I watched the super bowl today with a number of friends from our church. It was pretty much a yawner, breaking the record for the fewest points scored in a game. Neither team was one that I root for during the regular season, being a Seahawk fan, but the punter for the Patriots, Ryan Allan attended our church when he was a kid, and his Dad and I are good friends, so I was definitely rooting for the Patriots to win their 6th Super Bowl. The best thing about the game was the fellowship with friends and the barbecued ribs!

There are a lot of Patriot haters around because people get tired of the same team winning, and with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady winning 6 Super Bowls, they have won a lot. I like rooting for teams that win consistently, not just because of winning, though it certainly is fun to root for a winner, but because I believe so strongly that there are principles of success that God created and that very few people have discovered them and follow them consistently. When I was a kid growing up on the dairy every month a DHIA report came out that had most of the dairies in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho ranked based on milk production for the previous month. When we got it in the mail my Dad would say, “It isn’t luck that got the first place dairy there, it is that someone at the dairy is following systems and rules that work.” “Find out what they do, and do it as well , and you will also be successful.”

When our kids were young I would read books written on the subject of parenting, but I would only read those written by authors who were parents of large families and who had good kids. I would also read books on marriage, and again only by those who had been married longer than 30 years with a good marriage to show that they knew what they were writing about. Now I read a lot of books written by Pastors who have been exceedingly successful as a Pastor, and try to discover what systems, principles, and rules they follow.

Successful people are successful consistently because they consistently follow the principles of success.

When I played basketball in college during the first part of practice when we did drills we often wore weighted vests. I don’t remember how heavy they were, but I remember that half way through practice when we were going to scrimmage we took the vests off and I felt like I could fly.

I recently had all my symptoms of Parkinson go away, I guess you could say that I am cured. I am not sure exactly why, it could be the Keto diet I went on starting January first, it most certainly could be the literal hundreds of people praying for me that God would heal me, or it could be the strenuous exercise routine that I do every night.

When I was struggling with Parkinson’s I took a medicine called ropinorole that worked good to control my tremors and some others Parkinson’s issues. The medicine worked wonderful but a major side affect was that it made me very “addictive compulsive”, and I needed to practice major self-control to keep myself from doing dozens of different things that were wrong for me to do.

Every night as I examined my life, I plead with God to give strength over these compulsive activities. I regularly would be out in my shop working at 2:00 am in the morning because I didn’t have the self control to make myself go to bed even though that was my goal, and desire.

Now that I am almost totally free of the medicine that I was taking for Parkinson’s, I am enjoying great freedom from the side effects of that drug. When I was taking 18 milligrams today I had to exert great self control to do what I knew was right, and now that I am off of the medicine I have this new Super self control to do exactly what I want to do. I is like for the last 7 years I have had this vest on, and now it is gone. I know I will get used to the new “self-controlled ” me but for a little bit I am going to enjoy the power and the freedom of having great self control.

Hebrews 12:1Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,

So, I have been on this “no sugar – no wheat flour” diet for 32 days, and I am apparently done with Parkinson’s, feeling much better physically, way more energy, and my mood is much more “up” than I can ever remember being. Now what? Am I going to live to be 100? I don’t know what tomorrow may bring, but I do trust God with all my heart, and believe without a doubt that He has a good plan for my life. “Good plan” doesn’t mean comfortable, or fun, or without pain, it means that I will have many opportunities to do something with my life that counts. I am in a pretty good spot right now so I want to make the most of every opportunity to do something that is significant. I am keeping my eyes and my ears open to possible open doors that God is supplying for me, and when I see one I am not going to hesitate, for fear that He will pass me by and give my assignment to someone else and put me on the bench.

On January 1st I started a diet with the goal of losing 40 lbs in 160 days, 1/4 pound of ugly fat lost each day. The diet was simple, just eliminate all sugar and wheat from my diet. I wasn’t going to count calories or anything, just eliminate all sugar and wheat from my diet. My thinking was that most of the snacking I did in the evening when I read, was ice cream, cake, cookies, chips, ritz crackers, and candy. Those would all be eliminated with this diet, and I should lose weight. One month is over and according to my goal I should be down 8 lbs, but I have lost 14 lbs, so it is working so far, unless I start eating way more bacon or something like that.

But the good news is that since starting this diet with no sugar and no wheat all of my Parkinson’s symptoms have gone away. The biggest issue was severe muscle rigidity and muscle pain, especially after being immobile for a little bit. In the mornings getting out of bed was a major ordeal because my muscles were like concrete, I couldn’t get them to do much, and when I did it hurt like the dickens. The tremor in my right hand is gone, and my balance is almost totally like it was 20 years ago. Before I always felt fatigued, like I had just loaded a trailer with 100 lb bales of hay, but now I have energy to burn. Before I didn’t sleep much because every time I rolled over or moved, because my muscles got so rigid that when I moved it was like I got stabbed with a knife, and I woke up, wide awake. Now, I am sleeping like a baby. I have also cut my medication in half and expect to eliminate it altogether in this next month.

It has only been a month so I am not letting myself get to excited yet, in case it is just some kind of fluke. But I am praising the Lord for a good January, and we will see what happens in February.

God has infinite power to do anything, but He has chosen to limit His power or give great power based on what the church does. When we pray and ask a little, we have a little power, we we pray and ask a lot, we have a lot of power. The purpose of this supernatural power is to change things from bad to good, to change people from bad to good, to change people’s eternal destination from hell to heaven. There is so much that I want to change, but I can’t pray enough by myself to make it happen. It will take a lot of people praying together in unity to move God to pour out the power needed to make big changes in many people. Here is JBC praying Wednesday night. Lots of power.

The strength of our faith is a major issue in determining how much and how big our accomplishments in life will be. Jesus said if we had faith the size of a mustard seed that nothing would be impossible for us to accomplish. Wow, that sounds so amazing. I wonder, was that a literal statement or was Jesus just making a hyperbole, making a point with an obvious exaggeration. I don’t think Jesus was into hyperbole as much as I am. Here are a couple of contrasting statements on faith in the Bible.

Romans 4:20 yet, with respect to the promise of God, Abraham did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God,

Matthew 8:26 He said to them, “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm.

If I want improve the time it takes me to run a 10 K, I know how to do that. If I want to increase the weight I can bench press, I know how to do that. If I want to lose 40 lbs in 4 months, I know how to do that. If I want to get a higher score on the Bible literacy test that I took on line, I know how to do that.

So, I want to grow strong in faith, strong enough in faith that the things that I accomplish with my life are many and really big, really, really big, awesome in fact. How do I do that? The most effective faith building exercise available to us is prayer. When we pray we are talking to a God we can’t see, hear, or touch. So why are we talking to Him if we have no tangible, immediate proof that He even exists or that He is listening to our prayers, or that He cares enough to answer them? Faith, the act of praying is an act of faith. The more I run the sooner I get faster, the more I lift the sooner I get stronger, the longer I study the better my test score. The more I pray the more I will grow my faith, and the really cool thing is that the stronger my faith grows the more I will pray.

I don’t want another boat, I don’t want another gun, I don’t want another fishing rod, I don’t want a bigger house, I don’t want a newer car, I am content with what I have.

But I want, want, want more faith, I want, want really bad, more wisdom, I want in the worst way more self-control, oh what I wouldn’t give for more patience, and joy, and to love my wife more. I wish I could just buy more faith, but I can’t, so I will pray, pray, and pray some more because I want to move mountains, and I haven’t yet and I am 70 and time is running out.

The Bible says that God has put an awareness of Himself inside of every person, but that many deny Him instead of seeking Him. People deny Him because they don’t want to be submissive and obedient to an almighty, all knowing God, they want to run their own lives.

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 all your soul.

How do you search for Him with all of your heart and all your soul? One way that is very effective is to attend and participate in a corporate prayer event. In Matthew 18:19-20 Jesus says,

“Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

2 or 3 gathered in my name, and they agree about what they ask. “Asking” and “Gathering” that is a corporate prayer time, and Jesus says that He is at such an event. God is omnipresent, He is everyplace, but He manifests His presence at times and places. As the early church fathers would say, “He makes Himself felt by us” that is we sense His presence in our spirit. Psalms 16:11 says, ” In Your presence is fullness of joy”. I sense His presence by an unexplained heightened sense of joy. It happens to me at corporate prayer times like JBC is having this week from 5 am to 10 am and 5 pm to 10 pm Monday through Friday.

“If you search for me you will find me”, Sitting in the prayer room today has been such a powerful experience of being in the presence of God. I wish so many more would seek Him with me.

I am a dreamer. I love to sit by myself and create amazing situations in my imagination, stories of impossible accomplishments, inventions that nobody has even dreamed of yet. In my imagination I have run the Boston Marathon, in fact I won the Boston marathon, several times!

We assume that Adam and Eve would have remained in the Garden of Eden forever if they had not eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but that is a misreading of the text. Long before Adam and Eve were banished from the garden, God told them to fill the earth and subdue it. It was a divine invitation to explore, to adventure, to discover, to dream. Everything east of Eden was uncharted—196,949,970 square miles of virgin territory.

I take that command as one God has given to all of humanity that are in His holy family through faith in Christ. It is a command given to me, conquer the earth, subdue it. A dream is an idea that has been mulled over in my thinking until it became clear, rolled around in my head until it became big, really big, scary big, meditated on until it became accomplishable, thought about from every perspective until I had a clear path and strategy of accomplishment worked out in my thinking. It is a big, scary, impossible dream, but I think about it so much it becomes reality. Those who dream the most do the most. Those who dream the most work the hardest. Those who dream the most, pray the most. Those who dream the most inspire many people to help them accomplish this impossible dream.

I have to admit that dreaming big, scary, impossible to accomplish dreams is much harder at 70 years of age than it was at 30, but it is those big dreams that keep me energized, my dreams are the engine that drives my boat. The cool thing about dreams is they don’t cost any money, they take only a little bit of time to dream, most of the time we don’t share them so if even if they are crazy, who knows we are crazy but us.

In the New Testament book of Ephesians the Apostle Paul says that our struggles in life are not primarily with flesh and blood, meaning not with ourselves or with other people, but with evil forces, meaning the devil and his demons. Also in Ephesians Paul says, “don’t let the sun go down on your anger” that is if you get angry at someone, take care of it before the sun goes down, apologize, fix it, work it out, and if you don’t “you give the devil a foothold”. A foothold would be a place to hang on in our life, legal jurisdiction, as it were. Demons work in our life primarily by talking to us and we hear them in our thoughts, and when they are hanging on to us, their influence is strong. There are other sins that we commit that give the same access to these “evil forces” who have as their goal to make us miserable failures in life.

People who raise sheep run them through a tank of sheep dip periodically in order to kill the ticks that collect on the sheep over time and suck the life out of them. I have no idea how many demons are hanging on many Christians, but as I listen to a number of people in our church talk about their problems, thoughts, fears, anxieties, and temptations I am of the opinion that many need to go through a tank of “sheep dip” for demons. Something that works to accomplish the same thing is attending extended times of corporate prayer with your church family. People often tell me that the thought of coming to a corporate prayer time at JBC gives them anxiety, and some describe their experience as being a panic attack. The demons attached to people are afraid of corporate prayer and will work overtime to keep you from coming. They will cause this fear, nervousness, and anxiety, sometimes to the point of panic to keep you out of the prayer room.

Monday morning starts JBC’s “Five Days of Prayer” and we will be praying from 5:00 am to 10:00 am Monday through Friday, and 5:00 pm to 10:00 pm each day as well. We start each hour of prayer at 15 minutes after the hour and stop straight up on the hour so we have a 15 minute break every hour for people to come and go, get a snack, a cup of coffee and to visit for a bit.

These prayer events are very powerful times of meeting with God, experiencing His presence, and being cleansed from the forces of evil who can’t stand being in there. So many people are struggling in life with anxieties, fears doubts, and weakness, and don’t really have to if they would take advantage of the power, grace, and cleansing that God has made available to us through the power of corporate prayer of a church family.

If I were experiencing the fear, depression, sadness, and anxiety that many describe to me that they are going through, you couldn’t keep me out of that prayer room, I would want to be free from that, completely free.

I have 70 goals for 2019 because I am 70 years old. I teach goal setting, and one of the main requirements for a goal to be considered good is that is measurable. A good goal is good because it motivates the goal setter, which is the main purpose of goals. A goal that is very clear and measurable is much more motivational than a fuzzy goal because you know for sure if you accomplished it or if you still need to pursue it, but harder. My 60th goal is, “Fish every chance I get”. Now that goal is poorly written because it is not measurable, but it still motivates me, so I am going to count it as a good goal. My friend Matt and I caught these steelhead today and I am going to eat mine tonight.