My son, Seth and I left our house in Jefferson about 9 pm tonight, and we are headed for Powell , Wyoming. It is a little over 1,000 miles, and we are going to drive straight through. Seth started driving and he will go until he gets tired and then I will take over until I get tired. Hopefully Seth can drive several hours before I need to give him a break.I can do pretty good as long as I have a thermos of coffee, and a big bag of sunflower seeds. I don’t know what it is, but when I have a mouth full of seeds wallowing them around in my mouth picking one out with my tongue and shelling them with my teeth I don’t get sleepy. We will get to Powell tomorrow afternoon, and then Friday we are going to ride horseback into a Wilderness area outside Cody and hunt for 3 days. The goal is to shoot a big, trophy mule deer. I don’t walk real well any more so the horseback riding is a great way for me to cover some ground and see some deer. Seth is going to help me on and off the horse. The election will be over when we get back, the Cubs just won the World Series after being down 3 to 1 before coming back and winning 3 straight from the Cleveland Indians, the Portland Trailblzers lost in overtime to the previously winless Phoenix Suns. I wonder what tomorrow holds? Life is an adventure

Proverbs 1:20-25  Wisdom shouts in the street, she lifts her voice in the square; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the gates in the city she utters her sayings:
“How long, O naive ones, will you love being simple-minded? and  scoffers delight themselves in scoffing and fools hate knowledge?  Turn to my reproof. Behold, I will pour out my spirit on you;
I will make my words known to you.  Because I called and you refused,  I stretched out my hand and no one paid attention.  And you neglected all my counsel  And did not want my reproof;

Having a teachable spirit is such an important character trait, and so easy to not have because of our pride.  A prideful person says, “I know”, but a humble person says, “teach me, show me, help me”. Whenever this character trait rolls around, and it is the one I am supposed to focus on for a week, I make it a point of calling some people I know that are doing well in life, asking them to go out for lunch, I always buy, and I ask previously thought out questions.  I take good notes. Usually, as a result of the notes taken I write some new goals.

There aren’t many people today that look frantically for wisdom. Those who do find it, or really God gives His wisdom to them. Life is an exciting ride then.

tonight we had an event at JBC called “Trunk or Treat”, which is a bunch of kids and parents all going out “trick or treating” but instead of being on the streets going to homes they were in our parking lot going from car trunk to car trunk getting candy and playing games and eating free hot dogs with free packages of chips and drinks. In the gym there was a bouncy house and more games to play with tables where they and parents could sit and rest and eat the free food.  I brought my 1949 Ford and sat in a lawn chair with a bucket of candy handing it out to kids as they walked by, talking to them and their parents. There were so many people who came tonight that I ran out of candy, and as I walked around to the others giving it out to find someone who had extra, it seemed that everyone was about out, but we managed to pass around the little surplus between us and make it to the 8 pm ending. I had so much fun tonight seeing the little kids in costumes, giving them candy, and talking to parents. This event has become one of my favorite ministry events that we do as a church during the year. A ministry or ministry event is something that we do that meets a need for the people in our area that would show our love for them, and also show the love of Christ for them and attract people to Him. We believe that God is real and that we can have a relationship with Him though we can’t see, feel or hear Him. He is Spirit and He communicates to our spirit so that on the inside in the “real” us we can have an awareness and intimacy with the God of the universe. Most don’t have more than an intellectual assent to a historical fact in regards to Jesus. Our mission as a church is to attract people to Jesus through the ministry and love we would show them. So for many tonight their venture onto our parking lot was a small step toward Jesus, that is our prayer.

there are a number of people I know whose birthdays are  the same day as mine. One them is the wife of a couple that are good friends of Patty and I. We established the tradition a number of years ago that we would eat dinner together close to October 27th if not on the day, to celebrate our birthdays and lives.  We went out to a Resturant for a couple of years and then we  started having dinner in one of our homes alternating between us. Tonight we went to their house for this cool annual event, and had a very relaxing and enjoyable time with barbecued steak, potatoes, mushrooms, and other stuff that was delicious and we finished it off with ice cream, what else!  As a person assesses their life and tries to determine the valuable things that God has blessed them with I think good friends would rank right behind family. The Lord has blessed us with a number of very close, strong friends who have been invaluable to us as we face the pressures of ministry over the years, in keeping us “up”, encouraged, and enduring. We had our 40th anniversary of being the pastor here at JBC a week ago yesterday, and a question asked often was how did we manage that. I didn’t think of the answer then but now I would say with out a doubt the reason was easily the friends that we have had that provided so much support and encouragement. To have friends you must be a friend which requires effort, sacrifice of time to do things socially with them. I thank God for our great friends

there are a number of exercise/games, as I call them, that you can do with the list of 26 character traits. One is that you can put a number beside each one, 1 beside your strongest character trait, the you are almost perfect in, and then ranked all the way down to the weakest area of your life which has the number 26 in front of it. Once you have done that you can spend a month on your weakest character trait.  You can look up Bible verses that relate to it, set specific activities that will strengthen this character trait as goals or part of a daily to do list. The daily self evaluation of progress made is probably the most effective and powerful way to improve, grow, and become like Christ in your character. A coralory to this exercise is having someone that knows you well, like your spouse, parent, son or daughter, or friend rank you on the character traits. The continuous use of this list will increase our awareness of who we really are, and increase our desire to grow and change. The cool thing about this list is that we aren’t talking about sin or being bad, just a non- strengths that can become a strength if we work at it. I recently ranked myself and I determined that my weakest area was “orderliness”. So for the month of November I have 4 goals, (1) clean my office, (2) clean my shop, (3) finish my goal of inventorying all my tools and materials and putting them in an app on my phone, (4) and working at putting tools away when I am finished with them instead of just setting them down. Now that will be a miracle if I can pull that off😀.

I have identified 26 different character traits that I want to work on and improve in.My goal is to take one character trait each week and to meditate on what it looks like to be perfect in it, and to examine my life daily in regards to this one character trait and how I am doing in it. With 26 character traits I can focus on each of them for a week and then each of them a second time each year. This week the character trait is honesty, truthfulness, being transparent, and being real and not a phony. In Hebrews it says that it is impossible for God to lie. The reason it is imapossible is because God can’t act differently than who He is, what His character is. Isaiah calls God by the title “God of truth” several times. God is truth, that is who He is and He can’t act differently than His nature, His character. I want that same character. Each evening I think, reflect, examine my day and life, write and journal in an attempt to discover all that is contrary in me to truth.

October 27th, 1948 is the day I was born. I came into existence as a human being with a soul, a mind , a heart, and a spirit. I think, reflect, and  ponder, within myself about myself trying to figure myself out. I am eternal and have the capacity to know God. I have the potential to grow inside, my inner person to become more and more like God. My character can grow so that I can fellowship with, converse with, and enjoy a real relationship with the God who created everything. I am self aware, carry on conversations with myself, I dream about and plan the future. God planned, and designed me and loves me. Because of my faith in Christ I will get a new body someday. It will be me, with my character, my way of doing things,  my memories, my personality, but no sin nature, no bad habits. I am unique, a spiritual snowflake, and I began my personal journey 68 years ago, and it will never end. Amazing, mind boggling, incomprehensible.

Tonight was the start of the NBA season and the Portland Trailblazers won their game against the Utah Jazz. Tonight was also the start of the World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago Cubs, and though the Cubs are a sentimental favorite with many baseball fans because the Cubs haven’t been to the World Series since 1945, 3 years before I was born, but they lost the first game tonight. Winning and losing is what sports are about. In just 2 weeks we will have a winner and a loser in the presidential race. In 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 Paul says if you are in a race, run it to win. What does it mean to win in life? I want to win in life, how do I do that? How do I know if I have? Paul declared himself a winner a few days before he is martyred by the Roman Emorer Nero when he said”I have finished the race” and I will receive “the crown of life”, I will be declared a winner by God Himself. Most Christian’s will not win because they won’t finish well because they will become entangled with the world and the stuff in it. They will back slide because of the lure of the world, because of the tempting of the evil one, and because our flesh is weak in doing good and strong in doing bad.

my Dad used to say often, ” just because a person gets older doesn’t mean they get wiser”. It was usually prompted by a decision someone we knew had made, and that statement was his way of saying that he didn’t think it was a very wise decision. I am often in a place where I wished I was much wiser than I am, while raising our eight children I often would plead with God to give me more wisdom, as a husband, and almost daily as I try and give people advice, counsel and the Word of God as a Pastor in such a way that they raise good kids, have super marriages and so they can live a life pleasing to the Lord resulting in much blessing to them. I almost continuously am reminded that many people make decions and choices based on information that they have gotten from me. What if it is wrong? What kind of consequences will come into their life, and into the lives of those that they would pass this counsel onto believing it was good. The book of James in the New Testament says, “let not many of you become teachers, knowing that as such you will incur a stricter judgment from God”.

The book of Proverbs says, “If you seek for wisdom like gold, silver, precious jewelry” you will find it. The Bible also says that if you ask for it God who is all wise will give you wisdom, but only if you are seeking for it diligently. The first requirement would be that you have a deep,sense of lacking the wisdom you need. God doesn’t give much wisdom to “know it all’s”. I am constantly on the look out for wise people in various areas of life and I take them out for lunch, think of really good questions that I can ask, write them down, take good notes, and I pay for lunch. That is the number one recommendation in the book of Proverds as seeking wisdom is encouraged, get counsel from wise people. We can do that by reading good books written by wise people. My reading goal is 100 pages,each week faithfully, that is only 20 pages 5 days a week. I also listen to good teaching by downloading sermons and lectures onto my IPhone. I have a goal of listening to three good sermons each week. My motto is, “If I am moving, I listen, and if I am sitting I read”. Writing is another one of my wisdom seeking disciplines. Writing this blog, writing prayers, and writing sermons and lessons that I am going to give help me think clearer and more logically. If I have a problem I have much more success solving it by writing than just thinking.

One of the foundational aspects of my teaching and training over the last 40’years of my ministry as a pastor has been what I have called learning how to “Faithfully practice the basic disciplines of the Christian Life”. I have taught the importance of these 7 basic disciplines over and over again. I have nagged people to do them to the point I am pretty sure that they just want me to shut up and go away. The seven basic disciplines are (1) Bible reading, study, and memorization, (2) prayer, (3) self examination and confession of sin, (4) worship, (4) gathering with other believers, (5) giving proportionally of our money to God’s work, (6) worship, and (7) seeking wisdom. There are more but these are the basic ones, they are the foundation of our life.  I teach that if a person faithfully, systematically, routinely practices these disciplines they will never go backwards away from God, but that they will grow closer to Him,  more like Him, and more useful to Him every day of their lives.

Very few people do these basic disciplines faithfully which is the reason that the number of people that are growing consistently are few.

Of the 7, “seeking wisdom” is the most complicated and multifaceted.  Wisdom is so essential to living life successfully. Wisdom is knowing what to do and say in any and every situation. God sovereignly puts wisdom in us. God gives us His wisdom, only if we seek it like gold, silver and precious treasure. A major requirement for us to be genuine, passionate seekers of wisdom  is humility, that is that we believe that we need it and we don’t have it.

How are you doing being a wisdom seeker?