Let Us Consider: Seeking the Courage to Live True

By Daryl Sherfey

Only a desperate person will seek God with their whole heart and soul. The challenge, then, is to live in this busy, day-to-day world and remain desperate for God.When Daryl Sherfey was fifty-six years old, he awoke at 2 a.m. one morning unable to breathe. His heart was failing due to uncontrolled diabetes. This book is the result of his encoun

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647734473

Book preview

Dedication

For my two sons, Justin Jay and Michael Christopher;

and for Wallace, wherever he might be.

Contents

Prologue

Introduction: How It Began

Day 1: My Compass

Day 2: Mercy Me

Day 3: I Was Afraid of That

Day 4: No Excuse

Day 5: He Likes Me

Day 6: Superstition

Day 7: The Mustard Field

Day 8: Desperation

Day 9: Kite Tails

Day 10: I Can Do That

Day 11: I Can Only Imagine

Day 12: Shoo Fly Shoo

Day 13: Let It Ride

Day 14: It’s All in the Game

Day 15: Screwdriver

Day 16: Get Behind Me

Day 17: Gorgeous Girl

Day 18: Chiquito Creek

Day 19: Tomorrow

Day 20: Boxes

Day 21: Amazing

Day 22: When I First Believed

Day 23: I Have a Photograph

Day 24: A Sierra Summer

Day 25: The Heart of the Matter

Day 26: Jesus Sighed

Day 27: I Once Spent the Night

Day 28: Stars

Day 29: Stalking God

Day 30: Stealth Is No Defense

Day 31: Sand Dunes

Day 32: Out on a Limb

Day 33: Where There’s Smoke

Day 34: The Consuming Fire

Day 35: Traces of Charcoal

Day 36: The Voice

Day 37: The Cat and the Window

Day 38: Steve, the Surfer

Day 39: The Devil’s Club

Day 40: U-Turns

Day 41: A Slave to the Eyes

Day 42: Precious Pebbles

Day 43: In His Hands

Day 44: Eggnog, the Hamster

Day 45: The Longleaf Pine

Day 46: Buried Treasure

Day 47: The Badlands

Day 48: The Scent of a Rose

Day 49: Our Hope

Day 50: Pelicans and Anglers

Day 51: Blinking Butts

Day 52: Bubblegum Wrappers

Day 53: Beach Buckets

Day 54: Science versus Spirit

Day 55: The Wild Goose

Day 56: Not-So-Good News

Day 57: Is Righteousness Right?

Day 58: My Image

Day 59: Resistance

Day 60: Lying Eyes

Day 61: Fathers and Sons

Day 62: A Father’s Fear

Day 63: This Little Light

Day 64: Beavers

Day 65: Lost

Day 66: People Are Strange

Day 67: Telescopes

Day 68: Let It All Hang Out

Day 69: In Between

Day 70: The Land of Maybe

Day 71: The Others

Day 72: The End of the Rope

Day 73: On the Edge

Day 74: Douglas Fir Trees

Day 75: The Night

Day 76: An Apprentice

Day 77: Oh, So Wonderful

Day 78: A Little Bit of Country

Day 79: The Deep End

Day 80: Pearl of Great Price

Day 81: Hold On

Day 82: No Safety Zone

Day 83: Consider Robins

Day 84: It Don’t Add Up

Day 85: Optimism

Day 86: Tomorrow’s Promise

Day 87: Man to Man

Day 88: A Love of Rivers

Day 89: The Dog at the End of the Street

Day 90: The Se’aqah

Day 91: Forgotten

Day 92: The Insignificant

Day 93: Men’s Ministries

Day 94: My Two Cents

Day 95: First Tuesday in November

Day 96: Spin

Day 97: Navigational Charts

Day 98: Clipboards

Day 99: Déjà Vu

Day 100: A Time to Spill

Footnotes

Prologue

The purpose of this book is to provide material for a time of reflection each day over the next 100 days. There are no must dos or quick fixes put forth in the following pages, only examples drawn on my personal life experiences of over fifty years as an apprentice of Jesus. The challenge I speak of in the subtitle of the book is not one of performance, but of truth: The challenge I set before you is a call to evaluate your honesty with God, yourself, your spouse, your family, your fellow believers, and all the others in your life. My intention is to encourage you to examine yourself in light of the love and the good works either active or not active in your day-to-day life.

Introduction

How It Began

When my two sons lived away from home at their university, I sent them regular letters encouraging them in the faith. Reading those letters now, I cringe. They are long, tedious, and exhausting—like most things religious. It is amazing my sons even read them. At least the letters let them know I was thinking of them.

Years later, my oldest son suggested I turn the letters into a book. Surprisingly, he had kept them all. The letters would not have made a good book. I had written them in a detached, measured voice. They lacked heart. They lacked honesty. They resembled more lecture than encouragement.

In 2006 I had a heart attack while serving as an executive pastor at an evangelical church in the Northwest. I discovered I had diabetes and congestive heart failure. After some soul searching, I resigned my position to concentrate on a course toward better health. During this time of personal renewal, I began an online blog. In the blog, I evaluated my life in light of the sudden realization of my mortality. As a result, I realized how dishonest I had been with myself throughout my life. This dishonesty infected not only my relationship with myself, but also my relationship with my wife, my kids, my family, my friends, and my God. My blog addressed the details of my life as a believer in a glaring honesty.

My blog followers requested I send out emails to encourage them. I complied and began a daily email for those who requested one. The list soon grew unbelievably large. My simple emails went out to a host of people from all walks of life all over the world. Two verses guided my purpose as I wrote the emails: Hebrews 10:24 and 1 Timothy 1:15–16. The emails gave honest examples from my life to encourage believers to love and good works.

My oldest son again suggested I put them into a book. When my second son threatened to publish the emails on his own, I had no choice.

Here is the book. I hope you find it helpful.

Day 1

My Compass

And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

—Hebrews 12:1

I was always pretty good with a compass. I once ran a compass line for a mile through virgin old-growth forest on the southern slopes of Mount Saint Helens. This was before the volcano’s eruption. I sought an early 1900 government survey section corner near the Lewis River headwaters. A section of land is one square mile. After pacing off a mile with a handheld compass through difficult terrain, I had only to walk about ten feet to the right before I found the corner marker. No one believed it, but it was the truth. But a compass has its limits. It cannot point you in the right direction until you know where you are and where you want to go.

Most Christians, if asked, will say they will go to heaven when they die. That pretty much sums up the whole Christian life for most believers today. Once they have the heaven issue settled, what happens between birth and death does not seem to have much spiritual significance for them. Life’s purpose becomes pretty much the same as any other person of any other religion—something along the lines of success, big house, happy family, insurance policies, investments, then retirement.

Life is meant to be enjoyed—or endured—without much thought of the end until the end is near. Then there is a desperate scramble to pull it all together, or a sad resignation that nothing now can be done. Most of us live our lives haphazardly, dealing with circumstances as they come.

This should not be the case. The terrain we cross on this life journey has been chosen for us by our Creator. It is a course set out specifically for us. There are good things that need to be accomplished along our path. We are here to work together with God by doing good. As lights in a dark place, we are to provide warm comfort to those in need. We should be alert; we should keep our eyes open to the opportunity to do the work of God, to do the good that needs to be done along our path.

Other Things to Consider

Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.

—Titus 2:14 kjv

God will give to each person according to what he has done. To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.

—Romans 2:6–7

Day 2

Mercy Me

I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

—Exodus 33:19

We often force our modern ways of thinking on the stories told in the Bible, and thus sometimes miss the whole point of what is said. Take the apostle Matthew, for instance. Matthew was a tax collector. However, Matthew was not what today we would consider an IRS agent. Matthew was a traitor.

The Roman Empire had conquered Israel. Matthew, a Jew, worked for the occupying Roman government to collect taxes from his neighbors and fellow countrymen. Matthew earned his living by adding a fee to the total taxes due. It was a good strategy by the Romans to hire locals to collect the taxes. As a local Jew himself, Matthew knew when a neighbor had a good harvest or an unexpected windfall. He would swoop in at such times to demand his and the Romans’ cut.

For these reasons, the Jews hated Matthew. His neighbors spit on him when he passed—and rightly so. They considered all tax collectors sinners and traitors. Yet amazingly, Jesus sought Matthew out and asked him to become a disciple. More shocking still, Jesus, the Son of the holy and just God, went to dinner and celebrated with Matthew and his friends. Matthew’s friends most likely were also outcasts—pimps, prostitutes, thieves—for only such people would ever befriend a hated tax collector.

It is no wonder that the Jewish leaders of the day hated Jesus so much. His acceptance of such traitors was not just unreasonable, it was unjust. The Jewish law demanded justice for such sinners. Jesus, however, did not require such repentance or justice before accepting Matthew.

God declares to Moses in the verse quoted above from Exodus: "I will be gracious to who I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy." This may sound a bit fickle to our modern ears. And so it may be. But dare we have it any other way? Do we truly want a God who must always insist on justice, a God who can only show mercy when it is deserved? If such were the case, Jesus could not have asked Matthew to be His disciple. The father could not have welcomed back his prodigal son. And neither could the farmer have paid the same amount to those workers he hired at the last hour of the day as those who had worked the full day.

God can do as He pleases, and since God is love, it pleases Him to show mercy and compassion on whomever He may choose—and He chooses everyone. If it were not so, there would be no hope for anyone.

Other Things to Consider

Mercy triumphs over judgment.

—James 2:13

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

—Exodus 34:7

Day 3

I Was Afraid of That

What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.

—Job 3:25

Fear is a horrid disease. It infects us all: fear of death, fear of loss, fear of rejection, fear of exposure. It is crippling. It can overwhelm the weak; it can cripple the strong. It can rob us of trust; it can bar us from love. When fear rules a person’s life, honesty cannot exist. And without honesty, there can be no trust or love. Without trust and love, a person’s life becomes nothing more than a pretense—smoke and mirrors.

Even after fifty years of marriage, you would think I could be honest with my wife. Yet I must admit, I still keep a few mirrors around the house, just in case. She says she loves me unconditionally, but would she still love me if she knew about that one horrid thing behind the third mirror on the left, next to the smoke machine?

Even righteous Job appeared to have some secret fears. When everything had fallen apart around him, and he sat devastated upon the trash heap outside the city with his three friends, Job cried out something along these lines: Woe that I was born! What I always feared has finally happened!

God seems to have allowed Job to suffer inexplicably at the hands of Satan. What I always missed before in this story of Job was this: Satan first had to ask permission. He could do nothing to Job without first getting the go-ahead from God. Think about that a moment. Satan had to ask permission. Job belonged to the Lord. The Lord called Job His servant.

Why did God give Satan the go-ahead? I do not know. Perhaps it was because of what Job feared. Often the only way we can overcome fear is to pass through it. The thing to remember is this: Nothing can come into a believer’s life without God’s permission. If God loves us, we need not fear whatever befalls us.

The difficulty for me has always been believing that God loves me—especially when the trouble in my life is due to my own actions. But God does love me. I have learned through years of struggling with such a concept that God not only loves me, He likes me.

Other Things to Consider

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

—1 John 4:18

Keep yourselves from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you. So, we say with confidence, The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?

—Hebrews 13:5–6

Day 4

No Excuse

Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.

—Genesis 28:16

Jacob’s plans had gone awry. In league with his mother, he had deceived his elderly father and cheated his older brother, Esau, out of the family inheritance. Esau swore to kill him, and Jacob ran off to stay with a distant uncle until the situation cooled down.

The first night of his flight, Jacob found himself alone in the wild without a safe place to sleep. He slept on the ground with a stone for a pillow. Yet it was there, in those dire and depressing circumstances, all of which had resulted from his own doing, that God spoke to him in a dream and promised to be with him and to bring him good. When he awoke, Jacob’s first words were basically this: The Lord was here, and I did not see it.

I, too, like Jacob,