We are involved in a war, a war against Satan, demons, principalities and evil. If you are a baptized Christian you are in God’s army. What kind of soldier are you? Are you committed? Are you involved? Are you ready for the battle that is going on? Have you taken on the full armament that is available from God? Would you send your football team on to the football field without helmets and pads against a team wearing their helmets and pads? Then why go into battle against Satan unprepared?

One of the tactics during a battle is to take out the leaders of the opposing force. Satan tries to destroy our leadership. We have seen that in the Catholic Church with the priests. It has undermined our faith and trusts in the priesthood. The same thing goes on in protestant churches. Pastors get involved in inappropriate relationships with their parishioners. If we lose faith in our church leaders then maybe we stop going to church. If we stop going to church we stop praying, stop reading the bible and stop fighting the battle against evil.

We have had a rash of inappropriate contact between educators and students or underage children in Kansas. This is a tactic of Satan to continue attacking the leadership in our communities. Remember we are at war, a spiritual war. Satan wants you and your children dead!

What should we do to help our leaders? We should pray for them for starters. Our priests and pastors our football coaches and teachers. Have you ever read the U.S. Soldiers Creed? The American soldier learns that he will never leave a fallen comrade behind. We are in God’s army and these fallen priests, pastors and educators are our fallen comrades. Don’t desert them! Pray for them. Contact them. Encourage them to come back to the faith and repent. Yes, they must pay their debts here to our society if found guilty, but it does not mean we leave them behind on the battlefield of sin.

Several years ago I had a good friend who was being adulterous in a relationship while married. He ended up divorced. I went to him during this difficult time and told him I didn’t know what he was doing, but wanted to tell him I was still his friend and encouraged him to do the right thing. I saw him recently and we had a conversation about that period of his life. He told me only 3 or 4 people came to him and expressed the same feelings and thoughts to him like I had done. He told me his pastor was one of those who kept encouraging him to do the right thing and to keep coming to church. But my friend said most everyone else in the church treated him like they did not want him there anymore so he quit going.

All of us have fallen short of the glory of God and have sinned. Jesus and all of the prophets and saints had one message. The message was and still is repent!

Satan wins when our friends are killed on the battlefield of sin. But if they are just wounded in action there is still hope. Extend your helping hands to your friends wounded in the battle against evil today. Give them hope and encourage them to do the right thing and repent.

Ephesians Chapter 6 versus 10-20.

We don’t always see it nor pay attention to it, but at the end of a game of football the referee will hold the football above his head. This is the signal that the game is completed.

Jesus was lifted up and crucified on a cross. This was the completion of his life on earth as a living human being. Jesus death was his sacrifice for all of us human beings to be saved and to have eternal life. All we must do is to look upon him and call out his name to be saved from our lives of sin of which we are all guilty.

The Bible talks about this lifting up of Jesus. It goes back also to Moses and his time.

Numbers 21: 4-9 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses and said, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!”

Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.

The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

Notice that the snakes were not taken away. The people had to continue to live with the problem they had brought on with their sins. Yes, as long as we live on earth we will continue to have problems. But we must continually look to Jesus for help to live.

John 3: 14-15 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man (Jesus) be lifted up, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

Back in the days of high school shop class we made things with iron. My memory of working with iron was welding, using the cutting torch, heating up iron and pounding it with a sledgehammer on the anvil. Sparks and pieces of metal flew around you. We burnt holes in our shirts and jeans.

One day one of the guys set his long-sleeved shirt on fire. He was just standing there flagging his arm thinking it would go out. Several guys grabbed a blanket of some sort and covered up his arm and put out the fire. Next day the kid was back in class with his armed wrapped up in bandages where he had burnt his arm. Shop class was exciting and fun, and you never knew what was going to happen next.

There was always some kind of conflict going on in shop class. Guys would get unhappy with each other and yell at each other. Sophomores got picked on and made fun of. There were no women in the class so there was lots of manly talk going on.

Proverbs 27:17 Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

It takes work to grow up to be a man. You were not born a leader or unselfish, you must be taught. Men need other men to show them how. There are going to be sparks with each other as you grow up and learning how to handle conflict is a good thing.

Jesus started his church with 12 men and there was conflict among them. There was greed, selfishness, want of power among them, just your typical 12 men off the street kind of guys.

We need not, to be many, to start to change the world. We just need to get started one man at a time.

The devil’s not threatened by the silent! pic.twitter.com/gxuYa6CuqG

— Coach Hines 🇺🇸 (@CoachKurtHines) June 22, 2021

As a young boy I was drawn to the battle and story of the Alamo. Mexican army leaders had told the men inside the Alamo to surrender, or all defenders would be killed with no prisoners taken at the end. The Mexican army had about 4,000 men the defenders inside the Alamo had roughly 200 men.

Just before the final battle at the Alamo, Colonel Travis drew a line in the dirt with his sword and asked his men to decide what each of them was going to do. Surrender and leave the Alamo or step over the line and defend the Alamo to their deaths? After a siege of roughly two weeks the Mexican army attacked at dawn on March 6, 1836. The battle was over in about 90 minutes with all defenders’ dead.

Whether or not the story of the line in the dirt is just a story or the truth doesn’t matter. At some point each man inside the Alamo had to make up his mind whether he was staying or leaving.

Today we also have a choice. We can believe in Jesus as our savior and serve our creator, God the Father or we can choose not to. At the moment in the United States of America we might get made fun of or put down for choosing to believe and serve God, but in some places around the world men, women and children are being imprisoned, tortured and killed for their belief. Some day that persecution may come to us also.

Our choice today doesn’t come with a consequence of a death sentence immediately, but it will lead to a decision of how our lives will go in this world and where our soul will live after the physical body dies.

Joshua was the leader of the nation of Israel after Moses died. Joshua led the people into the Promised Land, and it was battle after battle, but with God on their side how could they lose? At one point Joshua drew a line in the sand also.

Joshua 24:15 But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day who you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living now. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

Today our choices of who we will serve are many and where do you spend your time and money? Do you serve money, fame, power, technology, alcohol, drugs, sex, your job, your home, your vacations, government, sports? You get the picture. Today draw a line in the dirt and decide who you will serve. Whether literally, a line in the dirt or not, you are making a choice. Choose wisely.

I saw my daughters maiden name on a list for removal from our church membership list, since she was married and lived in another community and goes to church in that town. So I continued to look at the list to see if I knew anyone else on the list. I saw the last name of someone who I used to hang out with as a young man. I had not thought of that girl in a long time. So like we do today, I googled her name. To my shock her obituary showed up and she had died of a brain tumor five years earlier.

I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I had really liked that girl, but eventually felt like we were not a good fit and so I quit seeing her. A month later she called me on the phone and when I told her that I didn’t think we were a good fit together she started crying. I felt guilty, deep in my soul for letting her go. That was the last time I spoke to her.

As I read her obituary and especially her caring bridge pages, where she told about her situation, that took place for over a year, it was a struggle to finish reading, because there were so many emotions. I wish I would have known about this, while she was alive to pray for her, to write her a card or letter or to make a phone call.

In this woman’s obituary, I learned that her father had passed on and she was the fifth sibling to pass away. She was survived by her 90 year old mother along with two other siblings. If we had a choice in life none of us would survive our children. As parents, we would like to be buried by our children. My thoughts and prayers went to her mom and siblings for what they have had to endure in their immediate family.

Death never comes at a good time. It comes and takes away those we love and cherish. We wish for more time to be spent with them, but that is not how it works. At some point, in our lives, hopefully we realize this fact and from that point forward we see life differently. As Christians we don’t think of bucket list, we think of relationships with our family and friends. We pray that God would continue to pursue our family and friends and that some day, they will open the door to Jesus before they pass on to the other side.

James 4:14 Why you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

We are not a permanent fixture on this earth and no matter how long we stay on this earth it won’t feel long enough to us or our loved ones. So live as though you know you will be passing from this earth tomorrow.

During my years of playing high school football, we always had some teammates that were just luke warm about being on the team. They were unenthusiastic, half-hearted, apathetic, bored, lackadaisical, and passionless about being on the football team. Those were just some of the adjectives we could say about them.

I remember myself and several of my friends asking some of those apathetic football players why they were out for football? Some of them said they were out for football because their dad’s made them come out for the team and they did not want to be there. One of the guys actually said his girlfriend wanted him to go out for football even though he didn’t want to. And then there were guys who wanted to be on the team, but they hated practice, so they went half speed so to speak during practice but wanted to only play in the games. And some of those guys were the most athletic kids on the team.

I have to say this also. I have talked to coaches in the past that didn’t sound enthusiastic about coaching young men.

Everywhere we go in life we seem to have some bored, half-hearted, unenthusiastic, passionless people. At our work, at church, in our sports in our other club organizations we have the same type of people. I don’t know about you, but I like to hang with excited people who want to be wherever we happen to be in life. I know it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around but find your niche and fill it.

Jesus said in Revelations 3:15-16 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.