This week

• When a discount computer will cost you a bundle….…
• The two most important keys to living a long, healthy life ….
• A very simple way to make your kids smarter….
• What’s the “need” in starting a new business.…
• A preacher used this Biblical success principle and his work lives on nearly 100 years after his death.…
• Do you really have to give away everything you own?…
  

“The Bible teaches that Christians are totally different from anyone else.” -  
Peter Jeffery, Evangelicals Then and Now (Buy Now)

Dear Wisdom Seeker,

This month, we’ve got an exciting new section for you. You already know that time is our most precious commodity. And we all need to find ways to save time so we can focus on the more important things in life. My good friend Dale Gramith, aka “The Time Shaver,” will offer us short tips each month that can shave seconds – even minutes – off your schedule each day. He also will help you see how these time savings really add up. Some of the tips may seem a bit over the top at times, but they’re all simple things you can do to save some time. Enjoy!

– Steve Kroening

Health

Two Ways to Stay Healthy Throughout Your Life

In last week’s issue, we discussed the power of worry on your health. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to say, “don’t worry” than it is to actually follow the advice. That’s because a lot of people try to avoid worry without putting anything in its place. We discussed last week how dependence on the Lord is the first place to start. And doing so gives us two ways to refocus our attention – and radically change our health in the process.

The Scriptures give us two ways to keep our focus off of worry and onto far more Godly ways of thinking. Both of these concepts bind up much of what God calls us to do. And it just so happens that they can keep us far healthier until the day the Lord calls us home.

The two ways to stay healthy are simply discipline and purpose. You’ve undoubtedly heard the verse, “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18). That verse is obviously talking about purpose. It’s referring to a plan for the future. And it also encompasses hope – hope that there’s something better coming down the road.

But there’s more to this verse than just purpose or vision. The rest of the verse reads: “but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” This part of the verse speaks to discipline. Its focus is on our living life according to God’s Word. If you read Paul’s description (in Galatians and elsewhere) of how he lived as a Pharisee, you see the description of a very disciplined man.

Even after Paul realized that his rigorous works had no power to save him, and came to Christ through faith, he remained a very disciplined man.  Moreover, he called us to be disciplined, as well. In 1 Thessalonians 4:4, Paul says, “each one of you (should) know how to control his own body in holiness and honor.”

So how does all of this help your health?

If worry and stress break your health down,
Purpose and discipline help to build it up.

If you read a lot of the studies done on what brings good health, you’ll see that many of them have to do with these principles. You’ll see that exercise, eating right, not smoking, and living in moderation with regard to how much you eat and drink all are part of discipline. Even the disciplines of prayer, meditation, and fasting are great for your health.

There are also studies that show how people with hope, purpose, and vision will stay healthier. People who have these characteristics have fewer sick days away from work. They also have less depression and fewer chemical dependencies. And, frankly, they have a reason to live.

How many times have you seen people die shortly after they retire? They simply weren’t able to find any purpose beyond their work. But some people thrive after they retire because they find a new sense of purpose that gives them a reason to live.

So if you’re looking for great health, the place to start is not in a pill bottle. Start with your mind. Is your mind solely dedicated to Christ? Is your mind disciplined? Have you thought of your purpose? If you’re struggling to find a purpose, read this week’s Success section. If you can find someone with a need, it’s easy to find purpose.

– Steve Kroening

PS. A great gift you can give your children is to teach them discipline and purpose while they’re young. It’s a great way to help them live a healthy, long life.

Family & Relationships

How to Make Your Kids Smarter

You may have heard that a certain type of music can actually increase your IQ. Experts have debated whether music actually has that power. But now there’s some solid science that shows conclusively you can use music to make your kids smarter.

The evidence comes from a repeatable experiment done by 16-year-old David Merrell at Virginia State Science Fair. This experiment clearly shows how certain music can help improve your kids’ IQ. It also shows how other types of music can negatively affect their ability to learn.

Merrell designed his experiment to test how different groups of mice made their way through a maze. He set up a standard 10-minute maze, and separated the mice into three groups. The first group was the control group. He didn’t expose this group to any music whatsoever. He exposed the second group to the music of Mozart. And the third group he exposed to rock music by the group Anthrax. Each group heard its dedicated music 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

Initially, he allowed all three groups of mice to find their way through the maze before they heard any music. Then Merrell tested each group after one week, two weeks, and three weeks. Given that the same maze was used, you would expect the mice to get faster, and they did. But look what happened to the mice exposed to the music. The numbers indicate the number of seconds it took the mice to complete the maze. The results are absolutely amazing!

See the pattern? The control group with no music did get faster. But the classical music group got even faster after the first week.

But pay attention to the rock music group. This, it seems, is the effect rock music has on the brain. After three weeks of exposure to rock music, the mice were one-sixth as fast as the mice exposed to no music, while the classical music group was nearly six times FASTER than it was at the beginning, and almost three times as fast as the control group.

Merrill told the Associated Press that he had to separate all the mice listening to rock music in order to complete the experiment. He attempted the experiment once before, allowing mice in the different groups to live together.

“I had to cut my project short because all the hard-rock mice killed each other,” Merrill said. “None of the classical mice did that.”

Apparently, the disjointed, jarring rhythmic structures of rock music
destroy the brain’s ability to function normally.

And it doesn’t matter what the lyrics are. In fact, it is not just rock music that is the focus of attention. It is any music that has a constant syncopation, where the rhythm is moved to the offbeat.

Merrell conducted another experiment using different kinds of rock music, from the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1990s. The results were not much better. The classical music group still beat everyone, and none of the rock groups beat the control group. The music of the 1970s was better than the 1950s by a very small margin and both of these were a lot better than the 1990s. But the 1990s rock music outperformed Anthrax.

Scientists tell us that the brain’s cells are usually formed by age six. So it’s worth the effort to expose your young children to good classical music, such as Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven.

If you’d like to learn more about the power of music, I recommend a 2-CD audio set called The Profound Effects of Music on Life by Andrew Pudewa. You can order it from the Institute of Excellence in Writing, www.writing-edu.com. It costs just $12 and should be in every Christian home.

– Ian Hodge

Success

The Most Important Thing to Identify Before Starting a New Business

If you’re thinking about starting a business, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what you want to do. You may have even put together a business plan and started to put the pieces together. But before you take one more step, you need to ask yourself this very important question:

Does this idea address a real, continuing market need or opportunity?

Far too many businesses die a fast death because they fail to ask this question. You see, it’s very easy to come up with business ideas that we would enjoy working on. But it’s difficult to find out what other people – your potential customers – really need and are willing to pay their hard-earned money to buy.

This is a classic example of the Biblical principle to put other people’s needs ahead of your own (Phil. 2:3-4). Many entrepreneurs are so focused on what they want to do, they forget to consider their customers. But, in reality, your prospective customers’ needs are precisely where you should begin.

This isn’t just a great principle for business, but also for ministry. In this week’s Wisdom From History section, there’s a great example of a minister who used this principle to start one of the best-known charities in the U.S. and around the world.

– Steve Kroening

 The Time Shaver

Tips, Tricks, and Downright Ridiculous ways to SAVE TIME

Do you still shave at home? Buy an extra electric razor for the car. With a five-minute shave time, you will waste over 26 waking hours this year. Enough time to take your spouse on that weekend get-away you’ve been talking about (by the way, if you’re just talking about it – it’s another waste of time).

One important consideration: For your safety – be careful not to distract yourself while driving. My attorney has also reminded me that lawsuits are not Time Shaver friendly. 

– Dale Gramith, aka The Time Shaver

Wisdom From History

Find a Need and Fill It

One day in 1865, William Booth stopped in front of The Blind Beggar, a tavern in East London, and read aloud a passage from a hymn.

The customers began jeering, then someone threw a rotten egg at the preacher. With yolk dripping down his face, he paused, then continued. He said a prayer, and moved on.

Being a traveling preacher wasn’t easy. But Booth (1829-1912), who’d decided 16 years before to try to save as many souls as possible, was determined to reach his goal. As he kept walking, he saw drunken 5-year-olds hanging around tavern doorways, mothers giving their babies beer, and men fighting.

“In July 1865, this city of 3 million souls numbered more than 100,000 paupers,” wrote Richard Collier in The General Next to God. “Three wet days saw 30,000 street vendors on the brink of starvation.”

Unlike most, Booth wasn’t repulsed by the sights and sounds of the poverty-ridden streets. He decided he’d found his calling; he wanted to help these stricken people.

That determination led him to form the Salvation Army, which now works in more than 100 countries, collecting donations for the needy and providing community services and outreach.

– Nancy Gondo

(Quoted from “Booth's Army Fought Poverty,” Investors Business Daily.)

Word for the Wise

Do You Own Your Possessions? Or Lease Them?

So therefore, no one of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions Luke 14:33

Not Give Up - This is certainly one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus. For that reason, it seems to be universally ignored. It goes against the grain. Did Jesus really mean that we should forsake all of our possessions? Did He really mean that we should become paupers for the Kingdom? We are more inclined to think of His remark to the rich, young ruler ("Sell all that you have") as applicable to rich, young rulers but not to us!

The Greek verb here offers some consolation – and some further obligation. The phrase is ouk apotassetai, literally “not place in order from.” In the New Testament, the verb apotasso is used only in the middle voice. That means it has the sense “to place in order away from myself.” We translate this phase as “not forsake” or “not renounce” but the underlying thought is to restructure the order of things so that we give up the incorrect arrangement and take on the correct priorities.

Now we see what Jesus is really saying. “No one can be my disciple
who does not take up the proper priorities about possessions.”

In other words, if you don’t have God's perspective about your possessions, you will not be able to follow the Master. Get God’s priorities first! Then you can follow Jesus.

What is God’s perspective on possessions? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Once I know what God thinks about my things, I’ll be able to see if my arrangement is correct. If it’s not, then I have a choice. I can change my priorities and become a disciple, or I can keep my priorities and not be His disciple. What I can’t do is keep my old priorities and still claim to follow Him.

Simply put, God’s perspective of things is a lease arrangement. He owns everything. I don’t. It’s all His to do with as He wishes. I merely have a lease option, set up by Him. That means that my possessions are on loan to me, and that should He want them back or ask me to do something with them, I have no right to claim them as my own. As a matter of operational method, God is in the distribution business, not the accumulation business.

So, He loans me what He owns in order that I may use it for His purposes. That’s it!

Whenever I begin to think of things as under my control, I have the wrong priority. Wherever I begin to collect for my storehouse, I have the wrong arrangement. So Jesus says, “If you are not willing to see all that you have as merely passing through your hands on the way to someone else, you are mistaken. If you think that life is about collecting for yourself and your use, you have missed the point. Anyone who has that kind of thinking cannot be my follower.”

– Skip Moen

(Ed. Note: Skip Moen, PhD, is the president of At God’s Table and the author of Words to Lead By.)

 Resources

Evangelicals Then and Now, Peter Jeffery, Evangelical Press (BUY NOW)

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