Happy Birthday America

On July 4, 2026, America will turn 250 years old. What an amazing country. The American Revolution produced a country of self-government with a framework constitution that has protected our democracy. Thirteen years after the American War of Independence, the French Revolution occurred. This revolution was very different; it sought to eliminate its own citizens- everyone who disagreed or who might potentially disagree. These kinds of revolutions have occurred in Russia, China, and many other places. The Constitution has guided us with the blessings of God, and for that we are thankful.

Amazingly, this country has survived the many threats to our democracy, including the Civil War. Now we face a threat from those who want to change this country into a communist country, even though Communism has failed wherever it has been tried, except for those in power. They live very differently from the hordes of people held in its grip. Russia, China, North Korea, and Cuba are examples of governments that control their people and allow very little freedom. Freedom is the one thing they are most afraid of—because when people taste freedom, they will fight to keep it.

Although the War of Independence would be fought for eight long years, and most of those years it appeared the United States would lose. It was mostly a war of perseverance; if Washington and his ragtag army could manage to hang in there, Britain would grow tired of spending so much money on a foreign war. Everything finally came together for Washington and his troops in Yorktown, Virginia, in the final year of the war. The Americans fought bravely, and the French Navy blocked the British Navy from escaping. On October 17, 1782, General Cornwallis surrendered. It was never supposed to have happened, but it did. The Thirteen Colonies were free, and the war was finally over.

On September 17, 1787, the United States Constitution was passed in Congress and ratified by the states on June 21, 1788. What a wonderful document our founding fathers gave us. It has endured these 250 years and has preserved our freedom and liberty. There have been times when it has been assailed from all sides, and it is still attacked today. We pray that it will be safeguarded and remain a beacon of hope and light for our country. God was with our nation at its founding, and we need Him with us now to restore our faith in Him as a nation. We need God today more than ever.

 

 

 

Giving Thanks

Gratitude has the power to transform our attitude and outlook on life. Gratitude is like a person traveling to their destination guided by GPS. To the contrary, the ungrateful struggles to reach his destination, making wrong turns, backtracking, and turning on one-way streets the wrong way. Most of all, he does not enjoy the journey, yelling at those in his way and blaming everyone but himself for his frustrating trip. Gratitude is like a power transformer, converting the powerful electrical current into usable electricity your house needs. Gratitude takes everything that comes at us and makes sense of it.

Have you noticed how being upset about something can change your whole day, while being thankful can make it better? For example, you find yourself anxious about a problem at work, waiting for it to get your attention. The more you think about it, the more nervous and irritated you become. Conversely, suppose you begin your day thinking about how fortunate you are to have your job. It’s a stable job that provides you with a good income despite the challenges that come along. Just thinking about what you have, rather than what you do not have, changes your mood. You are a very different person when you arrive at your workplace. Gratitude actually changes the way we think, act, and even look. It can even put a smile on your face. Gratitude gives a person a sense of purpose and adds meaning to their life.

This is a favorite holiday for many of us because it is a time to get together with family and relax. Even more, it is a time to reflect on the things we have to be thankful for. Life has a way of keeping us occupied, leaving us with very little time to reflect on our many blessings. Modern-day marketing focuses on what we do not have, thus making us incomplete until we buy what they promise will complete us. It is a strategy that has made billions for businesses but has left the consumer feeling very empty. The truth is that our contentment is not found in this world. It is found in our Creator. The more we know him, love him, and serve him, the more content we find ourselves.

 

Remembering What Is Important

 Scientists say that we never forget anything. How can that be, you say, since we seem to forget a lot? The mind stores what happens, but we do not necessarily recall those things until we are reminded of them. Something has to unlock it.

Repression is a defense mechanism that we all use from time to time. It causes us to deny what is painful. We push down into our subconscious those things we want to forget. People repress feelings of guilt, grief, anger or anything we don’t want to think about. We manage to push the painful to one side in order to get past something very difficult. Oddly enough, sometimes, we repress the good things in life as we learn the habit of repressing the bad—it spills over to the good.

We must be taught gratitude, and then we still have to work at it to keep it fresh. Moses warned  Israel about forgetting: “Be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Deuteronomy 6:12).

Prosperity tends to make us forget the good things God has done for us. We often take our health for granted, but we only have to get sick to be reminded of what we have. We should be thankful if we have a job and a good income. Thank God for the air we breathe. I once got choked at a banquet and could not breathe. A man noticed that I was struggling, so he performed the Helmick maneuver on me, and the piece of meat in my throat came unwedged. I was never so thankful to be able to breathe freely. We take for granted the sunlight, a shelter from the rain, a warm bed from the cold. We need to be thankful for food to eat and our family around us.  

David speaking to himself said: “Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits —  who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. (Psalm 103:2-5).

It is a great joy when one remembers our name. R.T. Kendall in (Just Say Thanks) told about a friend who works as a chaplain in a hospital for people suffering psychiatric disorders where a lady walked up and down the hall day after day crying out so sadly, “Does anybody here know my name?

God knows our name, and he doesn’t forget it. Isaiah wrote: “he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). Isaiah again reminds us of this: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15).

Reasons to be Thankful

 

Gratitude is being thankful with a willingness to show appreciation for what you have received. I want to list five reasons to be
grateful.

First, gratitude opens our eyes to what we have received. It says, look around—these things came to you from God and others. Gratitude gives us a perspective that helps us live in the now and not in the next anticipated stage of life. Some people so long for the future to come they don’t live in the present. Gratitude says, “This is my life, and these are the people in my life, and I am going to enjoy them.”

Second, gratitude helps me focus on the good and not the bad, on what I have and not on what I don’t have. It is not hard to see the bad in our world and even the bad in people, but we will be discouraged if that is all we see. When we focus on the good—even the good that can come out of people’s lives we feel better. That is pretty much how God looks at us. He sees what we can become with his help. He doesn’t dismiss us because we don’t measure up. He extends his grace to us even though we don’t deserve it.

Third, gratitude focuses on my life and helps me differentiate between essential and unimportant. The urgent often disguises itself as the important. The pressing will keep knocking on our door, call us and demand our attention while the essential quietly waits. Gratitude slows us down and helps us say no to the unimportant even though it calls itself urgent and say yes to the important things in life.

Fourth, gratitude helps me appreciate my family and assign them the significance they deserve. The sooner we learn to see the priority of our family, the happier we will be. It takes years for some people to realize that their family matters more than money, things, and even success.

Fifth, gratitude helps me look to God as the giver of all I have. It helps me appreciate the faithfulness and mercy he has poured out over my life. This is the best of all. When we see the beauty in the setting sun or the brightness of the stars, we know it’s the creator’s work. We look around and see how good he has been to us, and we are grateful. We treasure his love for us, and we are overwhelmed with his grace.

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A Fatal Attraction

 

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that we are all making choices every day, and those choices are making us better or worse. We are changing “either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.”[i]  No one person makes all the choices correctly. The point is whether we are trying to make good choices and what do we do when we realize we have made a wrong choice. Do we correct it? Making choices based on the principles of God’s Word transforms us into people of the light, as does the wrong choices into people of darkness.

Take, for example, the sin of envy; it is an acceptable sin to many today. I have had conversations with people who will declare they don’t think it’s right that the rich have so much and they have so little. It is one of the forces driving socialism. However, no context justifies envy. Cornelius Plantinga describes the difference between covetousness and envy:

Envy is a nastier sin than mere covetousness. What an envier wants is not, first of all, what another has; what an envier wants is for another not to have. To envy is to resent somebody else’s good so much that one is tempted to destroy it. The coveter has empty hands and wants to fill them with somebody else’s goods. The envier has empty hands, and therefore wants to empty the hands of the envied. Envy, moreover, carries overtones of personal resentment: an envier resents not only somebody else’s blessing but also the one who has been blessed.[ii]

There are numerous examples of envy in the scriptures, and it is always ugly. Cain not only wanted what Able had; he wanted his brother dead. Even when offered a second chance by God, Cain chooses the inevitable consequences of envy, and that is to attack the envied. Take, for example, the envy of Saul. Saul was king and David, his servant, so it makes no sense for Saul to want what David has. This is the insanity of envy. It blinds you to what you have and makes you resentful of the other.

Envy was what drove Joseph’s brothers to their horrific deed of selling their brother into slavery. They cared nothing about owning Joseph’s beautiful coat. They tore it into pieces. What the brothers resented was Joseph having the coat. They resented him and what the coat represented. That was why they stripped him naked and beat him, and tossed him in a pit to die.

Why write about envy? Because it is rearing its ugly head in so many places. Do you want to know the greatest antidote for envy? It is gratitude! Learning to be grateful for what you have and who you are keep envy out of your life. Let’s make choices that make us more like Christ!

 

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[i] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Macmillan Publishing, New York, 1952), p. 86-87.[ii] Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 162.

Vision Sunday

In 1998, People’s Church faced an enormous trial of survival. The congregation found itself unable to meet its financial burdens because of a failed bond program. Marilyn and I were leading a Bible School in Cordoba, Argentina, when we received a call to come and lead them during this crisis. We pondered the request and sought God’s guidance and thought how ironic to return to the Church where we had served as youth pastors 23 years earlier. God had blessed us, and we found ourselves in a fruitful time of ministry in Argentina. However, we also realized that People’s Church had been an incredible partner with us in Argentina, so now would be our opportunity to help them. Although it was a difficult decision to leave Argentina, we accepted the challenge of leading the Church forward. People’s Church assumed a new mortgage of almost 1.6 million dollars as part of the solution. This new mountain of debt would take 21 years to pay off; we all wondered whether we could do it, but with God’s help, we began an arduous journey that ended in June of 2019.

The financial arrangement afforded us one year to plan for monthly payments. Our yearly income projection fell way short of making these monthly payments. In 1999, in preparation for our task, we created an account called The Joseph Fund; this fund became our strategy to prepare for these intimidating payments. Like the widow in First Kings, chapter four, all we had were empty vessels—we desperately needed God’s provision. We began raising revenue by selling everything we could, the singing Christmas tree, farming implements, a radio station, and of course, we gave weekly offerings.

About 10 years into the loan payments, we applied to another lender to get a lower interest rate. They answered, “You are too big of a risk,” so they denied our application. Although we may have looked too small and insignificant on paper to climb this mountain, God never gave up on us. He helped each step of the way—all the way to the top. This has been our financial strategy this last 20 years:

·         Keep missions front and center

·         Stay current in our financial obligations to everyone

·         Do not incur any more debt

·         Keep giving to the Joseph Fund each month

·         Keep everyone informed as to our progress

Our Vision Going Forward!

·         To invest money and resources into ministry to people

·         To implement effective ministries that reach our community

·         To continue to improve our facilities with needed renovations

·         To save for future projects

·         To increase our missions giving in greater capacity