day no. 15,916: problems welcomed

"As Elbert Hubbard said of it, 'The only way to get away from opportunity is to lie down and die.'" -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

God has given us a world of opportunity. He has hidden gold in the earth and eggs inside chickens. He has placed honey inside combs and milk inside cows. He has hidden salt inside the water and water inside the clouds. Everywhere opportunity abounds. The only way to be outside the reach of opportunity is to lie down and die.

Ecclesiastes 9:4
A living dog is better than a dead lion.

To be full of potential, but dead on the floor, is to be of no benefit to anyone. Burying your talents instead of turning a profit on them profits no one.

Opportunity is what we call a problem when it is welcomed. A problem is what we call it the rest of the time. All opportunities are problems; however, they're the kind of problems we should want to have more of.

Ecclesiastes 11:3
In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.

The fallen tree has escaped the problems of opportunity. It has no more problems... except for the one obvious one.

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” — G.K. Chesterton

day no. 15,641: responsibility knows, privilege grows, and authority flows

"Greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and the latter justifies the former... the man who is concerned most of all with his responsibilities will be fretted least about the matter of his privileges, and that his exercise of any rightful privilege will not be resented by his subordinates, because they are conscious of his merit." — The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Mark 9:35
And (Jesus) sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all.

Luke 12:48
Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required: and to whom they commit much, of him will they ask the more.

Authority flows to those who take responsibility; and those who take greater responsibility will have a greater authority and the privileges uniquely required in order to wield it. Authority is accompanied by particular privileges without which it could not retain its sway. But these privileges are appendages to the authority which is rightfully obtained uniquely through the glad assumption of great responsibility. Pursuing the privileges of authority without pursuing the responsibilities of authority is wickedness. Wanting the fruit of obedience without obeying is evil. It is a sin to expect to receive the rewards of submission without accepting the responsibilities of submission.

Responsibility knows, privilege grows, and authority flows.

day no. 15,610: walk in a manner that matches

"The recruit who has just entered upon service can begin to understand that his regard for his uniform must be a far different thing than what he felt about his civilian dress, since it is identified with the dignity of the Nation. His training in military ideals starts at this point, and for the main part is carried forward subtly, by transfer of this same feeling to all other objects associated with his military life. His perseverance in the care of weapons, in keeping his living quarters orderly and in doing his full share of work is best insured, not through fear of punishments, but by stimulating his belief that any other way of going is unworthy of a member of a fighting service." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Those who understand that they have been granted a new uniform walk in a way that brings honor to the uniform they have been granted. They show respect for the uniform by walking differently while they are wearing it.

Christians have put off the old man and put on the new. They have made themselves naked before God in their sin and received the righteousness of Christ as their new garments. They have been enlisted into His army and given the insignia to match. They have been given new attire and commanded to walk accordingly. 

We all walk in a way that reflects how much we respect that which we represent. Those who have been called by Christ's name as Christians ought to walk in a manner that matches the honor and respect they have for the One who died in order to secure their regalia.  We ought to walk tall because we have been raised up with Christ.

Ephesians 4:1
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

Philippians 1:27
Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.

Colossians 1:10
Walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.

1 Thessalonians 2:12
We exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.

day no. 15,606: character is hard, caricatures are soft

"What is the main test of human character? Probably it is this: that a man will know how to be patient in the midst of hard circumstance, and can continue to be personally effective while living through whatever discouragements beset him and his companions. Moreover, that is what every truly civilized man would want in himself during the calmer moments when he compares critically what he is inside with what he would like to be." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Perseverance is the ability to remain under difficulty as long as it remains difficult. To persevere requires the person to engage rather than avoid difficulties. It requires the person to endure the additional difficulty of remaining in the difficulty and it requires the person to outlast the difficulty, proving himself too difficult for the difficulty to break. The persevering person is too tough for the difficulty to crack. The difficulties end up giving up. They cannot outlast the man who perseveres.

Character does not side step hard things. Character is further formed in enduring hard things. Character is formed in proving harder than the hard thing. Character is the hard thing bearing the marks of having been through some stuff.  

Christians are called to encounter difficulty and submit themselves to the process of character development. Christians are called to have character produced by hardness instead of being caricatures resulting from softness.

Matthew 7:13-14
Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.

Perseverance is not merely identifying the narrow gate, but entering it. It is more difficult to squeeze your way through it, but the difficulties you encounter in making your way through its narrow opening give way to life whereas the softness of strolling through the wide way ends in erosion of the entire person with nothing left to show for it. 

Proverbs 24:10
If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength is small.

day no. 15,605: faith fights where fear fails

"If nothing but fear of punishments were depended upon to hold men to the line during extreme trial, the result would be wholesale mutiny and a situation altogether beyond the control of leadership. So it must be true that it is out of the impact of ideals mainly that men develop the strength to face situations from which it would be normal to run away." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

The fear of punishment can accomplish a great deal of obedience, but it cannot hold a man in the line of duty. At some point, the immediate fear of being punished by the enemy eclipses the fear of being punished by the General. 

Something greater than fear is required to hold a man in his position.

1 John 4:17-18
Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

Love leads a man to stand, even in the face of divine judgment. Love holds the line. It stays where it is placed because of the love of the One who placed them there.

Fear imagines that fleeing will be safer than fighting.
Love cannot imagine not fighting.

Faith fights where fear fails.
Love stays true where fear is fickle.
Faith holds the line where fear drops the ball.
Love rises up where fear falls short.

day no. 15,592 continued... the especiallies

"But the fact remains that the services are not alike, that no wit of man can make them alike, and that the retention by each of its separate character, customs and confidence is essential to the conserving of our national military power. Unification has not altered this basic proposition. The first requirement of a unified establishment is moral soundness in each of the integral parts, without which there can be no soundness at all. And on the question of fundamental loyalty, the officer who loves every other service just as much as his own will have just as much active virtue as the man who loves other women as much as his own wife." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Christians should love their local church more than other churches. They should be members of their church as a matter of priority. They have an obligation to serve and minister to those who are enrolled as members in their local gatherings before they serve and minister to those Christians of other congregations.

Christians have obligations to love particular neighbors in a particular order of priority. Christians must honor covenants before anything else. This means a Christian is obligated first and foremost to God with whom they have made a covenant of worship. They then must love their spouse, if married, above all other earthly people as they made a covenant of marriage with them. Next, the children produced by the union of that covenant of marriage must be prioritized. One's own children take precedent over other people's children. Next would be a Christian's parents. One must honor thy father and mother and the covenant home into which one was born and lived under until establishing their own home through the covenant of marriage. Any siblings produced as a result of that covenant come next as the closest extended family from a previous covenantal arrangement. These blood-relatives whom God has made them family by His choosing of time, place and boundary a la Acts 17:26. Then the Christian must love the members of their local congregation of which they have a voluntary covenant of membership. Since this covenant can be transferred upon permissible geographical circumstances, it comes after the permanent nature of the marriage covenant under which you were born and the current one under which you have formed a new family. Next, the Christian must love their geographical neighbors beginning on their block and moving outwardly by association to neighborhood, city, county, state, nation, etc... Christian obligation is a matter of monitoring the especiallies and applying them with particular attention.

1 Timothy 5:8
But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Galatians 6:10
So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

day no. 15,591: enfleshed courage

"Men beget goodwill in other men by giving it. They develop courage in their following mainly as a reflection of the courage which they show in their own action. These two qualities of mind and heart are of the essence of sound officership. One is of little avail without the other, and either helps to sustain the other." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

If you want to encourage others, you must enflesh courage in yourself. The simple act of being courageous does more to infuse courage into your followers than a well prepared oratory on the topics accompanied by practical cowardice.

1 Thessalonians 5:11
Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing

day no. 15,590: information and transformation

"The services will continue to hold with the idea that strong nationhood comes not of the making of gadgets but of the building of character.." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Just as strong nations are primarily built upon producing people of precious character rather than producing gadgets of precious value, families and churches are built on the character of their members, not the amount of output of their operations.

The aim of education is not merely the transfer of information, but the grandeur of transformation. Education is primarily a matter of character development, not intellectual achievement. The end of education is not the amount of information we can organize into someone else's head. The wins are not measured in megabytes per square inch minted on the minds of our future employees. The wins are measured in character per square inch impressed upon the hearts of our children. Our descendants are not currency, they are stewards.

day no. 15,589: right without being righteous

"He owes it to his country to speak the truth as he sees it. This implies a steadying judgment as to when it should be spoken, and to whom it should be addressed. A truth need not only be well-rounded, but the utterance of it should be cognizant of the stresses and objectives of the hour. Truth becomes falsehood unless it has the strength of perspective... A false idea will come upon a bad fate even though it has the backing of the highest authority." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

The Christian faith is full of grace and truth: fully truthful in being gracious and fully gracious in telling the truth. There is a way to be right without being righteousness, a way to give preference to saying the right thing without assessing if it is the right time or place to say it.

There is an unrighteous way to be right. 
There is an incorrect way to be correct. 

Be patient and remember proportion and perspective. If you are right, but assert it wrongly, you do disservice to the truth, not homage. Anything that cannot go on forever, won't. Its failure doesn't depend upon your word. That isn't to say that you should simply shut your mouth and sit back with a bucket of popcorn as you wait and watch the whole thing implode, but rather to say that if you have something to say, but not the right time or place to say it, the time or place will eventually present itself or the enterprise will fail without you having had to say anything.

day no. 15,588: intellectual eunuch societies

"The service officer is not expected to be an intellectual eunuch, oblivious to all of the faults in the institution to which he gives his loyalty. To the contrary, the nature of that loyalty requires that he will use his force toward the righting of those things which reason convinces him are going wrong, though making certain that his action will not do more damage than repair." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Loyalty does not require cutting one's self off from reality. You can love and be loyal to something without having to pretend it doesn't have any problem or defend any of its faults per se. Loyalty insists on seeing the faults of its beloved, but does not insist on separating from the beloved because of them. 

It is the same with participation in a local church. A member does not have to pretend that their church has no problems or defend each of its faults in order to be a loyal member. On the contrary, members are obligated to see shortcomings. But what makes them a member is what they do about the problems. Members are not required to be blind to issues. They are required to be active in addressing them. That is what makes one a faithful member of an organization.

“No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it is worth changing?” - G.K. Chesterton

Love of the body produces acknowledgment of the body's deficiencies combined with commitment to strengthening those weaknesses. It loves the body enough to want to grow strong where it is weak which requires seeing holes and seeking to fill them.

day no. 15,573: solider on

"The true meaning of 'populus,' from which we get the word 'people,' was in the time of ancient Rome the ‘armed body.’ The pure-blooded Roman in the days of the Republic could not conceive of a citizen who was not a warrior... Nor is this concept alien to the ideals on which the Founding Fathers built the American system, since they stated it as the right and duty of every able-bodied citizen to bear arms." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

Citizens of a state are soldiers for its welfare.

2 Timothy 2:3-4, 7
Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him...Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.

Christians are enlisted, active duty. The body of Christ should be an armed body. The people who make up the members of a local body are the soldiers that make up the local brigade. They may not all be on the front lines, but they are all in uniform and on the same team. David made it a law that those who stayed back to guard the supplies should share in the spoils of those engaged in front line affairs. 

1 Samuel 30:24-25
“For as his share is who goes down into the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the baggage. They shall share alike.” And he made it a statute and a rule for Israel from that day forward to this day.

So all citizens of heaven are also soldiers, although they may be deployed to different posts or expected to engage in different tasks with respect to their rank and/or station.

day no. 15,571: an officer and a gentleman

"The military officer is considered a gentleman, not because Congress wills it, nor because it has been the custom of people in all times to afford him that courtesy, but specifically because nothing less than a gentleman is truly suited for his particular set of responsibilities." -- The Armed Forces Officer, U.S. Department of Defense (1950)

A man must be a knight if he is to battle dragons.

If he is not stern, he cannot defeat the beast, nor will he likely even try to. If he is not meek, he cannot be trusted to defeat the beast when he may just as well join it or be the very beast from which the people need defending.

"The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise of happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth... If we cannot produce Launcelots, humanity falls into two sections—those who can deal in blood and iron but cannot be 'meek in hall,' and those who are 'meek in hall' but useless in battle" -- C.S. Lewis, The Necessity of Chivalry

A military officer must be the kind of man you want in the midst of a battle and the kind of man you want to invite to the victory celebration that follows. If he's only good at minding his manners, there will never be a victory to celebrate. If he's only good at battling, no one will dare throw a party lest they be pillaged by his brutality.

He must, as Spurgeon notes, "practice 'suaviter in modo' as well as the 'fortiter in re.'" (Lectures to My Students, The Need of Decision for the Truth)

In other words, he must be 'gentle in manner' and 'resolute in deed.'