If you've ever played chess, you know it's a very complicated game. If you want to be good at the game, you have to be able to look at the entire board, recognize a variety of possibilities, and see several moves ahead. An excellent chess player has to see all sixty-four squares and all the pieces on the board.

An excellent chess player won't move their bishop and think: "I moved my bishop there because it puts his king in check." Instead, an excellent chess player will be thinking: "I moved my bishop there because it puts his king in check, blocks him from moving his knight where he wants to, protects my queen, opens up space to move my rook, and sets me up to take his bishop two moves down the road."

When I'm watching an excellent chess player in a game, I can't possibly even guess their reasons for making the moves they make. But I know they've got plans that are wise and sensible.

In some ways God is like an excellent chess player -- except He's dealing not with sixty-four squares, but an entire universe. Instead of thirty-two pieces, He's dealing with billions of people. And instead of looking a few moves ahead, God is seeing the entirety of human history.

Sometimes we want to understand why God does the things He does, but as little as I understand why a chess player does what they do, I have even less chance of understanding why God does what He does. The Bible says that God's ways are not our ways, but it also says in 32:4“The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.Deuteronomy 32:4 that His works are perfect, and His ways are just.

It is fun sometimes to try to guess God's reasons for what He does, but ultimately we must learn to trust in Him even when we have no idea what He is doing.

Last week I did something I never do: I turned on my television in the middle of the day to see what was on. Now I remember why I never do that.

Although, as I was flipping through the channels I saw a face that was very familiar from my childhood: Fred Rogers. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was one of those shows I watched faithfully when I was a little child, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it's still being aired after all these years.

So I decided to sit down and watch it, and see how my perceptions of the show would change since my childhood days. Mister Rogers was talking about music that day, and he told his "neighbors" that he wanted to take us to meet a friend of his, who was a professional musician. Off we went, down the street, to his friend's house.

As we got to the friend's door, Mister Rogers said something that caught my attention. I think any one of us would have said: "I can't wait for you to meet my friend -- he's a wonderful musician." But instead of that, Mister Rogers said, "I can't wait for you to meet my friend -- he's a wonderful person."

Did you notice the difference? "A wonderful musician" vs. "a wonderful person."

Why did I find that so interesting? Because through the clue of that one little word, Mister Rogers has given us a window into his heart and told us what he values most about a person: character over talent. Most of us, on the other hand, are quick to value talent over character.

The lesson in this is two-fold.

First, Jesus told us throughout Matthew 23 that what is on the inside is far more important than what's on the outside. We can brag all day about the things we do, but in the long run, it's who we are that matters to God.

Second, Jesus told us in 15:18But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.Matthew 15:18 that everything that proceeds out of our mouth comes from "inside." Just as Mister Rogers' words gave us a window into his heart, every time we speak we give everyone a glimpse of the kind of person we are.

A wise man will take this lesson to heart, and not simply guard his tongue, but also use the things he says as a way of understanding -- and changing -- the kind of person he is.

Celebrity death has been in the news quite a bit lately, with both Brad Renfro and Heath Ledger dying in the past week. Two very young actors. I think it's interesting that the Associated Press and other news services have pre-written obituaries for a handful of very famous people.

They are mostly well-known people who are either quite old or quite ill, and whose lifetime accomplishments are mostly behind them. If the obituary is pre-written, then when they die, AP can just write one last paragraph with death details, and then post the whole thing online. Of course, it's not worth the hassle if they have to keep updating it, which is why they only have obituaries on file for a small handful of people.

I think it's interesting that Britney Spears has made that list. Britney is 26 years old. And AP, by pre-writing her obituary, is essentially saying: "All her newsworthy accomplishments are in the past, and we don't expect her to last much longer."

Now that's depressing! If I was her, I think this news would get me to start taking a second look at what my life is all about.

The book of Ecclesiastes says that it's better to go to a funeral than a party, because everyone ends up dead, and while you're still alive you ought to stop and think about it! (That's my paraphrase of 7:2It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.Ecclesiastes 7:2)

I think it would behoove all of us to ask ourselves two very simple questions:

1. If someone was going to pre-write my obituary right now, what kinds of things would it say about me?

2. When, someday, my obituary is written for real, what do I hope it will say?

Perhaps asking these questions will help us better understand where we are in life, and where we ought to be.

A few years ago I had an interesting incident occur at our youth group. One night while the teens were playing a game out in the field, two of the girls decided to go visit a relative who lived within walking distance of the church. And they left without either asking permission, or telling anyone they were going.

Now, we have a policy that we don't permit teens to leave youth group unless they have permission given by a parent/guardian or the parent/guardian comes to pick them up.

So I wasn't happy when I realized these girls had taken off.

When they returned, I approached them and asked, "Where have you been?"

One of the girls replied, "Oh, we were just over on the other side of the building."

The thing that was ironic about this was, if they'd told me the truth, they would not have gotten in trouble. Why? Because, to the best of my recollection, I couldn't remember that I had discussed this youth group policy with the teens that year, and these two girls were new to the youth group. So I realized it was possible they didn't know the policy, and therefore it would have been inappropriate for me to "chew them out." Instead, I would have simply explained the policy, and that would have been the end of it.

But since they lied, oh yes, you'd better believe they were in trouble! The difference, of course, was that they knew lying was not right!

People wonder sometimes why God gave the law, and there are several reasons for it, but one of those reasons is precisely what I just described; God gave the law because He knew what was right and wrong, but we did not. 3:19Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary.Galatians 3:19 says: Why then the Law? It was added because of transgressions...

People already broke God's holy standard of righteousness. The law was given so that people would know what was right and wrong, and could therefore be corrected when they violated those commands.

Imagine a world in which God never said to the people, "You shall not lie," or "You shall not commit adultery," or "You shall not murder." What a terrible place that would be -- so much worse even than it is right now!

If you've ever been to Camp Fairhaven, you've probably met Dunkin. Dunkin is not a person, he's a dog. He belongs to Dave, who is currently one of the directors at the camp.

I've never seen a dog quite like Dunkin. I've never seen a dog so devoted to his master. If Dave is in the camp office, Dunkin will stand just outside the office door and stare at him. Doesn't matter if Dave is in there for three hours; Dunkin is content to stare for three hours.

Dunkin follows Dave everywhere. Once, when Dave ended up on the opposite side of the lake from Dunkin, Dunkin didn't wait for Dave to come get him -- he swam all the way accross the lake to get back to Dave.

If I opened the door of my car and Dave opened the door of his truck, I have no doubt which vehicle Dunkin would get in. If I stood there and called him by name, I still have no doubt which vehicle he would get in. And, if I stood there and called him by name while holding a doggie treat for him, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would still get in Dave's truck instead of my car.

This is devotion, pure and simple. And in 6:5You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.Deuteronomy 6:5, we are told that we should be wholeheartedly devoted to God. We should have the same love and devotion that Dunkin has toward Dave. For us, there should be no one else who steals our attention and devotion from God.

But how often does Satan hold out a "doggie treat" (temptation) to me and say, "Here, Doug!" and I have no qualms about getting on board with him?

I want to be so devoted to God that when Satan tries to get my attention, I don't even stop to consider the possibility of betraying God.

At Camp Fairhaven, there is a lake right in the middle of the camp. There are two sets of cabins and lodges on either side of the lake. One is the boys' side, the other is the girls' side. This year, things were different than they have been in the past; this year they couldn't get enough staff to run both sides of the camp, so they moved the boys to the girls' side, and left the boys' side deserted.

With one exception. Since they were using all the cabins on the girls' side, they put me, the Bible teacher, on the other side of the camp.

I felt like I was living in a ghost town!

But the camp was NOT deserted. It was overrun with squirrels. These squirrels were the boldest animals I've ever seen. They would scurry up the walls of my cabin, they would leap from branches to my roof while I was sitting right there on the porch watching them.

And when I dropped a carrot stick on the ground, they didn't grab it and run away with it. They grabbed it, dropped it at the foot of a little tree about five feet from where I was sitting, and then scurried up and down the tree glaring at me and scolding me -- as though daring me to take the carrot stick away from them.

I was surprised, at first, to see so many squirrels on the grounds. There weren't that many the previous year. But then I realized -- there probably were that many. They were just hiding in the woods, because there were so many campers around.

And this made me think: the campground will NEVER be deserted. It will always be filled. It may be filled with campers, or it may be filled with squirrels, but it will ALWAYS be filled!

You know, our hearts are like that. We need to make a conscious choice about what we fill our hearts with, because our hearts will never be empty. They may be filled with good things, or they may be filled with bad things, but they will ALWAYS be filled. That's why Philippians 4:8 is such an important verse:

What are you filling your heart and mind with? Are you filling them with the pure and the lovely? Because if you aren't, then temptations, bad attitudes, and evil desires are encroaching on your heart, and as surely as the squirrels became bolder and bolder as time went on, those temptations, attitudes and desires will fill you more and more.

It's your choice.

Last week I spent a night in the emergency room at Franklin Memorial Hospital (Farmington, ME). Turns out I have gallstones. The doctor discussed my options with me, considering that I wanted to finish out my summer of camp ministry before having surgery. My main issue is, I need to spend the summer on a very low-fat diet.

In other words, no camp food.

I find, though, that people tend to misunderstand what I mean when I tell them I'm on a low-fat diet. When people think "low-fat diet," they think of someone trying to lose weight or lower cholesterol. And when that's the purpose of your diet, it's okay if you splurge once in awhile. If you eat healthy all week, you could have pizza for one meal, and then go back to eating healthy.

That is not the case with me. I could eat fifty healthy meals in a row, then have one fatty meal, and regardless of how healthy I ate at the other fifty meals, that one fatty meal would put me back in the hospital.

It's a very all-or-nothing approach to dieting.

I was thinking about that in relation to 22:37And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.Matthew 22:37, where Jesus says that the most important commandment is to "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."

This, like my diet, is a very all-or-nothing sort of thing. It's not something we play around with. We don't say "I'm going to give God my all 90% of the time, and then I'll 'splurge,' and live for me for the other 10%."

It doesn't work that way; playing that kind of game with God is very dangerous; it results in a very unhealthy spiritual life. Jesus told us that we can't serve two masters, because we will either love one and hate the other, or vice-versa.

God doesn't want us to play games with Him, and really, when you think about it, He deserves our whole-hearted devotion, because of His great goodness, His great love for us, and His sacrifice at Calvary. He doesn't deserve the kind of games we often try to play when we serve and love Him half-heartedly.

If God has loved us so much, how could we love Him less?

My neighbors have an orange tiger cat that lives on the porch, and thinks that it belongs to me instead of them. No kidding.

Part of the reason for that is probably the fact that they have a pre-school-age daughter, and (I would imagine) she's a bit rough on the cat. I, on the other hand, always stop to pet the cat when I walk by, so it's natural that the cat would enjoy my company.

During the winter months, particularly when it's very cold outside, the cat more or less lives in front of my door. Either that or he has very good ears, and can hear me coming, so he's always there when I start to open the door.

I've never let the cat inside my house, and yet, the cat seems to think it really wants to be inside with me.

A couple days ago I was thinking to myself, "Well, we're starting to get warmer weather now, so I probably won't see the cat so much anymore."

And then I opened my door, and the oddest thing happened -- I saw this bright orange streak from across the road and two houses down, come racing toward my door. In fact, that cat moved so fast that he was in front of my door before I even finished opening it!

Oddly enough, the cat's behavior made me think of a verse in the Bible, in the book of Psalms:

It occurred to me that the cat feels the same way about coming to my house as God wants us to feel about coming to His house.

But do I really feel that strongly about going into the house of God? Do I drop everything and race with enthusiasm toward its doors?

When I was a child, my parents both worked as school teachers. An easy job? No way! If you've never had the experience of standing in front of a group of people and teaching, let me assure you -- it is exhausting work!

And at the end of the day, when classes were over and we returned home, the day wasn't really over. Because there were still papers to grade and lesson plans to write. It seemed like a never-ending job.

But one thing I remember about those days is that, during the spring time, and again in the fall, when dad returned home from school, he could often be found out in our garden. Planting vegetables, hoeing, pulling up weeds, fertilizing...

Another never-ending job.

And mom -- she would be in the kitchen, preparing another great meal for all of us...four boys who ate so much, and rarely remembered to thank her for her hard work.

Not just a never-ending job, but often a thankless one as well.

There were days when I'm sure dad didn't feel like being out in the garden pulling up weeds. There were days when I'm sure mom didn't feel like diving into the kitchen work. There were days when I'm sure neither of them wanted to sit down in the evening to grade papers and plan the next day's lessons.

But they continually did these things, day after day. There is a word that describes this behavior: diligence.

Diligence means: constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken; persistent exertion of body or mind.

Important tasks are often accomplished only through great diligence. If the garden is not weeded regularly, the weeds choke out the plants, and there are no crops. If the kitchen work is not done, the boys go hungry. If the lesson plans and grading are not done, the students stop learning, eventually the administration becomes unhappy, and in the long run there is no paycheck!

Diligence is a vital part of life, but in a society which wants nothing more than to be entertained, diligence often takes a back seat. We forget how to put our mind, our body, and our heart into a task and never look back.

In one of his epistles, Peter tells us to "make every effort", which simply means to be diligent. Perhaps more than any other area of our lives, the spiritual life requires diligence.

Unfortunately, we tend to hope that our spiritual lives will blossom without consistent, faithful, determined, constant and earnest effort. It won't happen. How diligent are you in your spiritual disciplines?

This object lesson is part of a series of "one-word lessons" from 2 Peter 1:5-8. Each week in our youth group I am teaching one word from those verses.

Excellence is defined as: the fact or state of excelling; superiority; eminence

We often use this word when talking about musical performance, academics, and sports. Thinking about the word excellence makes me think of when I learned to play ping-pong.

I was in college, and I used to play against my roommate all the time; late at night we would go down into the dorm basement and play for hours. Neither of us was a great player -- we just had a lot of fun (and wasted a lot of time!).

And we weren't really serious about getting better. Consequently, we really didn't get much better.

Until the day Yin, a tournament champion, moved into the dorm. He offered to play the winner, and proceeded to absolutely destroy me. I think I got one or two points against him.

Then, a few weeks later, another tournament champion moved into the dorm. (What was it about my dorm that attracted ping-pong players? I'll probably never know! ;D) When I mentioned to Bob about playing against Yin, Bob said, "Yeah, he's not that good."

I was shocked. "Really?"

"No, he just has three or four 'tricks' -- once you get past those, he's not hard to beat."

So I said: "Teach me!"

For the next few weeks Bob and I were in the basement most evenings. Not playing games (I knew he would butcher me, anyway). Bob taught me how to watch my opponent. How to study the way his arm, his wrist, his hand and his paddle moved. How to watch the way the paddle intersected with the ball. How to predict the path of the ball based on all these things. How to wait and watch the bounce before swinging.

He taught me to be a defensive player.

And the next time I played Yin, I discovered that he relied very heavily on his serve. Once I could get past that, the volleys were not nearly as difficult. This time I got eight or nine points against him.

Then Bob started teaching me to play offensively. Not just to block what my opponent was trying to do, but to use it against him. How to spin the ball, how to take a low hit and put a vicious top spin on it to move it fast without driving it into the net. How to fool my opponent into thinking I was doing one thing, when I was really doing another. How to push the battle into his court.

Then I took all of this, and with some practice, was finally able to beat Yin. I had gone from being a novice player to a player of excellence. (Of course, now, after a decade and a half, I'm back to being just an average player, because I never practice anymore.)

1:5For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge,2 Peter 1:5 talks about having moral excellence. And like excellence in ping-pong, moral excellence requires hard work and (as 2 Peter 1:5 also says!) diligence.

And, like excellence in ping-pong, moral excellence also has both a defensive and an offensive component.

The defensive component is what we most often think of -- it's learning to defeat Satan's temptations. How to say No to his attacks. Whether we face sexual temptations, or temptations to lie, to steal, to have prideful thoughts, bitter thoughts, or whatever the temptation might be, we must develop the ability to be defensive, and block Satan's "fiery darts."

But we often forget about the offensive component of moral excellence. The offensive component means taking the battle into his court. It means not just saying "No" to the bad, but finding the good and saying "Yes" to it. 4:8Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.Philippians 4:8 gives us a list of the good things that we say yes to. This is a good starting point -- we don't just reject the bad, we fill our minds with the good.

And when we face temptation to do something bad, we take that as our cue to go out and find something to do that would just drive the enemy nuts.

This is why, in our youth group, we try to provide many opportunities for our teens to serve -- to help at the nursing home, the homeless shelter, doing yard work for senior citizens, helping Child Evangelism Fellowship with some of their ministries. It is all part of moral excellence, because it is the offensive component of defeating the enemy in our lives.

Moral excellence: Say no to the bad, say yes to the good.

This object lesson is part of a series of "one-word lessons" from 2 Peter 1:5-8. Each week in our youth group I am teaching one word from those verses.