365 – Page 16 – Watch. Stand. Pray.

106 – Never Threaten

The very act of making any kind of threat means the threat-maker has become unhinged. Listen, understand, make your case, then accept and confirm their response. Let your actions in the days and years to follow be your rebuttal. Develop a reputation for meaning what you say the first time. Make sure people know, by your actions, that you respond without second warning—your initial conversation was the first and only warning.

If you catch a murder on tape, don’t walk up to the killer and threaten to go to the authorities if he doesn’t turn himself in. He already knows he did what is wrong. Lay low, keep quiet, survive, and report the crime as soon as you can. If a police officer is wrong in his work on the street and you can prove it, never tell him. Suggest that he do what is right once at most. After that, be diplomatic, be respectful, say, “Yes sir,” as often as you can, then go home and make sure he never works in law enforcement again.

This does not work the same relationships. A police officer has authority and force, which he can use. Never interfere with a police officer’s work on the scene, the same goes for any authority or criminal. Catching criminals safely and surely requires due process. If a revolution is in order, that must involve action on a larger, legal, respectful scale. Don’t just be a bumbling rebel. Like “tank man” who stopped the parade of tanks in China, wave around your grocery bag, then be on your way, he didn’t demand that anyone abdicate.

The Bible is clear about conflict in relationships: first one-on-one, then four at most, then the assembled authority. In a command structure, there are supervisors who must carefully review and verify at every step along the way. But, in that first one-on-one confrontation, don’t threaten to use that system; just use it. Kindly explain the right thing, the right reasons, and the right action. If the person doesn’t listen, go home and move to step two. When you must escalate, neither threaten nor warn. After all, a warning is a threat to the person being warned.

107 – Planning Makes Satisfaction

Of all the skills and subjects of school to learn, the most important lesson is the ability to control one’s time and schedule. My friend once blurted in the car, “My family doesn’t plan anything, but it’s not because we don’t know how, but because we don’t want to be committed if something better comes along.” His parents are divorced, so is he. It’s a problem for him and he says so more than I.

Good things come along from time to time. You can only catch them if you are ready. But, the best things in life can only be planned because they require preparation. Your children will live the type of life you do. If your family lives a free-spirited life, they will always be happy, but they will never be satisfied. They will hunger for something better, but they will always be chasing the next wave—always chasing the wind, yet never learning to soar—because the very best things in life can only be planned.

Parallel to planning is spontaneity. About half of God’s gifts come along without warning and if you reject everything that you don’t plan for, you will miss God’s best. Planning is not about locking down the future in your scheduling calendar, but about preparation. Preparation includes the unforeseen.

The secret to living effectively with planned spontaneity is think like a homing missile or a game of golf. First, know your general direction and stay on the fairway. If it’s a par 5, the second step is to get to the green. Third is the hole. But, you’ll never be able to “birdie” a hole unless you get years of regular practice. That means saying no to last minute movies and getting out of bed—or boogying after work—to the driving range.

Even the best golf courses offer rain checks, but no strong, healthy, toned body happens without exercise and diet being the priority. If the practice doesn’t get done, neither do the results; it doesn’t matter the excuse. “Flex days” smartly prepare spontaneity—the exception, not the rule. You must rule your time, otherwise others will rule you because they ruled their own time first.

108 – God the Holy and Patient

God is holy, which means that He is “separate”. We could say that “holiness” is a “separate kind of goodness” or “ultra-goodness”. When something “bad” happens, God does not feel threatened like a “good” person would. So, He hovers above the lesser problems of “good” and “evil”, patiently working the course of events according to His infinite wisdom and His higher ways.

God is as patient as He is because He is holy. Albeit, patience is part of the virtue of being holy.

God’s holiness—His “ultra-good, separate” nature—relates to every other attribute of His character. He is Most High because because holy and separate from all other things. Likewise, His wisdom and higher ways are, by definition, separate from our wisdom and ways. The same is true of His omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.

But, God’s holiness makes it a miracle that God is also “with us” as Emmanuel, Jesus Christ. Without being holy, Jesus could not be the Messiah who saves all people anymore than a sinking vessel could rescue drowning passengers. God must be separate and holy in order to save us and He must be ultra-good and holy to be in a position to bring us to after saving us.

Being holy makes God different from all others.

God commanded Israel to be holy just as He is holy. But, we are anything but holy. We are sinful and disobedient, quite inseparable from our fallen world. In some ways we can separate ourselves from the fallen world around us, but we cannot separate ourselves from the fallen nature of our temporary, physical bodies. So, for the remainder of this lifetime, holiness to us is more of a direction than a virtue we could actually obtain. We need to wake up and walk in the direction of holiness every day and we will never arrive.

This takes patience, which God has plenty of. God watches and still loves us. The fact that He is holy and above our problems allows Him to be patient; all the while our unholiness invites our need for Him to demonstrate His patience toward us. We can only ever be redeemed by a patient and holy God.

109 – Case for Earning

Children must earn whatever they have. It begins in the earliest stages of waking childhood, but reaches through to the end of life. If we have without earning, we become brats incapable of survival.

The overall problem among bad, fake, theatrical leaders is that they only manage momentum as it decays, long after the engine has shut off. Drilling, tapping, digging, tilling, sowing, building, beginning, initiating, sparking—to the fraudulent leader, these are “someone else’s role, because everyone has a different role”, when actually, fraudulent leaders don’t understand those things because they were never taught them in childhood.

Learning to fuel the engine and drive momentum is not any kind of inborn talent; it is a learned skill every bit as common as walking, eating, and the basics of human language. Using chopsticks and speaking with an accent have nothing at all to do with genetics. So it is with farming, kindling a campfire, and building roads. Commerce exists in every economy, just as economics and trade are universal.

People know how to initiate profitability only if they are taught through constant exposure and trial, just like walking and talking.

The parent who gives to children beyond what the children work has little difference from the parent who keels the child in the baby walker or leaves the training wheels on the bicycle and says, “See, you’re riding.”

Good looks, a naturally strong body, and a well-mannered temperament can also harm a person’s progress, making friends easy to make—and just as easy to lose. Natural talent and socially-favored genetics open doors automatically without having to learn to use a doorknob. It is the parents’ responsibility to curb the natural favors of life so that children learn that they still must work to earn what they have.

All the while, whatever we work for, we must learn to take advantage of our own, individual unfair advantages. Selling something, dressing presentably, getting a business balanced and profitable are all learned skill; art, taste, flair, style, manner—these are genetic and make each person unique. One artist in Hong Kong paints Chinese script with his mouth because lost his arms, but he has style and earns money.

110 – Everything Gets Shaken

At one point or another, sometime in life sooner or later, no matter what we create that we depend on the most—it all gets shaken.

For “churchgoers” it is the Sunday morning “Churchianity” culture that gets shaken. For the Buddhist it is Buddhism. For the Atheist it is godlessness. For the Hedonist it is the claim that indulgence gratifies. For the one who writes his own morals, his morals fail him and his life implodes. For the free spirit, he gets crushed by bureaucracy or starved by the famine. For the one who prepares, his storehouses get robbed. There will inevitably be times in life that whatever things we depend on get shaken; and whatever lasts through the shaking is of God.

Jesus told a parable of two houses, one built on sand and the other built on rock. Not “if”—when the storm came, the house built on sand crashed into a terrible wreck; the house built on rock stood sound. Jesus explained that to follow his teaching was to build a house that lasts. Remember, Jesus was a carpenter.

In his parable, the house built on rock was not exempt from the storm; it went through it. The storm was not an attack or hardship visiting itself upon the wisely-built house. The storm was from God. The only attack and hardship came from the wisely-built house upon the foolishly-built house because surviving the storm proved the last word. It was through the storm that the house wisely built on rock showed it’s “revenge by massive amounts of success” upon the house so foolishly built on sand.

It’s thinkable that the house on sand was large and on beachfront property at the same price of the smaller, less-scenic house cut into rock. But, Jesus makes no comment on the structural style of the houses, only the ground on which they were built. The key to surviving the inevitable storms of testing is not some unfathomable, expensive, elitist mystery—it is a simple choice.

Don’t let success lower your guard. The storms and shaking will come. You must be prepared, not by skills or “outsmarting”, but by being strong from simple choices of priority.

Matthew 7:24-27, Luke 6:46-49

111 – Prepare in Prayer, Don’t Wait

You can’t wait until turbulent times arrive before you develop a prayer life in God. Everything that grows grows slowly, even you, even your heart that grows by prayer and Bible.

Study God’s Word, especially the Gospels and Revelation and, quite frankly, the entire thing, especially. Know what it says. Study it. Read it. Study it.

Bad times are always waiting. Many bad people distort truth about God. They use entertainment and religious teaching—of any religion, Christianity or otherwise—to give people a view of God that’s at least partially false, so when people see God in action they don’t recognize God for Who He is. They even get their ideas about God from pop fiction, even when it runs contrary to God’s Word—and they don’t think twice about it because they study pop fiction more than they study God’s Word.

The devil is behind this, along with his band of moonlight followers—and you’d be surprised to learn who they are. It’s almost like “moonshine religion”, they even go to church knowing they worship the devil at night. Many more of them are Christians who refuse to acknowledge the lack of love and justice in their actions, constantly arguing and looking for a witch to hunt.

Wicked fools are everywhere. You can’t hunt them all down, though. God keeps them there to make sure that no one loves God without an objective choice. The solution is not to expose wickedness to the world; God will do that Himself at random times, whenever it suits Him, which always ends up bringing amazing justice.

Don’t deny evil or its followers; don’t fear evil either. The only thing you can do to strengthen yourself against evil is the best thing you can do: Grow strong by growing daily.

If you grow to withstand wicked people, you will also grow to withstand the bumps and turbulence of life. It’s all the same. The only way to be strong against shaking and testing is to grow. So, grow, remain standing after the shaking, and be celebrated by Heaven, where it matters most.

Know the world, just know God more. And remember, God must be known in advance.

112 – God the Forgiver

When God came to Moses on Mt. Sinai, He introduced Himself as the Lord God who abounds in lovingkindness and forgives the sin of thousands. From there, through the rest of the Bible, God’s demonstration of forgiveness only gets more dramatic.

Israel mad many foolish blunders throughout the Old Testament as well as the New, but God keeps forgiving.

In the desert, they would sin, then repent, and God would forgive. Through the period of judges, Israel would cycle through sin and repentance again and again, but God just kept forgiving. David sinned greatly, yet God forgave him. When Israel’s sin got so out of hand that God sent Babylon, Israel later repented and God forgave them again. Even the foolish prophet Jonah repented for running from God and God saved him and continued to teach Jonah even in his impatience. When Nineveh repented at Jonah’s prophecy, God forgave Nineveh.

Ultimately, God sent Jesus to offer himself for our sin so that all people who repent and turn to God can be forgiven—those who believe in Jesus after hearing about him as well as salvation for those who repented to God inasmuch as they knew before Jesus came to Earth.

God allowed His only son to sacrifice himself for us just so He could forgive us. God is the God Who forgives.

Forgiveness is often mistaken in Western culture for a “release of anger and bitter resentment”. Actually, forgiveness is nothing of the sort. Forgiveness is a financial term meaning to relinquish any collection of a debt owed. When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, he said, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” A sin is a debt and when God forgives sin, it means that He will not expect money, sweat, blood, or our souls as repayment for what we owe Him.

God forgave our debt—our sin—because Jesus paid it all at the Cross.

When anyone comes humbly and asks God’s forgiveness, He never turns them away. Just as God forgives all who ask, you too can forgive others, not only because your debt does not need to be repaid, but also from God’s own infinite forgiveness.

Exodus 34:6, Psalm 86:14-17; 103:8-14, Isaiah 57:16-21, Matthew 6:14-15, Luke 6:37; 17:3-4