My favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers, lost the Super Bowl today; I was disappointed, but not like I lost a big fish I was fighting or anything like that. In most competitions I am in, I have some part to play to determine the winner, but in the Super Bowl, I had zero influence on the outcome. I was simply a spectator watching the game on TV, hoping my team would win. It is over now, and I can move on to basketball, both College and NBA. I have favorites in both areas, but it doesn’t take much for me to switch loyalties, so I don’t need counseling when my favorite team loses. I used to be involved in playing basketball and softball, shooting my bow competitively, playing baseball in College, running in a lot of long-distance races, and competing in golf, though I never won. The most competitive events I am involved in now are playing poker and pinochle and catching the biggest or most fish.

The competitive nature I have had most of my life is now with myself in accomplishing my goals. I have several adversaries that I compete against; one is my flesh; it is what I live in. My flesh is lazy, hates to change, and despises doing anything hard or sacrificing. My flesh is totally against any and all of my goals, and it puts up quite a battle with my will to accomplish them.

”My second adversary is the devil who wants me to be lukewarm in my service to Christ as Lord of my life, and he wants me to sin a lot, to be selfish, prideful, angry, undisciplined, and grumpy. He has assigned demons to follow me around and tempt me 24/7.

I am determined to win the battle between me and my flesh and between me and the devil. My goals are my tools for winning; when I accomplish my goals, I win; when I don’t, I lose, and I want to win.

I sat in a chair watching young kids trying to climb a “climbing wall” today for several hours at JBC’s annual “Sportsman’s Show.” There were a lot of kids who harnessed up and made the try. It is a 30-foot high wall with little hand and foot holds. The climbers have a harness attached to a safety rope someone else holds. Most will slip and fall before they reach the top and call it quits when they do, but a couple of boys about 14 years old kept climbing after each fall. One must have attempted it ten times, each time getting slightly higher. I was so impressed with his tenacity and endurance. It takes a lot out of you to climb it once, but ten times must have been exhausting. It was encouraging for me to see young boys with that kind of endurance and fierce determination to succeed. I thought to myself, they will amount to something in life. I also thought to myself that kind of determination is rare. I was doubly encouraged because those boys were my grandsons.

The admonition in Hebrews 12 is to run the race of life with endurance. Life is hard, and those who run without quitting and endure will win.

In 2015, I went to the Portland Sportsman’s Show, which is a funny statement because I have attended it every year since I was 15 years old, except for a couple of years ago when it got canceled because of COVID. There are hundreds of guides there, both hunting and fishing, with booths advertising their business. There was a booth advertising long-range fishing out of San Diego. The trips were anywhere from three days to twelve days long, and they had hours of videos playing in the booth of the fishing on these trips. The whole concept fascinated me, and I stood there and watched their videos for hours. Everybody with whom I had come to the Show was ready to head home, and I was still watching more videos. That night, I added a new goal to my list, “Go fishing on a ten-day fishing trip out of San Diego before the end of 2025.” It was a long-range fishing trip for ten days, so I thought I would make a long-range goal to be completed before ten years. A pastor friend read my goals recently, saw that one, and commented that he knew a guy who made that trip every other year. He gave me his phone number. I texted him, and we decided to have a cup of coffee and talk about fishing. He connected me with the Captain of the boat, and I am now signed up and scheduled to go fishing for tuna for ten days in 2025.

I have made a lot of long-range goals over the years. I try not to have more than six at any one time so I don’t lose motivation on any one of the goals. I have read this goal and others daily for years, but I was never sure how to take the first step. Actually, I knew how to take the first step, but there were so many things I didn’t know that I was intimidated to take the first step. Making this new friend who had done it eight times before, who knew exactly what to do, and said that I could tag along with him gave me the confidence to take the jump. So, I signed up on the dotted line and sent in my $500 registration fee; it is now official.

There is a lot of power in writing out our dreams for years in the future and reading them every day. Because of that constant reminder, we regularly do little things that gradually open doors for our dreams to happen.

Twenty-eight years ago, all eight of our kids were living at home. The oldest was 20, and the youngest was eight. Back up ten years, our oldest was twelve, and our youngest was a baby. For about thirty years, we were raising and training kids. That was a lot of years ago. Now, they are all doing what we were doing.

Most of our kids are visiting for a few weeks, and I am enjoying the time very much. I keep having flashbacks of memories of different events we had with them over those thirty years. I love those memories.

The family consisting of a Dad, a Mom, and kids have been, from the very beginning, Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Seth, and nobody knows how many more existed at the beginning of the story. The basic family unit has existed in many countries and cultures for thousands of years. It has endured because it is God’s plan from the beginning.

Our family has been the most significant source of joy in my life. They have been the greatest source of fulfillment and meaning in life.

I am also part of God’s family. He is my Father, and I will live with Him forever. He calls me son, and Jesus calls me brother. It sometimes seems like a long time before I will be with Him, but time does fly, and it won’t be long now.

One of the things that I aggressively do is look for open doors with great anticipation. God orchestrates our lives, and He will provide opportunities to serve Him if we want to serve Him more and ask him for those opportunities. An open door is an opportunity God gives us to do something for Him that matters. We must look for them; they aren’t easy to spot unless we look carefully. We won’t look unless we want to do something great with our lives for Jesus. And we need to ask and pray, over and over again, that God will take us off the bench and put us in the game.

Often, we miss an opportunity because we are tired and don’t want to do anything more. Sometimes, we miss an opportunity because we are so distracted by all the activities of the world. And then there are those wide-open doors we choose not to step through because we are lazy or fearful of failing.

I am over at the coast teaching a group of Pastors for three days because I got a phone call and an invitation. I didn’t want to do it because of my schedule and the time it would take, but I have prayed every day, asking God to provide opportunities like this one; I couldn’t say no.

1 Corinthians 16:9 for a wide door for effective service has opened to me.

2 Corinthians 2:12 Now when I came to Troas for the gospel of Christ a door was opened for me in the Lord,

Colossians 4:3 praying at the same time for us as well, that God will open up to us a door for the word.

Revelation 3:8 ‘I know your deeds. Behold, I have put before you an open door which no one can shut, because you have a little power, and have kept My word, and have not denied My name.

In my last blog that I wrote about family, I said that we hadn’t had any major crisis except our parents dying. Later, I thought, “Well, sure we have; our son-in-law, Thomas, broke his neck in a farming accident and is paralyzed and in a wheelchair. What is even stranger about forgetting about that is that he, Sherri, and their two kids live with us.

I think the reason that I skipped over Thomas’s accident in my mind is because they and everyone else in our family managed it so well. Everyone has such a strong faith in the love of God that we all believed that God would bless, provide, and use this for His glory and in our growth in our relationship with Jesus. It isn’t that we weren’t sad about all the restrictions and hardships that had now come into Thomas’s life and in his family’s life, but we all trusted the Lord that He was causing the best to happen from His perspective to happen.

There is a lot of complaining, grumbling, and self-pity happening in most people’s lives over every trial and inconvenience that comes into their lives. Very few people faithfully practice James 1:2-4 “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result so you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

God dramatically uses those who rejoice instead of grumble during trials, grow to be like Him in character, and will be near Jesus for eternity.

I am so excited I can hardly stand it! Almost all eight of our kids and grandkids will be here in the next few weeks. Of the 45 total in our family, 40 will be here. It is funny how you get used to them being gone, but when they come back to visit, it is a major source of joy. We poured our life into those kids with the goal that they would move away, get married, have kids, and do their own thing, but it is sure fun when they come back for a visit. A major blessing for us is that I grew up in a very healthy family, and Patty did as well. Our own family was unified and loving, and each of our kids has a family that is close and abounding in love for each other. As a Pastor, I have seen so many very dysfunctional families, especially in this day where there are so many drug and alcohol problems. We have worked hard to have a good marriage and raise good kids who love Jesus, and all the work we put into that was well worth the effort.

So far, we have been fortunate that my parents and Patty’s parents dying has been the only major crisis of any kind in our family, with no significant sickness or accidents. It is only a matter of time before a major crisis happens to someone; we know that, that is how life is, but we have the hope of eternal life coming up. So many people don’t have that hope; I don’t know how they manage cancer and other severe diseases and unexpected death.

I just got back from three days at Cannon Beach, where I was attending the annual “Prayer Summit.” The first was in 1989, and there has been one every year since, except for a two-year break for COVID in 2021 and 2022. I have been to every Summit that has been held, that is, 34 “Prayer Summits” that I have been to.

I would have gone back to farming in 1989 had it not been for the spiritual renewal I received at the first one. As a result of that first Summit, I became a Pastor devoted to prayer, and JBC became a church devoted to prayer. Every Summit since then has been good, but nothing equals that first one for me in terms of life change and spiritual growth.

Several “coincidences” resulted in me being at that first Summit, but none of them forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. God opened some doors and made choosing to go relatively easy, but I still needed to choose.

God is constantly opening up doors and making it easy to choose to do things that will produce spiritual growth in us. We must look expectantly every day for those events and times that are the perfect environment for growth.

My Mom made me go to every VACATION Bible School event near us, and I went to Summer Camp every summer. My Mom used to say that events like those that got you away from everyday life and focused on the Lord were always life-changing with a capital C.

Many Christians seldom choose to go to retreats, camps, seminars, and classes because they are too busy, but the real reason is that they are not passionate about growing in their faith. If you want to grow close to Jesus and bear much fruit for Him, take advantage of every opportunity to get away to an event that focuses on Him.

Most people have expectations of us. Those expectations will create a growing pressure in us to conform to please those with the expectations. A significant part of the problem is that we can’t succeed at pleasing them because we are only doing what is expected of us, and as we do succeed at meeting the expectations, the bar is usually raised. Husbands and wives do this to each other without even thinking about it, parents do it to their kids in the name of good parenting, and bosses and supervisors do it in the name of successful business. These expectations, which are seldom identified or acknowledged, make us prisoners and jailers to each other in our relationships. An added problem is that we often have multiple people with expectations of our lives, and they are different, one with this set and another with different expectations. One way to deal with these expectations that others have of us is to rebel, throw a fit, and let them know in no uncertain terms that we are not their slave. That method of escaping often destroys relationships and hurts people.

Let me suggest a few things to do when you find yourself in a jail that others have built around you, one bar at a time, one expectation at a time. First, identify in your thinking what the expectations others have of you are that you don’t like. Try to be as precise as possible in identifying them in your thinking. Don’t fret about them and make them bigger than they are. Expectations that others have of us are like a piece of sand in our shoes; they irritate us, and, pretty soon, it is all we can think about. Then remind yourself that they set these expectations without thinking about what they were doing; we all do it and are seldom aware of it. If it isn’t a purposeful attempt to control your life, it is harder to get upset and feel used and abused by it.

So your wife expects you will not be home later than 5:15 pm. Your husband expects that the house will always be spotless, your boss expects that you will always work overtime, your parents expect a 4.0 grade point every semester, and on the list goes. Not all expectations are wrong or oppressive, so decide which ones you can live with patiently without fussing about them, verbally or in your thoughts.
When possible, choose to “go the second mile” and do more than expected. When you only do what is expected, you are a prisoner; when you do more than what is expected, you act in freedom.
In the Old Testament, Daniel was expected by his captors to eat food that violated Jewish dietary laws. They had this expectation because they believed it was the healthiest food and would make Daniel strong. Daniel graciously suggested a test where he would eat foods that were approved by the standards of the Laws of God for a time, and then the “boss” could check and see if Daniel was healthier. Gracious communication can often clear up expectations and let others know how you feel about them.

There are a lot of verses in the Bible about seeking God. Almost all of them have a significant promise attached to them. To seek God isn’t trying to find Him; He is everywhere; it is an admonition to grow close to Him in our relationship with Him.
Staying close to God is like having a good marriage; you pursue intimacy by following basic principles. If you don’t follow the principles, your emotions and feelings will fuel your efforts to grow closer in your relationship, and your emotions quickly become focused on self-needs and wants, and your efforts at a growing intimacy will become lazy and inconsistent.
For much of my Christian life, I thought that knowing God meant understanding Him theologically and knowing all about Him. To know God as I know, Patty seemed illogical because I couldn’t see, touch, or hear Him.
My journey towards genuine intimacy with God has been gradual but steady and has come from being faithful to the principles and disciplines of the Christian life. I read my Bible devotionally almost every day, which is different than studying for a sermon; it is reading with an inner ear alert for a thought that could be from God. I spend time in prayer talking to God daily, often while reading His Word. I confess all known sins to God daily, reflecting on the day, examining my life, and asking Him to show me what needs working on. I work very hard at worshipping well when I am at worship services with our church family, and I try to thank Him all day long for every blessing that comes into my life.
An old retired missionary I used to go to for advice and mentoring said, “When we get to eternity, everyone will have a different relationship with Jesus, just like Jesus did on earth when He was a man. Some will be very close and intimate with Him, while others will be distant in their relationship. What will determine our eternal relationship will be the relationship we have with Him in this life. Some people are very close in their walk with the Lord, and when they step into glory, it will be the same.”

Deuteronomy 4:29 But from there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and soul.

1 Chronicles 16:10-11 Glory in His holy name;
Let the heart of those who seek the Lord be glad.
Seek the Lord and His strength;
Seek His face continually.

Psalms 9:10 And those who know Your name will put their trust in You, For You, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You.

Psalms 34:10 The young lions do lack and suffer hunger; But they who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing.

Psalms 63:1 O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, In a dry and weary land where there is no water.

Psalms 105:4 Seek the Lord and His strength; Seek His face continually.