Series: 365

99 – Embedded Human Powers

Deep in each of us, in our very nature, beneath our DNA, beyond our choices, in the common traits of each human soul, God placed an unrivaled flow of power. This flow is like an aquifer; it must be first tapped and then capped. It’s power is infinite, charged by the Power of the Living Creator God Himself.

This power is available to everyone, but God limits our access to it so we can prepare, training our skills and our character first. But, this power cannot be accessed by some gimmick or trickery. There are no shortcuts. The well leading to deeper and deeper levels of power is only drilled through the essence of the teaching from God’s Word.

This does not mean that quoting random Bible verses will help you tap into your embedded power. God’s Word has its own core, “essential” ideas that can only be absorbed, like a sponge, through regular exposure and drenching. These ideas of God’s Word are not any strange mystery that a pontiff must divine and unlock; it simply takes time and familiarity.

God programmed us with this power locked away inside of ourselves, then gave us the instructions on how to access it. Those instructions are encoded in events of history, letters, poetry, even ideas we get today while pondering what Moses’s Sacrificial Law meant for Israel thousands of years ago. While we ponder the contents of God’s Word, a well drills in our hearts, breaking through one impenetrable layer after another, reaching deeper and deeper treasures and sources of strength and power.

This power can give us insight, wisdom in the moment, innovative imagination that prospers, strength for unimaginable prayer and splendid miracles, even supernatural powers to heal and more. We don’t know what all abilities we have except that comic book superheroes don’t do justice to the powers we have buried inside each of us. The important part to learn is temperance and self control first.

God will unlock more and more abilities in your life as you improve your character. He won’t give a lightning rod to a child tyrant. Let God’s Written Guidance embed itself into your heart you will grow unimagined powers.

100 – God the All Wise

Any of our own wisdom found its origin in God. All wisdom flows from Him—whether the wisdom we gain by seeking or the wisdom we gain with age and hard knocks.

God’s wisdom is not merely a kind of “cheating” based on His knowledge of everything. If God were to take a test He would pass by mere virtue of knowing the answer key. Having all academic knowledge would not necessarily mean that God would pass the test because most of our tests expect the wrong answers because our incomplete knowledge of science is flawed in light of His perfection. But, none of God’s vast knowledge relates to His separate nature of being infinitely and eternally wise.

Even without being the epitome of a living encyclopedia, God would know how to handle any and every situation. God could defeat the devil even without being all powerful or all knowing because He still possesses the wisdom of how to handle situations correctly.

God’s pure wisdom was demonstrated in Jesus’s early life. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. He had to learn to speak and walk, yet through his life he pursued and gained an enormous collection of “nuggets of wisdom” because he was born merely with the infinite, God-sized love for wisdom itself. In this sense, Jesus was the wisest “old soul” there ever was or will be.

Jesus was born with the eternal and perfect essence of wisdom, but the actual “nuggets” of wise thinking he thus gained as he grew up. God demonstrates His wisdom perfectly through His Son, Christ Jesus of Nazareth.

In Jesus’s adulthood, he knew how to answer the Pharisees and scribes because his perfect pursuit of wisdom from childhood had given him the understanding so that he knew what to say, even when he did not have the greater position of authority over the leaders who confronted him.

Jesus shared this wisdom in his teaching, advising us on relationships and confrontation with authority. Likewise, God teaches us wisdom throughout the Bible. Solomon asked God for wisdom and God granted it to him. You too can receive wisdom. All you need to do is ask from the infinitely wise God.

101 – Know Your Own Minimum Work

If a requirement can’t be met, there is no need to discuss the matter further. If the facts are wrong or unknown, nothing can be done until the truth be known. If it’s not your responsibility, don’t think another moment of it.

Focus on the difference you can make, for better or worse. Always prepare for the unexpected, give forethought to future situations, but don’t fantasize about things beyond your stewardship. Be considerate of others and be concerned about your own responsibility, not vice versa.

The world has no shortage of nosy people minding other people’s businesses. Nor is there any lack of dreamy managers designing artwork to paint the outside walls of a building while its foundations crumble. Everything has a minimum and everyone has his own business; keep your laser focus there.

Multiple projects and forked approaches aren’t bad. Single-product, single-service business models may work for some people while other people’s “single” mission is to have many smaller, related missions. Don’t confuse diversity with distraction. You can pursue many venues as long as you know the minimum needed to keep the ship afloat and don’t neglect it.

At the negotiating table, too much energy is wasted on posturing, “I don’t need you, but I want you,” chatter. East Asians love to gang up on the Western business prospect in their meetings. Don’t get lost. Steer your way through any kind of sales pitch, business proposal, suggestion to change your methods and mission—keep your direction my knowing you minimum and asking for neither more nor less.

If you can change your mind after an hour of niggling, you owe a consulting fee for help with “visioning”. Think through in advance. The, treat the meeting as a fact-finding mission; listen, understand, ask questions, learn.

It’s hard to stay focused on delivering a package you don’t recognize. But, when you know your minimum mission, you’ll have the guiding light to travel lightweight. What you need and don’t need along your journey won’t require a committee. Decisions can be made at the drop of a hat because, frankly, you’ve already made those decisions. You know your minimums, everything else is a matter of walking it out.

102 – Train your Snap Habits

Train your snap reactions—not swearing, kindly rebuking, strategic reaction, driving, family decisions, et cetera. Too much occurs in life to anticipate every circumstance or calculate how to respond. In essence, this means living by principles. More specifically, it means ingraining your principles into your habits so that acting on your principles becomes second nature.

Consider news, politics, and business. By automatically presuming, “If everyone is doing it, I won’t,” you will keep your business unique—and thus “necessary”—, you won’t be shocked by what happens in the news, and you will know the political climate enough to adapt in advance. Just the same, the principle from Jesus, “Build your house on the rock,” will tell you which governments, economies, and companies will collapse and which will last. Then, when the billionaires and newspapers try to tell you where they hope you should invest in, you’ll be smart enough to know, “They lie to their people. It won’t last.” Then, when stock sinks like ENRON and GM, and everyone is in panic, you’ll say, “They didn’t pay taxes, so they weren’t profiting, I don’t care what the accountants say about GAAP.”

But, these must be habits.

As you approach 40 years old, many practices in your life will become habits. Then, you’ll mostly live on autopilot, all the while thinking, “I’m tired.” So, wisely choose your habits before that time arrives, lest your habits choose themselves.

It is vital to train these habits early on and include among them innovation and “flexibility” as key habits. You do not want your habits to be dependent on geopolitical paradigms nor technology, which always change. The best way to remain flexible with the times, as a habit, is to learn outdated technology and artisan craftsmanship. Learning to type, for example, write cursive or calligraphy, playing older video games, occasionally dressing old school, using transportation means from 100 years ago, studying steam engines and traditional sand casting—these will help you see technology in a transcendent way. If you do that, then technology will be for you a river, not a pillar, meaning you will flow in technological changes, even in your old age, merely as a habit.

103 – End Times Evangelism

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Gospel of Jesus had made its way into every formal nation on Earth, with a smattering of “sub-nations” that have not heard about Jesus. Jesus commanded his disciples to preach the Gospel to every nation and said that the End would be near once every nation had heard; this means that we are in “End Times” by “Biblical” definition from that specific teaching of Jesus. This “Gospel” is the message that the one and only Son of God had died on a Roman Cross to atone for all humanity’s sins, otherwise punishable in the afterlife and thus a curse in this lifetime. “Nations” is Greek for “peoples” or “ethnic groups”; “evangelism” is the Greek verb for “telling Gospel”.

In the New Testament, “missions” focused on introducing the message of Jesus to people for the first time, then maintaining correspondence, distance discipleship, and cooperation. This correspondence comprises much of the New Testament—letters written to the very first Christians, organized collectively by city.

“Missions” today is much different since most of the “introduction” phase has already been completed. This has many ramifications, among them is the need to teach Christians about deeper things of God beyond the basic news that Jesus atoned our sin. Miracles, healing, and prophetic experiences show us more about God’s love; they are part of understanding God’s Word in its fullness. The New Testament teaches us to progress and grow in God this way.

Another ramification is that most people we encounter in our day-to-day lives have already heard about Jesus—they need “clarification” about who Jesus is. One of the best ways is through miracles; miracles are difficult to debate.

But, from the beginning, “evangelism” was never a quest to persuade people, but a quest to find them. Once shown the real Jesus, people only reject him because they want to. Evangelism about Jesus isn’t a sales pitch; it’s a message to which people respond and inasmuch identify themselves as already having their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. If spreading the message of Jesus is about “finding” rather than “selling”, it should be easier to do and easier to accept.

104 – God of Higher Ways and Higher Thoughts

God is more than the Creator of all things; He is the inventor. He imagined everything even before He created it. He is infinitely imaginative.

God’s ideas and methods are even more incomprehensible than the incomprehensible nature that He created us in.

Some things God will not explain to us simply because it’s not possible for us to understand. Other things we would easily understand, but God chooses not to tell us for good reason—and it is those reasons that we are incapable of understanding.

A father on the south side of Chicago told his eight year old son to get out of the street. The son defiantly asked him why. “I’m a forty year old man,” the dad answered. “If you can understand my thinking, what does that say about me?”

While we make our plans, God looks down from His higher viewpoint and sees many more things than we see. Our logistics and limitations are much smaller than the immensely bigger picture that God sees. While we may think we have everything worked out—for how we plan to do a thing or how a thing will happen—God already has a better idea.

Hopefully, with an ongoing prayer life in God, our plans will not attempt to outsmart or conflict with God. We certainly don’t need to consider something He might have overlooked. As we mature in God, our plans should try to align themselves with God’s plans. Most importantly in this, our plans must account for the fact that our plans will always remain incomplete by definition.

“Godly” planning will have enormous gaps that read “this is where God has to do something because I’m clueless”, but then we execute the parts of the plan that fall into our responsibility. The insight to know which parts are which comes with a lot of time, a lot of Bible study, a lot of prayer, and a lot of very exciting journeys with God.

The Bible itself being God’s Word will be above our own understanding and will teach higher ways and methods. Studying the Bible will help us to get less unaccustomed to the God Whose ways are higher than ours.

105 – Forgive unto Unoffense

An underlying key of being approachable and disarming is to truly—in your heart, in the quiet moments, in your thought life, in the tiring and difficult stories—be impossible to offend; be unoffendable.

Offense is sneaky. It always convinces its victims of their “justified” opinions; the more accurate term is “indignant”. Offense is the mask of self-righteousness. It is the claim that oneself is in any kind of position to decide what actions of others are right or wrong.

Even if someone murders you in cold blood, you—being human like all of us needing redemption from Jesus—are too drunk on sin to know why or how the murder was unjust. Only Jesus is fair and just enough to make the ruling on even your own murder.

Wrong is wrong still, but you and I cannot be judge, jury, and executioner.

The great lie from the demons of Offense is, “Letting go of the emotions against the offender equates to agreeing that the offender was right.” Nothing could be farther from the truth or deeper from the pit of Hell.

The anti-Christian mind cannot comprehend the difference between forgiveness and agreement. We all must learn forgiveness, every day, no matter how old we get. We never actually learn to forgive; but some learn to keep fighting back the possibility of being offendable.

On some levels, “forgiveness” is a financial term, meaning to wipe out a debt. In life, it means to “not seek blood or payment” of what someone did to you, nor even restitution. In Christianity, that means “collecting repayment from Jesus”.

Financial comes first: Give up the need to collect on damages owed. Just ask Jesus to repay your loss double, don’t seek repayment one cent from the offender, and see what Jesus does. If the offender pays you, give it to charity. Then, your emotional freedom can follow.

We still need to fire people. We must hold our watch and stand for our standards. Just drop your rage about it. Drop the logical arguments about it from your mind. “Forgive” emotionally until you can return kindness. Kindness returned for injury gets under the offender’s skin, bringing everyone much more justice.

Proverbs 15:3, Matthew 6:14-15, Colossians 3:12-13