Jefferson Baptist Church has four, five-day prayer events each year. We pray for 50 hours during the five days, ten hours each day, five in the morning and five in the evening. We average about 40 people every hour with lots of coming and going. This particular five-day prayer time that is starting this Monday is focusing on our world wide missions effort and we will have a number of our missionaries with us sharing about their ministries and needs via Zoom.

Though we are praying for our missionaries and the millions of lost people that live all around our missionaries I personally am incredibly blessed by each of the prayer events, and when one is over I can hardly wait for the next one to start up.

Here are a few of the very real blessings I receive during each of our prayer events.

The most noticeable reward that I receive is a marked increase in energy. I am 74 years old and I have Parkinson’s and I am weary most of the time. Getting out of bed in the morning takes most of the energy that I saved up during the night sleeping. Just about everything makes me tired, including fishing, but praying energizes me. I pray for about 40 hours in the five days and it really seems like it is the volume of praying that fills up my gas tank so much. The extra energy and passion that I get Monday through Friday will make a difference in me right up until the next one.

Another super reward that I will experience next week is a significant renewing of my creative thinking. My brain picks up a lot of speed, sort of like I have shifted into a higher gear, and I imagine all kinds of scenes in heaven. I also get a ton of ideas about solutions for current problems I am dealing with. I get so many ideas for goals, projects, ministry ideas, and sermons that I can’t get them all written down.

The most important reward is the strong sense of God’s presence that I feel and the resolve that wells up inside of me to seek Him more, to serve Him, and to grow to be more and more like Him in character all the days of my life. The resolve to seek Him diligently results in a recommitment to reading His Word everyday, to spend time with Him in prayer every day, and to worship and praise Him all day long.

There are many more blessings and rewards but I will write about them another day.

Acts 1:8
but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”

The word “both” means that we are involved in all four of these arenas at the same time in regards to evangelism and reaching the lost. For me, that would be equivalent to Jefferson, the State of Oregon, the United States, and the whole world.

Being involved in all those areas as an individual would be very difficult if not impossible physically, but we can do it in prayer. God gave us prayer as a powerful tool to accomplish His will of reaching out to the lost.

People in many countries of the world are in great bondage to the devil, and he blinds them so they can’t understand the gospel when they hear it. When we pray God sends angels to war against them freeing up people to respond to the gospel. ¡

One old man in a rocking chair can accomplish a phenomenal amount through prayer if he prays with faith and faithfulness. When that old man joins forces with others his prayers to God will increase in power exponentially.

This next week, starting on Monday we are going to have a “Five Days of Prayer” specifically for missions around the world.Why not join us.

I came back from the Pastor’s Prayer Summit this afternoon riding with Gary. When we got to JBC I got out and while I was getting my luggage out I set my iPad out on the rail of the pickup bed, and forgot it there. He made it about a mile before it slid off in the middle of the road. I used the”find it” app on my Iphone and drove right to where it was laying in the middle of the road. It looked like it had been run over a few thousand times. Because I use my iPad so much I went right into the AT&T store in Albany and bought another one. It took awhile for the nice guy in the store get everything switched over, but finally we got it all. He had a good laugh when he saw my iPad and had little difficulty selling me insurance on my new one. My old one was eight years old and my new one has a lot more bells and whistles on it, and the price was quite a bit higher as well. It is a miracle that I have kept it for eight years because I have left it in restaurants, on top of the car, motels, and I even left it on an airplane once. It is tough to get old.

It is times like this that I get to day dreaming about my new body that I am going to get when I get to heaven. The Bible says that I am going to get a body like Jesus has now. I expect that my thinking capacity is going to be amazing. I wonder what that is going to be like, to have perfect memory, amazing wisdom, and the ability to grasp and understand anything.

I get this new body that will never die, get old or tired, and will probably be able to fly. Why? Because I trusted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and am now in God’s family. There are so many people who have not accepted Jesus as their Savior, because of pride, mostly, they think they can make it on their own. I don’t know what hell is going to be like, I do know it is going to be bad. The sad thing is that becoming a follower of Jesus is free and easy, and then eternity is going to be wonderful. It is a puzzle to me why people reject that, but they do.

Right now there are 736 people signed up to get my blog via email each day. My goal is to have it grow up to 1,000 readers signed up to receive my daily blog. My first plan to increase the number of people reading daily is to make the blog very enjoyable to read. I am working hard at learning how to write in a way that holds people’s attention and teaches them new information, especially spiritual information. The result of my increased writing skill should result in an increase in the number of people reading my blog,

One of the things that you can do to help me grow my blog is to “share” it with other people suggesting that they subscribe after they read it. Just make it an automatic thing after you read it to share it. If you think one particular blog is bad then don’t share it.

Jesus declares that we will be able to accomplish more than He did because we have been given the power of prayer.

John 14:12-14 Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.

The average Christian doesn’t have very many answers to prayer because we think that God gave us prayer to make our lives more comfortable, to take away our problems and trials.

James 4:3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

Jesus gave us the “Great Commission” to reach people with the gospel so they would be transferred from an eternity with the devil to an eternity with Jesus. He gave us a big gun to help accomplish that task, a very big gun, prayer, but we waste our power.

Almost every year myself and several friends go sage rat hunting. A sage rat is like a prairie dog but smaller. They make a mess in an alfalfa hay field with all their digging so the farmers love us when we thin them out. We shoot them with 22’s and .17 HMR’s with good scopes, small caliber rifles with no recoil. One time when we went sage rat hunting one of the guys had a 375 Weatherby Magnum, one of the largest big game guns made, and he wanted to shoot it a few times at a sage rat to see if it was sighted in and what it would do! I said to him, “You gotta be kidding me! That is the biggest waste of power I have ever seen!”

Starting on Monday JBC is going to have a major prayer event when we will be praying for the salvation of people all around the world. It is our annual “Five Days of Prayer” for our missions ministry. We will be praying from 5:00 to 10:00 am and 5:00 to 10:00 pm Monday through Friday. We will have dinner each evening except Friday and the dinners will be each be from a different culture.

This is what God gave us prayer for. You would be a reason that a soul from Africa ends up in heaven forever if you would take the time to come and pray.

Way back in 1989 I went to my first Pastor’s Prayer Summit at Cannon Beach, Oregon. It was a major life changing event in my life and in my ministry. I made seven goals in regard to prayer that I have never turned back from pursuing in my life. We haven’t had the summit for the last three years because of COVID so I was really looking forward to this year and attending.

I am at the summit now and we just finished our first day that started at noon. It is fun fellowshipping with pastor friends some who I haven’t seen for several years. A lot of my friends have retired and aren’t here and there are quite a few younger guys who I don’t yet know.

I am planning on doing a lot of reflective thinking about who I am, my values, my disciplines, and my priorities. I am going over my life goals, and my ministry goals thinking about what is realistic in light of my age, energy, health, and mental desire. Sometimes my passion and positive thinking goes past reality and I frustrate myself.

The great thing about a couple of days away from my normal life saturating my time with prayer, great worship, Bible reading, scripture memory, and meditation is that I seem to be more in tune with God’s voice and will for my life.

I also am tremendously re-energized while I am here, and I recommit to some dreams and goals that I had given up on. I look forward to running with endurance the race God has given me to run, and then coming back next year and getting filled up and are-energized again.

The first time I came to the summit way back in 1989 I was fried and was planning on leaving the ministry. When I left I had re-committed my life to ministry and promised God that I would pastor as long as I could think and knew that Genesis was the first book in the Bible and that Revelation was last.

This is a picture of our Five Days of Prayer last year during our missions prayer time. We had a lot of different people show up to pray and it was a very blessed time. But there were also a lot of people who didn’t show up at all. I often wonder what causes some to pray and others to not pray. I have come to the conclusion that it is faith, some believe strongly that their time matters to God and that the more they pray the more God will work, and others don’t have much faith that there praying amounts to much of anything.

Faith is a condition of our inner man, not of our intellect. Our faith can grow strong and it also can decline and become weak and wimpy. Jesus said that with faith the size of a mustard seed not much is impossible for us to accomplish. Our faith grows fast when we are praying. Praying is a major act of faith so the act of praying when we doubt it will make any differenc is a major exercise for making our faith grow stronger and stronger. So if you want to grow strong in faith pray more. The perfect time to pray is the “Five Days of prayer” coming up Monday through Friday, Febrary 8th through the 12th. We pray from 5:00 am to 10:00 am each morning, and again 5:00 pm to 10:00 pm each evening. Come pray with us.

A Discipline is something that our flesh doesn’t like to do, the devil is going to make his best effort to keep us from doing it, but it is extremely important that we stay faithful to these disciplines for the sake of our spiritual growth, our relationship with the Lord, and our accomplishments for the Lord. In each of these disciplines, I have made a goal and I read them every day to keep me motivated to successfully do each one of them every day.

1. Read the Bible. My goal is to read 14 chapters every day.

2. Spend thirty minutes by myself praying for people in JBC, Agape, lost friends, missionaries, the government, and my family.

3. Spend thirty minutes minimum in memorizing scripture verses and meditating on them.

4. Read 20 pages in a good book, so that I can remain a learner and a thinker all of my life.

5. Listen to a podcast or a audio recording of a good sermon.

6. Write in my journal about discoveries about myself and life that will help me grow. Also to use my writing in my journal as a time of personal confession of sin.

7. Write my blog everyday. I pray and ask God to give me a special anointing from Him so that I write well, and that many would take the time to read it.

8. Read my goals. I have 75 goals but many of them are goals that I write every year that I put on the list of my goals because I show my goals to lots of people to motivate them to set goals, so mine are a model and and example for them. So the number of goals that I write out to read every day is about 40.

9. Exercise by either riding my stationary bike or lifting weights for one hour every day. This discipline is super important to keep my Parkinson’s under control.

10. Pray my prayer of commitment every morning presenting myself to the Lord as my Lord and me as His servant, and asking for wisdom and strength to serve Him well.

11. Write my “todo” list for the next day.

12. Tell Patty I love her five times every day, spend time talking with her, and go on a date twice each month.

I read 14 chapters each day in the Bible. My goal is 12 but I almost always read 14 so I am going to change my goal. I read 2 chapters in the Old Testament, Genesis through Malachi, minus Psalms and Proverbs. That gets me through the Old Testament once a year. I read 5 chapters in Psalms each day, getting me through Psalms every month. I read 1 chapter each day in Proverbs and because there is 31 chapters in Proverbs I read it through each month. I read 2 chapters in the gospels, then Acts and Revelation. That gets me through those six books four times in the year. I read 4 chapters each day in the Epistles, Romans through Jude, and I get through them every month. That reading schedule seems like a lot but I can read it easily in 45 minutes. Reading the Epistle, Psalms and Proverbs every month and the Gospel, Acts and Revelation four times a year and the Old Testament once, is a lot of Bible that will transform your thinking. I also spend one hour every day memorizing Bible verses and meditate on them. That discipline not only gets God’s Word down into my heart but it improves my memory and my ability to think and ponder and solve problems. Make a goal to read every day. Figure out a plan and schedule and only compromise on the schedule for things that matter. The people who keep their plan are those in an accountability group. I have a goal of starting six new groups this year.

This an old picture. I didn’t catch any fish today, but I promised you I would show you a picture of a fish so I dug this one out. Today was a good day. It didn’train, it was relatively warm, there was hardly any other boats on the river, and the fellowship was great.

I enjoy fishing very much so I fish every chance I get and as often as I can. Why? Because I enjoy the challenge of catching fish. Fishing is the activity, catching is the reward. I enjoyed today because the challenge and the reward are intact, but if I went fishing 20 times and caught no fish the reward would be gone and the challenge as well, and I would quit fishing.

I ride my stationary bike most nights for an hour because the health benefits are real and measurable. I read my Bible every day and memorize and meditate on scripture because of the huge rewards that come into my life for that activity. Identifying the rewards in life helps us prioritize our activities in life and to stay motivated.