Patty and I drove ten hours to Twin Falls, Idaho, on Tuesday to celebrate Thanksgiving with our son Seth, his wife Amie, and their four kids. Our son Sam, his wife Shannon, and their four kids also drove from Stayton. So we all had a great time today eating brisket, ham, turkey, and a bunch of other great food. We watched three different football games between the various courses, and my favorite teams won all three. Last night, it started to snow, and it snowed all night and all day. We ended up with five inches of snow, and the kids had a good time sliding down the hill in the backyard of Seth’s house. Throughout the day, we talked about every topic under the sun. Seth, Sam, and I drove down the road looking for deer and saw a lot of them. We also saw a lot out of their living room window in the field behind their house. It has been a wonderful day for me as a husband, a father, and a grandfather. We have eight kids, six sons-in-law, two daughters-in-law, and 28 grandkids, and we enjoy spending time with all of them.

Whenever we are with any of the kids, I always pray for them silently in my head as we sit around, and they all talk away. I probably do some of my most passionate praying in these situations as I listen to them and watch them interact with each other. I believe Patty and I have more influence with God on their behalf because we have God-given jurisdiction as their parents and grandparents. I also know that many parents and grandparents of our six daughters-in-law and two sons-in-law also pray faithfully for their kids and grandkids, so they are well covered in prayer.

We live in a sick world, but our kids and grandkids will be winners in our culture, living as champions for Jesus, and that is why I am so thankful to God.

I spent the morning praying through our weekly church prayer letter. It is comprised of requests written down and dropped in the offering plates at the end of four different services each week. I don’t usually pray for all of them in one sitting because there are so many and because it is too emotionally draining to pray for all of them without a break. There are so many people who have cancer or other serious illnesses, and there are so many who are having family problems of one sort or another, so many looking for jobs and struggling with finances, and so many with family members who have no relationship with the Lord.

I believe in the power of prayer with all of my heart, but I also believe that God doesn’t fix all of our problems because we pray. I do believe that He gives us the strength to manage them, that He provides us with the wisdom to solve them, that He will prompt other people to come alongside and encourage those with the trials, and for sure, I believe that He will use all of our trials to cause us to grow to be more like Jesus in character.

I also believe that the more unified and loving a church is, the more that church will be used by God in a sick world to attract people to a saving relationship with Jesus and to make disciples. Trials in the lives of those in a church aren’t what makes the church unified and loving; it is the volume of prayer for each other, the support, the help, and the encouragement that is given to those who are struggling that causes the church to become a healthy “Body of Christ.”

I am working hard to do my part to be a significant factor in the growth of JBC to be more and more unified and loving as a church family. I hope you are as well.

One of my goals this year is to spend one hour a day, seven days a week, working on memorizing new Bible verses and reviewing the old verses I have already memorized. To keep myself motivated, I review the benefits and blessings that come into my life from this discipline. The first one is that the discipline of memorizing does for my brain what weight lifting does for my physical body; working my brain hard by memorizing keeps me from becoming senile. A second blessing is that God’s living, active, supernatural Word will give me a healthy, growing soul and heart. Psalms 19:7 The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul;

A third benefit is that I will become increasingly more wise. Wisdom is knowing the best thing to do and say in any circumstance God sovereignly puts me in. I need much wisdom as a pastor, as a husband, as a father, and as a grandfather. Psalms 119:98-100 “Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, For they are ever mine. I have more insight than all my teachers, For Your testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the aged, Because I have observed Your precepts.”

A fourth reason to spend an hour every day working on memorizing the Bible is that I will sin less and less as God’s supernatural words work in my heart. Psalms 119:11: “Your Word I have treasured in my heart, that I may not sin against You.”

A fifth powerful motivator for me to work hard at memorizing the Word of God is that I will know God intimately. The Apostle Paul declared that everything in life was garbage compared to knowing Jesus Christ. The command to seek the Lord is given in the Bible over a hundred times. Most of the commands to seek God have a blessing attached, such as in 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.” But the best blessing is that if we seek the Lord, we will find Him, and if we draw near to Him, He will draw near to us. 2 Chronicles 15:2 The Lord is with you when you are with Him, and if you seek Him, He will let you find Him. James 4:8: “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.”

The best way to seek the Lord is in His Word, and to memorize it, meditate on it, and hide it in my heart is a very effective way to seek Him with all of my heart, soul, mind, and heart.

I spend 30 to 45 minutes almost every day working on memorizing Bible verses and reviewing those I have already memorized. I will probably up my goal to an even 60 minutes, one hour, seven days a week. I have 700 verses memorized well; my goal is to up that to 800 in the next year. I am presently 248th among about 100,000 people with this same memory app that I have. The app ranks every person in the memory program, giving points for each verse reviewed successfully. My goal is to be lower than 200th place by the end of the year.

So, what motivates me to pursue such a goal? Memorizing Bible verses is the most mentally fatiguing exercise that I do. It takes a great deal of self-motivation and self-control to keep this commitment every day, and I wouldn’t be able to do it if there wasn’t some very compelling reason motivating me. Let me mention five reasons;

Lately, I have noticed that forget things, mainly the names of people. We all forget things, but the problem has been growing noticeably. I also have had several friends my age who have been diagnosed with the beginning stages of dementia. In all of my studies, memorizing is the best therapy and prevention that there is for mental problems, so I am going to work hard on this so that the typical losses in mental sharpness that come with growing old aren’t part of my life.

A second reason for maintaining faithfulness to this discipline, which will take an hour every day, is that the verses I am memorizing are the Word of God, the Mind of Christ, and the Sword of the Spirit. The Word of God is living, active, supernatural, and works in the core of my being, spirit, and soul. I desire to become like Jesus in character, think like Him, feel like Him, and act like Him in every way. I believe the Word of God in my heart will transform me into the Image and likeness of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.

Tomorrow I will give you the remaining three reasons that motivate me to spend an hour every day memorizing God’s Word.

I am getting ready to paint a car. I sanded the entire car down to bare metal and then skim-coated the whole car with Bondo. Then, I used Bondo to fill in the prominent low spots and dents I could see with my eyes and feel with my hands. Now, I will spray the car with a black primer and then sand it all with an 18-inch long by 3-inch wide block sander. As I do that, working the entire body in several directions, the black paint will come off except in the low areas. I will put another layer of bondo on the low areas and then repaint it with the black primer and sand it with my long-block sander again. This time, the areas of black should be fewer and smaller. I will Bondo those areas once more and then paint and sand again; then I will call it good and move on to a different kind of primer, then sand by hand with finer grit sandpaper. I will go through several other steps designed to result in a beautiful paint job on a nice 1969 Mustang.

My big goal in life is to enter eternity with a character that is as much like the character of Jesus as possible. I want to grow more and more like Him every day. To do that, I need to see and correct my character flaws. I must pursue holiness, righteousness, and Christ-like character with diligence and discipline.

Who I am in character for eternity is infinitely more important than a 1969 Mustang, so I should pursue that character with much more care and concern for the beauty of my soul than I put into that car.

Proverbs 15:1 A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.
99% of the conflicts I find myself in could have been prevented if I had applied this Proverb to my life. My justification to myself after a conflict is that the other person started it; that is, they spoke a harsh word to me and provoked me to anger. But the Proverb still applies to me; I need to respond with a gentle answer, and the inevitable conflict will be avoided. Almost all of the tense conversations that I have had with Patty could have been avoided if I had followed this fundamental relational principle. I know this principle, but I violate it repeatedly, and afterward, I am always sorry and repentant, but I do it again. I am making progress. I do it way less than I used to, but you would think that after 54 years of marriage, I would be perfect on this one.
As I get involved with marriages and other people’s relational problems as a Pastor, I have concluded that not only are my conflicts 99% because I violate this principle, but everyone else’s is as well.
My pride is the problem; I am right, and she is wrong, so I shouldn’t have to be the one who responds graciously. Sheesh! That last sentence looks so immature, so stupid, I was tempted to write it as everyone else’s problem, but not mine, but Patty reads these blogs.

The title for this blog has been one of my main life mottos for years. I have a bunch of mottos that I use to remember and teach principles and guidelines for living life well, but this one has been one of the key ones. For most of my life, it has been relatively easy to live by this personal guideline because I have been much more of a cognitive person than an emotional one.

But as I get older, I find myself getting more emotional almost by the day. I guess it really isn’t emotion as much as attitude or feelings. For instance, I find myself feeling unmotivated to get out of my recliner and do one of the many things on my “to-do” list. It wasn’t that many years ago that I was consumed with getting everything done on my list and then writing a new one; I was highly motivated and loved to work. Now, I get things on my list done because I remind myself that they are essential and need to be done, and if I don’t get them done, I am irresponsible, unfaithful, lazy, and a good-for-nothing. I get most of what I need to do accomplished, but it is much more of a grind than it used to be.

I think that as God is working at growing my character, He is making life more difficult so that I grow faster because I have so many character flaws, and there isn’t much time left to refine them.

Well, I am all about growing to become like Jesus, so I will continue to cooperate with God and act responsibly instead of being a lazy, good-for-nothing.

We all sin and on bad days we sin a lot. As Christians we want to overcome the power of sin in our life and move towards holiness. We want to keep growing so that we are not only living righteously but we are becoming righteous on the inside, in our heart, and in our character.

There are at least a dozen different ingredients that we will need to practice if we are going to overcome the power of sin to control our lives. Those different steps, practices, disciplines are all very important in our pursuit of holiness, but I believe that the most powerful and important is transparent self-examination and confession of our sin. The big barrier to overcoming sin habits that we hate in ourselves is the proneness to excuse, blame, and ignore the things we do that are wrong. We automatically hide and defend ourselves from anything that would make us feel shame or a sense of failure, we do it without thinking and we do it quickly.

Psalms 32:1-5 How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, Whose sin is covered! How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, And in whose spirit there is no deceit! When I kept silent about my sin, my body wasted away Through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to You, And my iniquity I did not hide; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”; And You forgave the guilt of my sin.

For me the most effective way to accurately reflect on who I am and what I do and why I do it is in journaling. I journal about three times each week. I just start writing about my day with the goal of discovering myself and as I write my brain and memory kick in and I start remembering events, motives, thoughts, and sins. As I write I become like a third person examining me, my motives, my thoughts, my actions and I become almost ruthless in my pursuit of all the junk in me.

As I discover it, I own it, no excuses, blaming, or making light of any sin, I own it, to the max, I sinned. I confess my sin, I repent of my sin, and I commit to the Lord that I will not do it again. I may do it again, but in making the commitment, I sin less and less and that is what I want and that is what God wants.

I have taught classes on leadership for the last 40 years. What I teach has nothing to do with being in charge, being the visionary out in front of the crowd, or being the person who makes all the decisions. Leadership is influence and the leadership principles that I teach is about leading by example, motivating people who are your peers by how you treat and honor them, being the kind of person that is so admired by others that they unconsciously imitate your behavior and speech.

I offer the 7 month class once a year starting in October to whoever wants to take it. It isn’t an easy class and a number usually drop out each year because the homework takes too much time for their schedule.

For the first month of the class I teach about the power of goal setting to control your life, to establish priorities in your life, to change your life, and to accomplish a lot with your life for the glory of God and for the blessing of your family, church, and business. I also teach the mechanics of goal setting and how to use it as a tool to discover the will of God for your life.

This year I have about 20 in my “Woman’s Leadership Class,” about 25 in my “Men’s Leadership Class,” and 20 in my “Leadership II Class” which is open for both men and woman who have gone through their respective leadership I classes.

Everyone writes at least a dozen goals and turns them in, and today I read them all. It was a very blessed and encouraging time to see what so many wanted to accomplish with their lives. Everyone had a Bible reading goal, a prayer goal, and a Bible memory goal. Almost all of them had a pray with their spouse and children goal. Many had exercise and weight goals. Most had some kind of Christian ministry goal and personal evangelism goal. Almost all had some kind of goal to change bad behavior habits like anger, swearing, drinking, smoking, overspending, excess TV viewing or Facebook time.

I am so thankful to the Lord that I get to teach people principles that help change their lives to be more godly and useful to the Lord to do His work. I don’t take this blessing from God for granted, but I pray a lot for each student each week and for my own wisdom in teaching and motivating and that God will work through His Spirit in my life and those I teach.

I regularly have people tell about things that really bother them. Often it is about politics, or the news media, or COVID, or the Middle East situation, or finance, or work, and on the list of injustices and problems go that bother people.

But what bothers me most is the number of people that I know that haven’t trusted in Christ as their savior, the number who will spend all eternity in hell if nothing changes. Many of them I know well, I like them and spend time with them, some are family members that I love, but they are lost, blind, spiritually dead.

What really bothers me is my inability to break through their shell, their resistance, their indifference, their blindness. Here I am the veteran pastor, the Bible scholar, the radio preacher and I can’t convince so many different people to believe in and follow Jesus as Lord of their life.

I will pray harder and longer for those I know that don’t know Jesus as their savior.

Romans 10:1 Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation.