Author: watchstandpray

169 – Two Great Commands: Sequence, not Hierarchy

The Pharisees condescendingly asked Jesus which command was the greatest. Jesus silenced them in an already silenced crowd by saying that there were two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength; and the second one like it, love your neighbor as yourself. This, Jesus explained, summarized the entire Old Testament from Moses’s writings through the last of the prophets.

The religious teachers who thought to make Jesus look foolish with their academia didn’t know how to respond because they didn’t understand the Scriptures enough to see them for what they were. They missed the whole point and couldn’t the forest for the trees. Samuel told Saul that God wanted obedience more than ritual sacrifice. The Psalmist and Hosea taught the same thing: Old Testament Law is for our benefit; God does not delight in the rules themselves. God wants us to live and prosper. But, it all begins with loving Him the most and consequentially loving His Image, our fellow Man.

The command to love God is not greater than the second, it is “the first and great” command, “the second” is to love our neighbor—not more than ourselves, but just as we love ourselves at the same time. The sequence is the essence and the secret to both: One cannot love God actually without consequentially loving people; one cannot love people without loving God first.

In much the same way, no one can feel love from other people without first feeling loved by God. Spending time with God—thinking about His love for you, your love for Him, your love of being loved by Him—is not time wasted. If you remain there forever then you never were actually there. Time spend loving God, with neither distractions nor actions, will boil up love inside the heart. We can’t love without loving God and we can’t love God and not love.

Lack of love throughout the world continues when second things aren’t second. The Great Commandment, to love God, was first. If you make Jesus’s First Great Commandment your first commandment to follow throughout your life, other needs and pursuits will line up as they get in line behind.

Psalm 51:16, 1 Samuel 15:22, Hosea 6:6, Matthew 22:29-40

168 – Jesus the Wise

Jesus was wise in ways we cannot fully know. Even working as a carpenter had its wisdom. John writes that Jesus did so many things that the world couldn’t contain enough books to tell it all. From what we do know of Jesus’s life in the New Testament, much of his wisdom shows in his conversations.

In prayer and study, Jesus came to understand God the Father in personal fellowship. Don’t think that Jesus’s knowledge and wisdom were downloaded to his brain—that would not be perfect. Jesus was perfect and a perfect human is a human who never stops learning.

Humans must expand and study, pray and grow. The Bible says that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. As a perfect human, as he pursued God through Scripture and prayer, God would reveal to him who he was.

In this way, Jesus sets the example for all of us. Through persistent prayer and daily Bible exposure, God will reveal to you who you are. You will know your mission, purpose, gifting, calling, abilities, uniqueness, and even choices in your heart that you are unaware of.

Heaven rejoices over you because of your uniqueness, but you will only know why if you pursue Heaven’s knowledge through daily prayer and Bible. This is the beginning of wisdom and it is the reason Jesus was so wise as he was.

With the religious teachers and their word traps, Jesus cut to the heart of the matter. He knew God the Father and the Pharisees never could because loving God is necessary to know God.

When the Sadducees asked about the resurrection, Jesus explained what Heaven is like and that the error in their question showed that they neither understand God’s Word or God’s power.

When the Pharisees asked about the greatest command of Moses’s Law, Jesus explains the two Great Commands that sum up Moses’s Law as well as the Old Testament Prophets. Jesus knew this, but the Pharisees never considered it because, though they may have Moses’s Law memorized, they don’t know what it means.

Jesus didn’t answer these ways because he was cute with twisting arguments, but because he truly understood the issues.

Matthew 21: 23-27; 22:23-46, Luke 2:52

167 – Winning Is Wearisome Work

The troubles and struggles along the pathway to any victory ought be expected. Unfortunately many of the world’s mentors skip this lesson with their pupils. Athletic coaches talk about it, but institutional establishments paint a very different and false picture—that diligent homework makes friends and a shoe-in financial statement. But, that’s just propagandist brainwashing for institutions to make obedient minions, rewarding them with frictionless perks.

Real victory is bloody, sweaty, and teary. Consider the trailblazers and pioneers of the Wild West. Anything new, fresh, and growing will cut into the wild and untame. Anyone who does new, fresh, and growing work will adapt one’s tastes to find comfort and familiarity in the fray.

Institutions and establishments, by contrast, sterilize their environments before entering. If the masses allow—and sometimes they do—institutions will raze the jungle, mill the logs into poles, and plunge them back into the ground like a field of giant toothpicks where trees once stood, labeling it a “better” forest to explore. But, nature is organic and spontaneous.

Each tree, each grass and moss and bird and critter thrive uniquely—differently yet in kind. Life sprawls with ordered chaos having a purpose necessary to biological progress. That life is strong and powerful, able to overcome… whatever—even a forest fire, even nuclear fallout. Consider the environment around Chernobyl.

The bumpy, irregular path of real life makes us tired. Enemies return flack when the good guys make progress. Wisdom tells us this is normal. But, institutions see the unique irregularities of life as a nuisance and it makes them depressed. Thus, institutions and their teachers pass on their depression to their pupils—to their minions. To hear any institutional culture speak of life is disheartening. It has neither spunk nor spark, completely deflated and complacent.

“It’s so hard,” they say. “I don’t know how I’ll make it, but I’ll keep going a little longer. This life isn’t easy, full of trouble.” For the so-called “godly” institutions, they inject “institutional hope”—”God will come help me some day and rescue me from this depressing existence.” Such is lifeless Institutionalism.

Know this truth and thrive: Winners are not weary as victims, but as victors.

166 – The Holistically Holistic Life

In life, we learn and grow, choose and become. One single human life contains an equilibrium to itself, made up of whatever morals we held, skills we learned, self-control we gained, strength we grew, knowledge we discovered, truth we accepted, friends we earned, enemies we notarized, fruits we yielded, gratitude we gave, and beauty we beheld.

Skill, hard work, learning, and stewardship are some pieces of a much larger ecosystem. All of the components of a healthy life can never be exhausted or listed since living life includes searching out what it means to live. Knowledge becomes outdated or added to. Stuff we gain from good stewardship decays and blows away in the wind. But, things like character and virtue matter eternally. From hard work and stewardship, we cannot help but gain good character and godly virtue because good character and godly virtue both require and lead to hard work and fruitful stewardship. But, the actual work and stewardship themselves are mere means to the greater ends of enjoyment and godliness that last into the next life.

Don’t sacrifice or overemphasize any one aspect of a well-rounded life over another. Like stones in an archway, every component is important. The ongoing quest is to identify all of the parts of your life that matter to your journey of today and remember them all throughout the day.

Remembering everything to remember is a near-impossible task. As ever-growing humans, our lives are prone to disproportion. Never think that you have arrived at perfect balance of the juggling act of life’s many values because the moment you become perfect, your purpose in life is expired and it’s time to pass on. God makes sure that we each die when we become as perfect as we will ever be—either by becoming nearly perfect or by refusing to.

We can never measure the impact or value of our own lives. You might help a million souls see the light or you might mentor only one child who does. Which is greater—the world-changer or his mentor—is for Eternity to decide. Gauge your life’s value, not by what you see in this lifetime, but by values transcending into Eternity.

165 – Listen to Talent

As a car owner, it can be frustrating listening to a mechanic explaining your car’s engine problem. Remember, he’s giving you a tuition-free education. He could just charge you money or lie to you. When he shares his knowledge, you should be thankful. The more you know about your car, the better condition you can keep it in and the less likely a bad mechanic is to do you dirty.

As a business owner, you may contract, hire, or both, when it comes to specialized talent. Those talented people will want to talk to you and share their expertise. Don’t respond with a faux pas.

A Rush Limbaugh caller once said, “I mean, if someone gives you a box from Tiffany’s, you say, ‘Thank you.'”

It’s not about being rich or smart or educated or wanting to be a geek or being materialistic. The polite, kind thing to do when someone gives you a compliment is to, quite simply, be thankful. If nothing else, it’s back to mom putting drawings on the refrigerator. But, when you’re paying the person who wants to throw in something extra to boot, you might want to display that artwork under glass.

Whether you think like an investor, deal-maker, employer, or simply a friend, it should count as at least three red flags when someone disrespects the opinion of hired talent. It might be a worthy HR tactic to stall job applicants with a janitor babbling on about why he mops the floor the way he does, just to see which applicants care and which get irritated—and the janitor is the actual guy giving the interview.

I actually do that kind of stuff when I visit a potential sourcing factory for the first time. I throw out my “crazy guy strategy ideas”—in part, never all—to let the factory owner filter himself. If he rejects my idea, then it won’t work out when I order 100k pc anyway, and, on record, he was the one who rejected me. So, he can’t complain when I’m ordering, literally, from the factory across the street.

Rambling talent could save you big money. Never stop learning, especially from your own hired help.

164 – Jesus the Shrewd

Jesus had insight, not only into “soft power”, but further into “weak power”. It seems like an oxymoron, but that’s precisely the point: Everything has its unfair advantages, especially the underdog. Exploit the unfair advantages of your situation.

This involves shrewdness, something Jesus celebrated. “Vicious as snakes, yet innocent as doves.” Viciousness—shrewdness—is a vital virtue of the kingdom. Religious cultures often revere hyper-honesty to a point of naivety, where they easily succumb to charlatans and con artists. This is another man-made system of morals. Don’t buy it.

Be cunning. Be shrews. Be vicious. Be plain and powerful. Just don’t be dishonest. This is the teaching of Jesus.

Let wicked people’s imaginations fill in the gaps as their creative listening wants. Herod did that with Jesus, thinking him a “fool” because he wouldn’t speak.

Jesus’s “shrewd servant”parable celebrated a sell-off to make lasting friends.

Jesus taught to carry a soldier’s weapons beyond the legal one-mile limit he could force upon a civilian: Carry it two and watch his popularity sink. Do the same if someone sues for your cloak—a greedy move—, give him your tunic also, stand trial in your undies.

The key to shrewdness is a willingness to make sacrifices yourself, sell-off your own property, get your hands dirty, break a sweat, and do some hard work. Consider a few modern day scenarios.

If someone steals your intellectual property, go open source rather than lawsuit; they won’t be able to compete. Thieves don’t know how to invent things, you do. Going open source will turn the guy tho stole your stuff into free advertising for your next invention.

Gandhi sparked India’s independence one person at a time. England invaded Scotland, then the Scottish burned their own cornfields, England hurt more. When the US government insisted ketchup companies no longer use chemical preservatives, Heinz invented the idea of vinegar and sugar for modern ketchup, the others fought the government and went out of business, ketchup was remade.

Reinvent yourself, use “weak power”, walk the miles, don’t fear taking a hit just to survive. This is different from going nuclear or kamikaze and a much better way to get out from under a bully.

Proverbs 25:21-22, Matthew 5:38-48; 10:16, Luke 16:9, Romans 12:20

163 – Fame Is Normal

When you do a good job at something, it will eventually make you famous. You may only be “famous” among colleagues, your name never appearing in public for decades, if ever.

It happens every now and again, somewhere in the world of media, gossip, and periodical literature. Someone says, “You know that guy we always call to do that one part of our design projects because only he gets it right?”—and everyone in the room or reading that column knows the guy—instant publicity. Next, he’s the name for all the talk shows and columnists to interview, being offered book deals from five publishing houses. But, he was already famous for his work. What happened in the public “bragosphere” was merely his fame turning into publicity.

The guy at the gas station, the gal running the cash register, the shoe repair guy downtown, the piano player at the weddings and parties, the school band director and football coach—all of them are already household names for one reason: They do good work.

If your work is worth its salt, you will certainly become famous in some way. Count on it. Plan for it. Grow in your personal, inward, ethical, moral character so the spotlight doesn’t melt you—because the spotlight always turns on unannounced.

Don’t shy away from the spotlight either. Never say, “I won’t do that because I don’t want to become famous.” Of course, don’t seek fame, but don’t evade it either. Let the searchlight of fame roam where it will; you just do a good job and let the problem of fame tend to itself.

Trying to miss a moving target is almost as hard as trying to hit one. In some ways, you are already more famous than you know. Your friends talk about you, just as you talk about them. Rather than measuring, avoiding, seeking, or otherwise even caring at all about “celebrity status”, just be yourself and do the best job you can. Your good example can inspire people without you knowing it for eons. You’re going to make mistakes. What makes a good role model is not the absence of human error, but demonstration of good character.

Proverbs 22:29