Spiritual P90X

My Belief

I love P90X! It is an awesome total body workout that is always “Changing”. It consists of 12-15 different workouts that you do in different orders. The idea is that by always changing your routine you will confuse your muscles. Confused muscles work harder because they never get into a routine. They can never get into a rut because they don’t know what is coming next. There are studies that show that people that do the same workout all the time do not benefit that much because their progress levels off. Also, when you do the same thing all the time your heart is really not in it. You are just doing the same old lifts and squats over and over again. I’m telling you all of this because I feel that my prayer life is the same way.

I CAN’T pray for the same thing everyday! I have so many things that I want to talk to God about. I want to pray for my family and for my own issues. I want to pray for all the lost people that I have had the opportunity to share my trust in Jesus with. I pray for my church, my pastor and ministries that I am involved in. I pray for friends and small groups and on and on and on… When I try to pray for all of these things in a single day it becomes routine. I feel like it becomes something I don’t mean. Sure I am sincere for a few weeks or maybe even a month, but after that I feel like I am just telling God the same “mind numbing” thing I told Him yesterday. Quite a while ago I STOPED doing this! I started breaking up my prayer life. I started using Sundays to talk to God about lost people, Monday has become my own issues, Tuesday is for my church, Wednesday I pray for friends, Thursday is for small group, Friday is for family, and Saturday is for specific needs. My prayer life has become a changing process that is never the same old mantra to the Lord. Now I feel that I can come to the Lord with that thing that weighs heavy on my heart that particular day. It has become a system where I can get real results and see positive change as the Lord works on me in prayer.

Scripture

Jeremiah 33:3 ³ ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’

Application for life

It does not matter how you pray it just matters that you DO pray. God wants us to come to him with all of our issues. The big ones and the small ones. The thing that has always separated powerful men and women of God from all the rest is their dedication to bring everything to the Lord in prayer. By praying to God we are telling Him that we are trusting Him with everything that we are. I recently heard an interview with Billy Graham where he was asked what he would have done differently in his life and his response was simply, “I would have spent way more time in prayer”.  

ICE BREAKER

My Belief

When I enter the flight deck I feel like I have a very clear mission. I only have 2, 3 or even 4 days to find a way to share the hope that I have in Jesus with the guy or gal sitting next to me. Hopefully, with God’s help I will get a chance to share with some of the Flight Attendants in the back, as well. The Lord has helped me to form a very effective strategy regardless of the “type” of lost person I am flying with. It is simple but it works. I like politics and current events and most people have some sort of opinion or at least pay attention to what is going on in the world a little. Usually, when we have long overnights or long flights at cruise we “chit-chat” about union stuff, contract stuff, or career progression stuff…blah blah blah etc… I use this awesome forum as an opportunity to grill people on what their personal opinion is and what they think about the issues in the world. I NEVER talk at first! People love to hear themselves talk and so I just keep asking questions. More and more questions. For Example: What do you think about health care? What do you think about gay rights? What do you think about Iran and the middle east? etc… Then I just listen and listen. It is funny how the conversation always turns around after a bit. People love to keep talking to a point, then they change their tune. After a bombardment of questioning then something clicks over in their mind and they HAVE TO HEAR FROM ME. It drives them nuts. They say things like, “What about you? Don’t you have an opinion Mr. question guy? I’m doing all the talking here, tell me what you think?”. THAT IS WHEN I GET TO HIT THEM WITH MY ICEBREAKER. I tell them, “Well I don’t really fit the “norm”. I am a conservative that thinks the Republican party is CRAP and a Christian that thinks Religion is CRAP”. This also drives them nuts and causes them to start asking even more questions! The first one is usually “What-in-the-heck does that mean?!?!” This is where I get to start telling them about my Biblically based values and how no where in the Bible is “Religion” mentioned, except in a bad way. I tell them that I believe in a personal relationship with God that is given through his son Jesus Christ. I tell them that the story of the Bible is simple. God created everything, we screwed it up, and so he gave us a new way to fix it. This strategy usually provokes long and beautiful conversations about values, beliefs, and most importantly FAITH. In the end most of these conversations end great. They end with people telling me that they have never heard anybody present the Gospel like this and they found it very thought provoking and enjoyable. The conversation is always there and it just starts with a good ICEBREAKER.

Scripture

1 Peter 3:15

¹⁵ But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

Application for Life

It is important to know what is in the Bible so you can give it to the world around you. It is also important to find a way to present it to the people in the mission field that God has given you. Make it meaningful to yourself so that you can make it meaningful to those around you. Find a way start conversations that relate to people and then find a way to turn that conversation toward Jesus. We CANNOT convince people, but that is not what we are called to do. We are just called to till, plant, and water. The Lord God in the form of the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it ALL grow!

                  

White Chocolate vs. Jesus Jihadist

My Belief

We have a flight attendant that is infamous at our airline. Most people only know him as “White Chocolate”. His real name is Sean and I consider him a friend. If you saw him you would definitely do a double take. He is a pasty white man with gray hair. That gray hair is braded into something that looks like it is straight from the Caribbean Islands. He walks with the “swagger” of a black girl and has all of the attitude to match. He announces to everybody that he is a strong black man and he can’t stand all these “damn white people”. He was born and lives in Newark NJ and needless to say has had a hard life.

I have flown with Sean many times and the most recent was last September. I am always careful about what conversations I get into with Sean because they usually end up in the gutter pretty quick. The last time I flew with him I had a great chance give him a “healthy dose of Jesus”. I was surprised to learn that Sean told me that he had grown up in and sometimes still attends a “Black Church”. He knew a decent amount about the cross and the Bible, but we fundamentally disagreed on one thing. He told me, “I know all this stuff, but I am still going to Hell”. For just a few moments Sean took down his costume of attitude and anger and told me that he knew he was a big time sinner and in his mind he still would never make it to be with the Lord.

I bring this up now because I have started bumping into Sean in the crewroom a lot lately. He always greets me in the same loud way. He greets me as, “Hey White Jesus, Hey Jesus Jihadist, or simply JJ for short.” He usually then goes into some sort of tirade in front of other people to the effect of, “everybody need to go to the White Jesus Church because there you can Smoke and Drink and Cheat and Lie and your still going to heaven. In the church of the Black Jesus we condemn you to Hell if you do these things.”

This is the most important thing in the entire Bible! Salvation is not predicated on your good behavior. Salvation is given freely by grace. God already knows that we are liars, cheats, and drunkards just to mention a few. This is the entire point for Jesus. Our performance is to substandard to get us to the Father, so Jesus made a way for us. I hope and pray that “White Chocolate” will understand and hear the message of grace that I keep trying to tell him about.

Scripture

Ephesians 2:8-9 ⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.

Application for Life

While Sean makes fun of the “Church of the White Jesus” his description of it is absolutely correct. Jesus’s church is the church of tax collectors, cheaters, unclean, adulterers, drunkards and filthy sinners. Grace simply means that God has given it to us when we could not do it ourselves. We strive to be like Christ, but at heart we are all still dirty sinners covered in the blood of grace. Don’t think for a moment that you will ever stop being a sinner and some how become a “Good Christian”. NO such animal exists. Every time I fall off the wagon and let my old sin nature get the best of me, I am reminded of grace. As I sit there in my filthy wrong all I can do is come to the foot of the cross and thank the Lord for covering me in his merciful grace.

BAIT

My Belief

I flew with the same Jewish guy for 8 DAYS in a row! I was certain that God was going to give me some AWESOME opportunity to share some hard evidence from the “OLD” TESTIMENT on how Jesus Christ of Nazareth absolutely has to be the “Jewish” Messiah of Israel. I had it all mapped out in my mind. I just had to get him talking about the “Jewish Bible” (aka Old Testament) and his faith in Judaism. Then I would hit him with the fact that in Daniel Chapter 9, from the Old Testament, God gave Daniel the prophesy of the “Seventy-Sevens”. This prophesy clearly lists the ENTIRE time line for the Jewish people from the point in which God issued the decree to rebuilt their temple through the fact that Jesus would be cut off and killed in 31AD and then ends with Jesus Christ returning to destroy the Antichrist at the end of the age. In my minds eye it was perfect. I had a spiritual Left, Right, and an Upper Cut ready and I thought I was going to knock this guy out for Jesus!

Well, that didn’t happen. We agreed on everything. We agreed on politics and the direction of the country. We agreed that Israel was in the middle of a coming “Islamic meat grinder”. I got him to agree that the Jewish Bible had to be credible. I even got my Flight attendant in on the act. He was a Christian and we were both hitting this guy with how much faith we had in Jesus Christ. The real problem I had was when I tried to tell this guy I could prove it to him in the Old Testament. When I tried to start that conversation he would start getting sensitive. He would start telling me, “Well I don’t know enough about Daniel so I don’t want to talk about it”. He would also start side tracking the conversation or say he just wanted to read the paper. He was a great guy that loved intellectual and historical conversations until it came to Jesus. I could not believe how good he was at keeping me from giving him what I considered to be the “nail in the coffin” or cross for that matter. I ended 8 days of flying with this guy and felt very frustrated. I was praying to God, “ATHIESTS AREN’T EVEN THIS DIFFICULT”. The only peace I found was in a sermon I heard a while back about spiritual bait. My pastor preached that when Jesus offered the woman at the well “living water” that was His way of dangling spiritual bait. In the story she was excited to receive the water that would quench her thirst once and for all, but she also could have said, “get out of my way weirdo so I can draw water”. God only asks us to be open to opportunity. To dangle spiritual bait out there and then be prepared to give an account of the hope that we have in Christ. He did not say that everyone would take it.

Scripture

John 4:10

¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

Application for Life

In these last days of the church we have to be willing to put ourselves out there as spiritual bait. Some men may stray away from it, some may nibble, and some may take the entire thing. One thing is for certain, no one will get it if we don’t “cast” it out there. Even though my Jewish friend and I had a lot of great conversations about Israel and the Bible, he never took the bait. He nibbled at it a little and maybe even was force fed a little because of the boldness God has given me. People don’t save people, only Jesus does. So even though I felt unsatisfied at the end of our trip, God will do the rest. He will take our conversations and hopefully the next time he flies with a Christian Captain the Holy Spirit will harvest that life for Christ.

On the way DOWN

My belief

I was sitting on the couch with a few guys up in New Jersey and I was struck by what I saw on TV. I DO watch a lot of TV, but I am very limited in my selection. For the most part all I am usually interested in watching is News or NFL Football. Well, while I was sitting watching a program called Tosh 2.O, which is a celebrity talk show, I was quite disgusted with what I saw. I would guess that 80% of the images and jokes were homosexual in nature. What seemed even more surprising to me was that everyone in the room thought it was hysterical. I think I was particularly sensitive to this because of a sobering sermon that I had just heard from Lon Solomon. The sermon was all about the descent of man and the decay of society. God lays this process out clearly in the last part of Romans chapter 1. Pastor Solomon explains how God has 3 stages in which He “gives man over” to his own sinful nature and allows him to condemn himself to the eternal wrath of God. Sadly, from what I see around us in America I think this process is nearly complete.

Stage 1 Humanism – Where people replace The Creator with what is created. In ancient times people replaced God with animals, the sun, and even hand made idols. Today we have progressed passed this and now we worship ourselves. We worship celebrities, the rich, and the beautiful. We celebrate and praise our own ingenuity. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are our Kings. Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie are our Queens. We revel in the innovations of Google, Microsoft, and Apple. In the hit show American Idol only the talented and beautiful have the “IT” Factor. America’s new god is man.

Stage 2 Embracement of Homosexuality – Where men and women give up the natural way for what is unnatural. Recently President Obama signed the repeal of “Don’t ask, Don’t tell”. Gay’s now serve openly in the military. The U.S. is now in the process of changing American passports to say Parent #1 and Parent #2 instead of mother and father. In my business it is especially normal to be surrounded by gay and lesbian coworkers more often than not. In my opinion America is “out of the closet” and gay is now normal. Pastor Solomon says that any society that has ever made it past stage 2 has never recovered. We are well on the way to repeating the mistakes of the Roman Empire.

Stage 3 The Hardening – Where there is no more right and wrong, and wrong is preferred. I am not sure that America has completed this step, but we are working on it fast. It is now considered good and right for a woman to have the right to choose, or gays to have equal partnership rights to heterosexuals. We are used to people saying “Well, this is RIGHT for me”. In my opinion we are very close to completing this stage of our destruction. Is it any wonder that the worlds largest super power (America) now seems to be riddled with financial and social problems that no one has an answer for.

Scripture

Romans 1:24-25

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Application for Life

America seems to be on the same track that so many other mighty and prosperous nations have been on. Our job as followers of Christ is to be Salt and Light in an ever crumbling world. I feel that so many hearts in our country have become hard and lean on there own understanding. However, there are still some who have not hardened their hearts and are willing to listen to the message that God has to offer. We must continue to preserve our testimony, let people know where we stand, and watch for that person who wants to know more. Anyone who studies God’s word knows that America and our way of life are temporary, but the HOPE that we have is that the next way of life will be perfect and permanent.

Hate to RUN!

My Belief

I really hate to run for exercise. It is so boring! There is nothing to hit or throw. There is no goal to score in or defender to get past. It is really just not my sport. It is just a repetitious monotonous chug along sort of thing where the world passes you by. Even though I hate to run for exercise, I do it anyway. I think it is good to help me build endurance for when I do get to play those other sports that are much more engaging to me. I have only started to run again for about the last six months. I put my headphones on and take my dogs plodding around the neighborhood or I hit the hotel gyms on my overnights, like I did today. I realized something while I was running today. I hate to run, but I love it when I do it. It is always a drag to start off on the cold sidewalk or treadmill, but when I put on my favorite praise and worship music from my iPod things start to change. My body starts to warm up and the music starts to take over my mind. I begin running faster and faster and at times break out into a full on sprint. The songs penetrate my heart and turn my thoughts toward Jesus and his sacrifice for me. The more I like the song the harder and faster I run. Before I know it I have run a few miles and for a decent amount of time. I arrive back at my house or step off the treadmill feeling refreshed like my entire body has just been in praise and worship to the Lord Jesus. I don’t end feeling tired, but alive. My heart is pounding and my thoughts are driven toward God.

I started thinking this dilemma I have with running is very similar to the dilemma I have with God’s word. I start out feeling like I have chores to do and I don’t have time to sit down with that “old book”. There are bills to pay and I don’t have the energy to listen to that “preacher” again. It is always the same old repetitious monotonous stuff. Even though at times it seems like it will be boring and take up my time, I do it anyway. I open the Bible or push play on that sermon and before I know it I feel like my entire perspective on my life has changed. I feel like all those silly chores and bills just melt away and I am left with a renewed energy. I am left with a humbled spirit because of what Jesus has done for me and a great hope fills my heart because of His soon return. I don’t end the sermon or close my Bible thinking I have wasted time, but that rather I know how to make the most of my time. Afterward I can focus and put life into the proper context of what is really important. My stress fades and my worries subside. I know that all these chores and bills are temporary and very soon I will see my savior face to face.

Scripture

Matthew 4:4 ⁴ Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’^[a]”

2 Timothy 3:16 ¹⁶ All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,

Application for Life

It is so important to take care of our mind, body and spirit. Exercise helps us keep our body in shape and God’s word helps us tune our minds to the world around us. By carefully studying the Bible we can know everything that we need to know. We get the answers to where our world has been and where it is going. We can then focus our lives on the things in this life that really matter. Our perspective becomes sharp and we know that we are only passing through. Spend time meditating on God’s word and letting Him speak to you through it. It will allow all your cares to fade and give you a bigger picture of what life is really all about.

               

It’s ALL just a Test

My Belief

Uncle Charlie is a great guy. He is one of the people that I like to chat with most in my family. He is just one of those really relaxed objective people that has been “around the block” a few times. Uncle Charlie is not a Christian but he plays nice with the rest of us in the family that are. I was privileged to get to have a great conversation about FAITH with him over this past Christmas Holiday. I was really praying that God would present an opportunity to share my faith with him as I went over to his house. Faithful as ever, God gave me a perfect opportunity to talk with him alone after Christmas dinner. We went back and forth a bit about science and other stuff that did not really matter much to him. He felt that all of that could be debated either way. One of the biggest problems he has with “Christianity” has to do with fairness. He said to me, “How is it fair that one person is given the chance grow up rich in America and another is given a lousy hand growing up poor and persecuted in the Congo?” Charlie told me that IF there is a God, then He is not a fair or just God.

This is a hard question and the answer to it is found in the same place all of the rest of life's answers are found. Over and over again in The Bible God shows us it is not about “the hand” you are given, instead it all about what you do with that hand. What ever life gives us God wants us to adhere to His principles. He wants us to do EVERYTHING His way. The story that stands out most to me is of Abraham and Isaac. Why would God tell Abraham to sacrifice his son on an alter? The answers is just to see if he would do it. God wants to see will you take whatever you have been given and give it back to the Lord. Are you willing to put God first and in front of everything in your life. This life is short because it is just a test. God is going through time watching who will use the free will that is given to them to choose the Lord over all else. Then He will use that group of people to set up the perfect Heaven on Earth.

Scripture

Luke 12:48

⁴⁸ But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

Application for Life

Even when this life is Great it is still not that great. If you sat on the beach in Hawaii it would be AWESOME…for a minute. After 10 years of sitting on the beach in Hawaii I bet it would lose a little luster. If you had all the money in the world to spend, it would be INCREDIBLE…until you owned one of everything. Then you would be the same as all the other rich people who get in loads of trouble because they are bored. This life is God’s test for choosing his own. No matter how much or little we are given God wants us to put it at His feet. This life does have some High points, but the next life with Jesus Christ will never have a LOW point.