”, “I hunger and thirst for a closer relationship with God”, “I want more than anything to accomplish more with my life than I have”, “I will put the needs of others above my own”. About a dozen of those kinds of statements regularly and often made to ourself is grabbing the steering wheel of our life and becoming the kind of person we know is pleasing to the Lord.

We had a church work day today. We worked on our new “Discipleship Center”. The goal is to have it finished in the next 3 weeks. Because all of our buildings are paid for as we go they take a few years to complete. We have been in a building program every year since 1977. This present building will be 10 years in the making. It will be finished by September 1st and we will begin to use it almost immediately. It was fun working with people today on a common goal who are all anxious to get this building finished and have classes in it this Fall. Over the years of pastoring at JBC I think the highlights have been the various building projcts. Not so much the building as much as the fellowship that happens during the building. We all get there and than imedietley start to drink coffee and eat donuts. I get to know people better while working with them more then any other way.

Recently a number of people have commented that God certainly has blessed me. Eight kids, 6 son-in-laws, and a daughter-in-law who all are doing well in life who love the Lord and us. A great marriage of 46 years. 22 grandchildren. A successful ministry that is growing. We have the usual trials and problems that are common in life, but we have the strength and wisdom from God to turn them into an adventure. Life is fun and fulfilling. Many tend to think that God’s blessings are random, arbitrary, and come by luck. The Bible teaches that God’s blessings are conditional, that is there is a requirement, and when we know what the requirements are and meet them God blesses. It is an easy Bible study to discover what the conditions are, just type in “bless”, “blessing”, “blessed”, and “blesses” in your computer Bible program and look up all the verses. I have done that and regularly evaluate my life on the basis of those things God says He will bless. I want God to open up the windows of heaven and pour out blessings on my life and my families life until I can’t hold them all. One of the conditions is that we would love His church. It is easy to see the reasonableness in that when we understand that the church is the “Bride” of Christ. How you treat my bride is a major factor in whether I like you or not. Loving our church is not the “in” thing right now. Church is seen as a glorified Walmart store, we go when we need something from God and we aren’t particularly interested in sacrificing much for the church, after all a bunch of hypocrites go to it. The conditions God has set for Him to bless our life aren’t hard, but they do need to be met faithfully or He won’t bless. That is pretty much how we raised our kids, do the right thing and you are rewarded for it. Do the wrong thing and there are loss of privileges and consequences. That is what loving parents do, that is what God does. Jesus loves the Church and gave His life for the church and those who love her and who are devoted to making her beautiful receive great favor from God. I love my church with all my heart. If you don’t have a church home try try JBC this weekend.

Today I attended the annual Willow Creek Leadetship Summit simulcast in Salem. It is probably the biggest such event in the world in that it is broadcasted in almost a hundred countries and over 400 cities in the U.S. I have attended it every year for about 20 years. One of the speakers this morning was Jim Collins who is considered one of the foremost experts on what it takes to be successful in business as a leader. He has studied businesses and those who lead them for years and has written many best sellers, my favorite is “Good to Great”, and for the last year he has been teaching leadership at West Point. His talk this morning was “The Five Intangible Traits of Great Leaders”. The first and most important trait of the five was what he called “Grit”. It was quite fascinating to listen to him talk about various leaders who accomplished a phenomenal amount in their lifetime because of this trait that refuses to quit or give up, rarely gets discouraged, works super hard, and has a passion for their goals that does not wane with set backs and barriers. All of the five intangible traits can be developed and made stronger and one of the ways to develope grit is to pursue a crazy physical goal like running a marathon, climbing a mountain, peddling your bicycle across the U.S. I think I will do that, pedal across the U.S. again. In March and April several of us are going to go from San Diago to St Augustine, Florida. We will average about 70 miles each day and mostly camp along the way most nights. I am building a Trike Recumbent, a three wheeled bike with 2 wheels in the front and one in the back. They are quite expensive to buy but I am building mine for a tenth of the cost of a new manufactured one. I hunted around and found a great set of plans. A friend is helping me with the welding and design. I am looking forward to developing grit in myself on this bicycle trip.

Life is like a big garden, and the major principle of life is pretty simple, “what you sow is what you reap”. It isn’t rocket science. Sow cornc seeds and corn is what you get. As we live our life everything we do and say all day long is sowing seeds. Every act is a seed. Every word is a seed. So many people think life is random, arbitrary, accidental. That kind of thinking is the ultimate in foolishness. Life is cause and effect, sowing and reaping. One of my favorite verses is from Galations, ” do not be deceived, God is not mocked, whatever you sow is what you reap. Wisdom is figuring out what are the blessings and consequences of various choices and words and choosing what we do and say with a clear understanding that God is watching and listening. Part of the problem is that when you plant a corn seed it takes 90 days before you get any crop, so it is easy to forget what you planted by the time the crop is harvested.

Learning how to manage my energy and get to the end of each day still going strong is a skill set that I am working hard to learn and acquire, and also to pass on to others. Everyone struggles with weariness, and gets tired and discouraged and burnt out by life. The Biblical admonition is “do not grow weary in well doing”, “run the race set before you with endurance”, “in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary”. One of the keys to endurance is systematic rest. Systematic rest is resting by the clock and not waiting until you feel tired. Resting when you get tired is like looking for a gas station after you have run out of gas in your car. Every hour I rest for 5 minutes. Sometimes I close my eyes and just sit, other times I pull out my IPhone and look at the pictures of my grandkids and pray for them. If I have been at my desk studying or writing I will get up and walk over to the new building and back and pray while I walk. Often I work on a memory verse or read part of my daily Bible schedule. At home I really enjoy going out where my 55 gallon aquarium is with my brooder tilapia and sit in the chair I have set there and watch them swim around. 5 minutes of variation, mind shift, something fun, distracting, silly, is very powerful in restoring energy. It is not an easy discipline to develop because we just forget to do something that short and that often. For the person who struggles with tiredness getting this discipline down is more than worth the effort. I started this about 10 years ago when I read that walking for 1 minute for every 10 minutes of running in a marathon would give you a faster time then running the entire time or walking when you got tired. I tried it and found that I did indeed finish a bit faster and I felt way better at the end of a race and the next day. Systematic rest is not just sleeping for 8 hours every 24 hours, but getting a breather all through the day on a scheduled basis.

What is success? Who is a successful person? My definition is that success is accomplishing something with your life that is significant. A significant accomplishment is one that changes things for the better, that meets real needs in the lives of people, that has a long term impact on those that were targeted, that makes the world better even just a little bit.
In the Bible a significant accomplishment would be called fruit. In the gospel of John Jesus talks for six chapters about how to bear much fruit. The few days before He is crucified is when these dialogs by Jesus are made to His disciples. Jesus knows He is going to die on a cross, be raised from the dead and go back to heaven with the Father. He knows that His disciples will now have to carry on building the church without Him so these chapters are full of great truth on how to bear fruit, in fact Jesus says that they will bear more fruit than He did. I have read these 6 chapters over and over again wanting to glean all that is there on how to bear more fruit than Jesus. I am now in the process of memorizing these 6 chapters so the principles will not get lost or forgotten. For the next 6 weekends I will be preaching at JBC on these chapters teaching on “how to be truly successful and accomplish incredibly significant things with our life.” Services are 7 pm on Saturday night, 9 and 11 am on Sunday morning. If you don’t go to church someplace try JBC and see what happens.