Month: June 2017

The Big 6-0!

Happy Birthday to me! I’ve reached the big 6-0. It’s hard for me to believe I’m sixty years old. As so many people say, “I don’t feel that old.” I really don’t, most of the time, anyway. Over the past week I’ve been reflecting on my fifties, and significant truths I’ve learned and applied in my life, so today, I look forward to this golden decade of life. I read a quote from Bob Biehl recently that said the sixties ought to be one’s most productive decade of life. I’m certainly seeing it that way. While I don’t have the physical capacity to work as I once did, the knowledge and wisdom I’ve accumulated along the way along with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit more than make up for the physical deficits.

More than anything I’m grateful to have the opportunity to live and move and have my being in Jesus Christ, and to be serving Him effectively as I launch into my sixties.  Life is a gift and when I was young I often took it for granted. Now, I wake up everyday and thank God for the gift of another day of life. I’m grateful for the Holy Spirit’s constant presence, guidance and direction in my life. I’m grateful for Nancy and enjoy living life together with her more with each passing season of our lives. She and I have always been so opposite in our personalities, but we’ve been hitting our stride in making those differences work together to create a better and better marriage as the days, weeks, months and years pass. I feel sorry for those who gave up on their marriages in the early years or even decades, and never got to enjoy the growing unity that decades together create when God is leading.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to do meaningful work to advance God’s Kingdom, and to do it with a staff of fantastic people who love Jesus and their particular ministries. As we work together the results are so encouraging. Once again, the application of perseverance over time, and following God’s leading is producing a church I’m so glad to be here to experience and help lead.

As we reach various milestones in our lives, they provide us the opportunity and to remember once again that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, regardless of our age. As I reflect on the first sixty years and look forward to the days, months and years ahead, if the Lord wills, I am filled with gratitude for the past and hope for the future. I’m looking forward to waking up to a great many more days of serving Jesus in, through and beyond New Life.

I hope wherever you are on the timeline of your life that you are grateful for God’s work and hopeful for His future in your life. Why not take a moment right now to reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going? Thank God for all He’s done, and call on Him to fill you anew with the Holy Spirit that you may continue to serve Him well.

Here’s to leading better, by pausing to reflect on where you’ve been and where you’re going–today!

The Last Week of My 50’s

As I reflect on the last week of my 50’s–and I’m now down to the last two days of my 50’s–the most significant development of this decade for me has been what happened during my spring retreat this year in early May. I’ve already recounted some of the impact from the retreat, but the most significant lasting aspect of that time, and one that is going to last into my 60’s in a powerful way, provided God gives me time in my 60’s is the reality that when Jesus told us we must “lost our souls, in order to find them,” and the necessity of “taking up our cross daily” He was talking about the daily necessity of “crucifying” our souls-our minds, emotions and wills–and letting the Holy Spirit “resurrect” them. I got this truth from Watchman Nee’s book The Normal Christian Life.

It has made such an impact in a short time. Over the past month, during my daily prayer time I have told God, “I lay my soul before you–mind, emotions and will. Crucify them so I will live in the power of Your Holy Spirit and not in my own, selfish will, feelings or intellect.” I don’t say it in exactly those words each day, but the point is I want God to be in charge of my mind, emotions and will, and not me. As I read and reflected on Nee’s point in The Normal Christian Life that each of the gospel writers records a different moment and context when Jesus told us we must lose our souls in order to find or save them, I realized He had understood a powerful, biblical concept I had somehow skipped over all these years. The reality in my life has been an understanding that the world (or I) have no need of my best, whether it be the best of my brain power, or the most passionate of my emotions or the most determined set of my will. What I need and what the world needs from me is to submit my brain power, my passion and my determined will to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Only then, does God’s will and purpose get done in and through me.

If we are going to be the best leaders we can at home, in the church, out in the world, wherever we’re leading, we must offer the folks we lead God’s best in us.  God doesn’t want to wipe out our personalities, or our intellect, our emotions or our wills. God wasn’t to empower them in ways we will never accomplish apart from Him. Dr. Dick Eastman mentioned that a Korean pastor who toured the United States some years ago, visiting many of the larger churches was asked at the conclusion of his tour, “What did you think?” The pastor replied, “It is amazing what the American Church has been able to do…without God.”

Whoa. When I heard that I thought, “How often do I do something ‘without God,’ that is without submitting my soul to Him?” I am quite careful to pray before I preach, while I prepare messages and studies, and yet many times I was asking God to “baptize” my efforts, my study. The goal is not to empty our minds and not to study, not to work, but the difference I’m talking about is confessing to God that nothing good starts in or with me. My mind is always going to be tainted with sin, with selfishness, with a motivation to put me in a good light. Only when I offer my mind up to God, when I “crucify” it can He “resurrect” it through the Holy Spirit’s power and use it to His glory.

This change of emphasis has brought about such significant changes in just a month, that I list it as the most important development of my fifties. On a daily basis, I have been learning what it means to live with the Holy Spirit not just present but in charge of my soul. Do I fail at keeping Him in charge? Definitely! I am at the “conscious learned” stage in the process of learning to live with the Holy Spirit resurrecting my soul. (If you’re not familiar with the four stages of learning they are: 1) Unconscious unlearned (you don’t know you don’t know something.); 2) conscious unlearned (you know you don’t know something.); 3) conscious learned (you now know the information, or the process, but you have to think to implement it.) and; 4) unconscious learned (you can access the information or implement the process without thinking about it.) That means I need to think often about whether the Holy Spirit is in charge of a mental process I’m using to prepare a lesson, or a blog post, for example. One day, I’ll move on to the place where the Holy Spirit is guiding my soul without much conscious effort.

As you go about your day today, stop to consider whether you have given the Holy Spirit permission to guide your mind, emotions and will. Have you “crucified” them, lost your soul to use Jesus’ term, so that you can find them in Him? This is a crucial question, and makes incredible difference in how we approach nearly everything we do. That’s why I list it as the most important learning of my 50’s. I hope you learn or have learned it much sooner in your life.

Here’s to leading better, by taking the time to give the Holy Spirit control of your soul–today! (and everyday!)

The Last Week of My 50’s

As I live the last week of my 50’s and consider some of the most significant growth that took place during them, something that happened at the beginning of my 50’s has had powerful effect throughout them: God showed me how to overcome a life-long battle with anger. I grew up in an angry household, my dad was an angry man. His father before him had been an angry man, as had his father. We had a generational curse of anger going in our family. I inherited the anger, too. By the time I was five, I had already learned that when things didn’t go my way the natural response was anger.

While I surrendered my life to Jesus at the age of twelve, my anger problem didn’t go away. Even when I went to seminary and became a pastor, the anger problem persisted. I prayed for God to remove it. I asked God forgiveness over and over again after an outburst of unrighteous anger, and promised not to do it again. Then something big or usually small would happen and I would explode again. While I managed the anger for the most part, it surfaced regularly, and while I never became violent, or hurt anyone, it was a poor testimony and it ate away at me.

In my early 50’s I read a book by Gary Smalley titled Change Your Heart, Change Your Life. The book contained a simple truth: whatever the sin you struggle with in your life has been “written” on your heart. In order to overcome it, you must “overwrite” the sin, with a truth from God that “erases” it. It sounds simple, and easy, and it was. While I could have chosen many verses dealing with anger to overwrite the life-long incidents of anger that were in my heart, I chose the Golden Rule, Luke 7:12: In all things do to others what you would have them do to you. This sums up the Law and the Prophets. I prayed the verse over and over. I asked God to use it to change my heart. When everyday situations came up that moved my heart to its typical anger, I would pray, “God let me do to that person/driver/cashier what I would want to have done to me.” In a matter of days, I noticed a difference. I was in the conscious learned stage, but I was catching the anger sooner, and overwriting it with a call for God to give me the power of His Spirit to do what I would want to have done in the situation.

As the months passed the incidents of anger reduced dramatically. Now, as I near the end of my 60’s, I find most of the time I’m living at the unconscious learned level when it comes to anger. In other words, I don’t have to think about not “blowing up” any more. Yes, occasions still occur when it flares up. In those moments, I go back to the conscious mode of asking God to fill me with the Holy Spirit and to do what I would want to have done to me. But more and more, I have hours of victory and sometimes whole days.  That never happened in my teens, twenties, thirties or forties.

What about you? Do you have a signature sin that’s written on or in your heart? Do you confess it, repent of it and promise God you won’t do it again, only to have it show up again in minutes, hours or days? If you do, I recommend the process I mentioned. God’s word is true and His Holy Spirit is powerful. We know that, but sometimes we need to be reminded. I also recommend the Smalley’s book as an excellent resource for helping you overcome whatever it is that is holding you back from living victoriously as a person and leader in Jesus’ name.

Here’s to leading better by addressing any sin that has overwritten your heart–today!