Ken

It is evening on the last day of winter. (Out on Bittersweet Farm we say spring is March/April/May and tomorrow is March. So tomorrow is spring–even if we have to will it to be so and we may still have to endure a half-dozen snowfalls of various intensities.

This evening I helped a neighbor pick up some branches from an ice-storm and I walked. Upon returning I rode my bike a bit. It was a sunny and wonderful way to end winter, especially since we lost electrical service and internet last week for three long days.

I’ve written an article I hope will be helpful to you. Let me know what you think…

Learn How to Change

Unless you are perfect, you need to change. As a Bible-believing Christian I always hold out hope that real, lasting change is possible. God’s word p

romises that it is possible with God’s help to change. What needs to change in your life?

Small, daily changes contribute to overall change and the Lord promises that the Spirit will inspire us and empower is in the process. So if you want to change as God to help you work on these things:

1—Change the Way You Think. (Meditation) repent-means change the way you think. (Psalm 19) “Let the words of my mount and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight oh, Lord…” (Psalm 19:14)

2—Change the Way you Talk.“…Let the words of my mouth…be acceptable in your sight…” (Psalm 19)

3—Change the Way you Act. (Romans 6:15-23) “put-off and put-on” are you habitually godly or habitually ungodly. (ill) Ralph Waite. (Jay Adams)

4—Change Who you Admire. Worship is the loyalty, time, talk, physical bowing we give to what we really value and admire in the deepest part of us. (Psalm 1)

5—Change What you Desire. “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, (fleshly desires

) which wage war against your soul.” (1 Peter 2:11, ESV) “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4, ESV)

Notice this prayer from the end of Psalm 19:12-14: “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Psalm 19, ESV)

Remember that small sins lead to secret sins, which lead to habitual sins, which lead to life-dominating sins, which result in great transgression. Never stop improving with God’s help…and that begins by meditating on the Word of God.

With God’s help, you can change.

A Few More Musings… On the Asbury Revival….

Musings by the fire on the last night of winter….

I’m sure you know there have been spiritual stirrings among young people at Asbury University which have also spread to other gatherings and campuses. The awakening is especially among young people.

Now some of the same folks who were deeply grieved that more young people are not following the Lord are the same who are quick to be critical of the awakening.

Let’s be very, very careful about having a critical spirit with young people. Let’s be careful what we say. Let’s get our facts straight and err on the side of grace. Let’s not close our door or our hearts to what God might do among us because the first stirrings happened among people who might be “across the aisle” from us in some doctrinal matter.

Warren Wiersbe once said, “Isn’t it amazing how often God uses people we don’t approve of.”

I would be very, very careful not to discourage young people when they are praying, repenting, singing, reading Scripture and seeking God. I would be very, very careful not to compare my spiritual experience unfavorably with theirs. I would be discerning and wise, but I would be very, very careful to discourage young people who want long church services, spirited singing, prayer meetings, public Bible reading, and repentance.

God, thank you for moving among young people. Move across our land and around out world in revival. May we be telling the stories of what you did on the porch in the evening throughout the rolling ages of time.

Oh, and may I gently add this. Please don’t post a defense for criticisms on this site. Can I humbly suggest that you spend your time watching and reading and listening to accounts of revivals of the past so you long for a fresh moving of the Spirit among us.

Bittersweet Farm

February 28, 2023

Things That Influence for Good.

I had a conversation today with a friend who is a devout and mature believer. He mentioned some things that contributed to his spiritual formation. He said, “When my dad was alive we would go to a Bible Conference every summer at Gull Lake, or Winona Lake, or Maranatha. He would pick the week that featured HCJB radio is the missionary of the week or a teacher/preacher from Moody Bible Institute.”

Now his father and mother and with the Lord, but my friend graduated from Moody Bible Institute, he met and married a woman he met there, and he is the director of a Christian camp. If you are a wise parent you will do what you can to influence your children toward things that are good and worthy, wise and noble.

Learning Together Naturally

On a warm spring night a man was driving at night through the countryside with his daughter. It was late, past her bedtime. He made conversation with her as they drove through the darkness. To make conversation he said, “Honey, if we could go to the library and get a book on any subject at all, what kind of book would you get?”

She said, “I would get a book about the stars in the sky, why they sparkle and how they move.”

“That is called astronomy,” he said.

Ahead he found a place to pull off the country road and he and his daughter lay on the hood of the car and looked into the clear night sky. He answered her questions and told her everything he knew about stars and planets and the solar system. It was a sweet learning moment and it bonded their hearts together in love for each other and creation and it didn’t seem at all like a school assignment.

We homeschooled our eight children but you don’t have to homeschool to learn together at home. Early in scripture God instructed his people to saturate their home and daily affairs with learning moments. God instructed his people through Moses to draw a strait line from the things they observed in the world around them to their Creator and his love for them and their duty to love him back.

We don’t have any little people around Bittersweet Farm except when one of the almost 20 grandchildren comes to visit. When we do we try to pay attention to things and let learning and worship tangle together. Truth kinda’ slips up on you that way and it’s hard to shake.

We cherish memories of moon walks in the country and starry winter nights from long ago, of watching moonlight on the surface a quiet lake together, of walking paths under pines beside the rushy lakeshore hand-in-hand with little children who now are grown with children of their own.

And still we are learning of God and of his world as long as we are alive.

I’ve said it before. Bittersweet Farm is a real farm. It is not a working farm, but it is a gentleman’s farm, and for that reason it is a farm. I’m writing this in my darkened corner. Lois is sleeping in the same room. She works tomorrow. We are in the last hour of a quiet Monday. I didn’t start my car all day… until Lois got home from work and we drove to town for a meal.

We are in wintertime, but it has been mild. Saturday, Sunday, and today the sun shone on Bittersweet. The little house is built so the front rooms and the living part of the house face the east and south and drink in sunlight. The north and west sides of the house have fewer windows, the better to weather the west winds in winter.

When the sun rises the large kitchen windows capture it’s yellow-golden warmth like warming your hands at the fire. The dining room has two large east-facing windows that do the same. Along the front of the house that faces south are six large windows and a door that allow the sunlight in as it traces across the southern sky in winter. Across the road is a woods draped up over a hill, but in the winter it is bare and the sun filters through to the house. In the summer the leaves offer shade. I like to think the people who designed the house thought of all those things when they planned it.

When Charles Perlos had the house remodeled the house he went to great expense and effort to use modern triple-pain windows that were the same size as the original ones. Where siding was replaced, it was replaced with the same cedar as the original house. So the house is simple, but it we build thoughtfully and no one who has ever lived here for its twelve decades has appreciated it more than the ones who have owned it for the last five years.

We had all the flooring taken out upstairs and down except the bathroom and replaced it with light hickory hardwood that glows in the sun and shines warm in the evening with the reflection of indirect lighting. It is small and it is simple, but it is ours and it was a provision of God and the fruit of diligent work. We never start or end a day, never climb the stairs or eat a meal or see the little house from down the road approaching through the arch of trees, that we don’t breathe a prayer of sincere thanks to God for it.

It’s a one-hundred and twenty-three year old farm house. It’s a place on the earth where a weary man can rest and listen for God’s voice in the turning seasons. It is a place of simple and quiet. It is a more-managable little plot and a couple buildings that a simple man of words can manage with the help of God and his friends, and most of all his life-partner, Lois.

We could grow vegetables. Maybe we should. We could grow pumpkins or fruit trees. We could grow wildflowers and herbs, but crafting words is a better and more fruitful and productive use of my time, so I tend the place and feed the birds and enjoy its quiet and peace and I don’t have be enslaved to it that way. It’s a joy to us. We tend a few flowers. We mow and weed and trim and arrange things to be orderly and to give us joy and then we sit on the porch and walk among the flowers. We listen to the birds and watch the fireflies. We hear the peepers in the spring and the cracking of the trees in winter. Our hearts always leap when we hear the Barred Owl or the Coyotes. The call of cranes and geese overheard call my heart to worship like chapel bells ringing on the Lord’s Day.

Bittersweet Farm

February 22, 2023