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114 – Talk It Through

If you keep your peace, you give up all claim to complain about being ignored. If you don’t make a fair case in your favor, you have no right to appeal. If someone doesn’t agree with you, but you don’t let them know, you are a coward to make known your final decision after the fact.

Learn to identify people with these “quietly hot tempers”, who don’t speak their minds, but then want to flee across the ocean to give their rebuttal where no one can dissent or object. These are revenge-driven weaklings. Do not be one and do not work with them. Their lives will be petty and small as will be the things they complain about.

Only hardship can teach them; do not try to counsel them. Let them be alone and constantly extend the one thing they lack: ongoing relationship. Send them a Christmas card every year. Drop off a box of blueberries when blueberries are in season. Extend benign, reasonable, harmless, and normal acts of an average friend and neighbor. Make sure such people know they are not alone. Don’t give up on them the way they pretend to give up on the rest of the world. And, don’t ever even once invite their wrath of one-way silence by trying to solve a disagreement in a useful manner. Just be a non-threatening friend from the closest distance they accept.

But, you yourself, never become that person. Speak your mind—kindly and diplomatically of course. Act with dignity in every way that you can. But, give people a chance to reason with you. Allow everyone the opportunity to persuade you. You don’t know everything. Even if the other guy is wrong, allowing him to speak persuasively—and engaging him in discussion while he does—will you help to strengthen your own opinion if nothing else.

Take the high road where disagreements are concerned. Be strong enough to welcome dissent. Let people know where they stand with you, simply for their information and without being hostile. Let others tell you where you stand without feeling resented. Thick-skinned, strong-standing people, after all, are naturally more effective and have few worthy adversaries to contend with.

113 – Case for Work Ethic

Working—prioritizing employment over enjoyment—limits one’s time, but so does unemployment. When you have a job schedule to keep, you can’t go to the beach and surf whenever you feel a passing whim to do so. But, when you don’t have money, you can’t ever surf because you can’t afford a surf board.

But, a good, strong work ethic is not only about employment—working for someone else; a work ethic is about self-respect. Work ethic is an intrinsic motivation—to have dignified pride in one’s own effort and accomplishment—a reward that exists on the inside as a “good feeling” for having achieved something noble and worthwhile. The intrinsic motivation for a good work ethic is well told in the adage, “Work is good for the soul.”

The intrinsic motivation for a good work ethic is, or course, exploited by employers. It’s overplayed and underpaid more often than not. But, counterfeits are only made of things of value. Paul did not lie when he told slaves to work as if for Christ since Christ would, indeed, reward them for their work beyond what any employer could ever pay—just as much as Paul didn’t lie when he told slave masters to treat their slaves with respect since Jesus is the master of all. Thanks to Biblical teaching like this, the freedom of Jesus entered a world of slavery like a healthy virus and eventually abolished slavery altogether.

The moral of the story is: Work for Jesus.

But, there are also practical arguments for a good work ethic. Societies where people take personal pride in their work outperform societies who regard labor with contempt.

Your job doesn’t need to be your dream job, but nor do you need to hate your job in order to strive for more. Always seek to improve yourself, including doing a good job right where you are, including achieving other goals so you can move on from where you are. Do well across the board and bless God for the road you’re on that will lead you to better lands.

Your own opportunities are interlaced with others in your economy. When everyone does good work, that’s better for everyone.

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

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.

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

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.

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.