We are really enjoy­ing the Com­mands of Christ and Char­ac­ter Qual­i­ties! One goal that we have while study­ing these is to med­i­tate on how Christ per­fectly embod­ied the qual­i­ties. Then they become a point of wor­ship, instead of just good char­ac­ter goals. So, this morn­ing, as I was look­ing at this new com­mand to Go the Extra Mile and the new Char­ac­ter Qual­ity of Def­er­ence, I was ask­ing myself, “How did Christ embody these?”

Here is an excerpt from my jour­nal this morning:

No greater love has any man than this that He would lay down His life for a friend! The Cross is the ulti­mate exam­ple of def­er­ence; Jesus “putting our eter­nal wel­fare ahead of His own per­sonal plea­sure or will”. He said, “Not My will, but Thy will be done.” Jesus also showed def­er­ence when He would, while attempt­ing to retreat and be with His Father, be moved with com­pas­sion and stop to heal the sick and teach the mul­ti­tudes. Matthew 14:13, “when Jesus heard it (speak­ing of John’s death), He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Him­self. But when the mul­ti­tudes heard it, they fol­lowed Him on foot from the cities. And when Jesus went out He saw a great mul­ti­tude; and He was moved with com­pas­sion for them, and healed their sick.”

This week as we focus on Going the Extra Mile and prac­tic­ing Def­er­ence, let us med­i­tate on how per­fectly Christ embod­ied these. Praises be to His name!

If you would like to down­load the desk­top images for this week, feel free. Here’s one for the big screen and one for your lap­top.

At the onset, this seems like a no-​​brainer. We would pre­fer the truth told to us than a hurt­ful lie. I think we can all agree that telling the truth is bet­ter than lying. But when we get into exag­ger­a­tion, half-​​truths and omis­sions, it’s not being truthful.

So many Bible verses talk about the impor­tance of telling the truth. Psalm 151:1 – 4 says those who walk uprightly, work right­eous­ness and speak truth in his heart — even to his own harm are the ones who can abide in God’s taber­na­cle and dwell on His holy hill. Psalm 101:7 says liars can­not be in His sight let alone stay within His house. On and on the Bible gives these warn­ings. Worst of all, Rev­e­la­tion 21:8 says liars will have their eter­nal home in the lake of fire, which is the sec­ond death.

I don’t want any part of deceit­ful­ness — even if it seems harm­less. God views false­hood on a com­pletely dif­fer­ent level. So for this week, Liz and I are going to focus on truth­ful­ness. If you’d like to join us, sub­scribe to the daily suc­cess emails, or down­load the desk­top for the week, here you go: One for the big screen and one for the lap­tops.

Med­i­tat­ing on God’s word is one of the keys to trans­form­ing our spir­its. Not only was it a com­mand of the LORD for the kings of Israel, but it is vital to keep our minds on things above.

In order to facil­i­tate this desire, Liz and I started get­ting emails from Bill Gothard from his Daily Suc­cess email cam­paign. Each week, a new char­ac­ter qual­ity and med­i­ta­tion verse are issued. And each day, we receive a lit­tle devo­tional sup­port­ing that char­ac­ter qual­ity from the Bible. So at the begin­ning of the week, we write down every­thing on the glass plate boards so we keep it in mind.

Well, that worked for a lit­tle while but I end up look­ing at my com­puter screen more than star­ing off across the room at the board. So, I decided to start mak­ing desk­top images so I have them on my com­puter while I work. They key for me is to make them look good. If it looks good, you want to look at it. And when you encounter text, you auto­mat­i­cally begin to read it — well, that’s my theory.

I’ll attach my desk­tops from time to time. I don’t know if any­one who reads this will want to do this too but, if so, here’s the one for this week. The char­ac­ter qual­ity is “Respon­si­bil­ity.” Here’s one for the big screen and one for the lap­top. Enjoy.

On Decem­ber 23, the Inter­na­tional House of Prayer lost a dear friend as Derek Loux was united with the Lord after a fatal car crash in Nebraska when his vehi­cle lost con­trol on black ice. Com­ing home from a min­istry trip in Col­orado, Derek was away learn­ing how to fur­ther care for young chil­dren who have been vic­tims of sex traf­fick­ing. In the last sev­eral years, Derek and his wife have taken the lead in the adop­tion move­ment by tak­ing the unwanted and dis­abled chil­dren. Their first-​​born child, Josiah, who was dis­abled, died at 2.5 years old to their dev­as­ta­tion. Estab­lish­ing the Josiah Fund and the Orphan Jus­tice Cen­ter was an over­flow of their passion.

While death’s sting is with us, I want to remem­ber what inspi­ra­tion he gave. Below, are some media links so you can expe­ri­ence the gifts he gave us.

Spir­i­tual War­fare, A Will­ing Heart

Liz and I were in Kansas City and heard him speak at IHOP’s Spir­i­tual War­fare con­fer­ence on Peter. Open­ing up how Jesus estab­lishes dis­ci­ples in love amidst fail­ure, he pre­sented Jesus’ heart for the weak and broken.

Excerpts from Paper Reli­gion

Paper Reli­gion was his Derek’s sec­ond release at the Inter­na­tional House of Prayer in Kansas City. Here’s three tracks from this album.

IHOP Acronym Song

This song and imper­son­ation of Dave Sliker is great! IHOP has an enor­mous amount of acronyms and it’s hard to keep up with all of them. Derek’s song com­pletely illus­trates how con­fus­ing it is. In a sep­a­rate video, Mike Bickle shares some of his thoughts about Derek and his fam­ily on his video blog.

Derek’s Funeral

Over the last sev­eral weeks, I’ve been search­ing for the video of his funeral. On the fam­ily blog, René has posted the media. Here is the video of his ser­vice.

Shel­ley Paul­son, a fan­tas­tic pho­tog­ra­pher, shot pho­tog­ra­phy from the ser­vice and cre­ated a slide show.

Thanks to Jonathan Mills, we had a chance to sub­mit designs for the Inter­na­tional House of Prayer in Kansas City (IHOP-​​KC). Jonathan writes one day and asks if I had ever design for music projects and if he could see some of our work. I sent him our port­fo­lio and we had a shot at design­ing the Majes­tic album. With a warm suc­cess here, we had a chance to design for their Lim­ited Edi­tion album.

Liz and I have always received the Lim­ited Edi­tion albums since the first release so this was a huge oppor­tu­nity. Not know­ing what style they pre­fer over another, we devel­oped sev­eral con­cepts with dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions. Long story short, they liked it.

So why blog about it? I’m happy with the work so far and I want to post it. Is that so bad? The design they chose will be the same each release but we will be fea­tur­ing dif­fer­ent pho­tos for each album. See what I mean?

If you ever have a chance to work with IHOP-​​KC, they are fan­tas­tic peo­ple to work with and have a spirit of excel­lence in all they do. It’s been a pleasure.

Recently, I’ve been pretty focused on get­ting work done. As many of you know, I have a great influx of work in the third quar­ter of the year that runs most through most of the fourth. So that means I’m at my desk a lot. I mean a lot.

So, while my life is here, in Kansas City, the Inter­na­tional House of Prayer was cel­e­brat­ing their tenth anniver­sary of night and day prayer. They made their meet­ings avail­able on the web stream and online. What I have col­lected here are the nine ses­sions Mike Bickle gave going over their 30+ year prophetic history.

What I really enjoy about this is that while Mike is giv­ing these ses­sions to encour­age the staff, he really points out that these promises are not just lim­ited to them. The bib­li­cal promises are based on scrip­ture and are avail­able to all the redeemed.

If you’re inter­ested, feel free to lis­ten to them below or go to their web­site. You can lis­ten with the flash audio player, or down­load the MP3 file and notes and fol­low along. The notes cover addi­tional infor­ma­tion that Mike some­times breezes over in his pre­sen­ta­tion.