Green and "Green"

Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries are a great product. You can recharge them approximately 1000 times without losing capacity, and they work very well.

Right now Amazon has 4 Sony AA NiMH batteries on sale for $8.98. That is a little over $2 per battery, but when you think that 1 NiMH battery replaces literally hundreds of non-rechargeable batteries.

Having a good stock of these will save you a lot of money. Especially Wii owners!

10 Ways to Build Wealth

I had a question submitted about ways to build wealth. These are 10 simple things you can do to save money and build wealth.

1. Never Buy a New Car- New cars depreciate the most they will ever appreciate the first year. The second biggest year of depreciation is the second year. The third biggest year of depreciation is the third year, and so on. My general rule is, buy a car that you can pay cash for or that you can pay off within a year. Buy the oldest car you can stand taking into consideration use, and necessity of reliability. I have done extensive research in this area and buying good used cars rather than new cars every three years can save you millions of dollars in a lifetime.

2. Don't Buy Drinks At Restaurants- This may sound petty, but depending on how much you eat out this could add up to thousands and thousands of dollars over a lifetime. Considering that at Pizza Hut a carbonated drink costs $1.99 plus tax. This could be up to 30% of your bill. Water will work just fine. You Lufkin folks are excluded from this rule because the water is horrible there!

3. Shop Rates On Insurance and Other Monthly Recurring Expenses- Including ways to cut your cable bill, phone service (consider going "cell only") etc. This is important, you need to shop rates and find ways to reduce monthly recurring fees. If you can reduce your insurance bill by $20 a month, that is $240 a year, which is almost like putting $2400 in your pocket.

4. Live Below Your Means- This may sound outdated and boring, but if you don't have the money to buy something, don't buy it.


5. Save 10-15% of your income. This is a good goal to make for saving for retirement. Especially for people below age 35. Social Security will not exist in it's current state (unless we make some serious cuts in other places, which is unlikely). My generation cannot count on Social Security being sufficient to have any kind of standard of living. Bottom line, you need to plan on providing for your own retirement. To go along with this, take advantage of any company retirement plan offered at your place of employment, especially if they offer any kind of matching on money you invest.

6. Watch Your Taxes- Take advantage of tax credits, and deductions. This can save you big money.

7. Watch Your Investment Advisor, not just your investments. You cannot consistently and without great risk pick winning stocks, and neither can I (and neither can anybody else.) You cannot consistently time the market just right on when to get in and out. You should never ever pay an investment salesman a commission to invest your money. You should find a "Fee-only" financial planner with the CFP(R) designation to advise you and take care of your financial planning needs. CFP(R) Professionals have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients, meaning they have taken on a standard of care enforcing them to put the interests of the client before their own. They are held to the highest ethical standards in dealing with their clients, which has been and will be very important going forward.



Disclaimer: I don't agree with everything Jon Stewart says but I love it when he rips on CNBC.

8. Do a Budget- Know where your money is going. Be in control of it, this is half the battle.

9. Don't Buy Toys- I don't just mean for kids (let relatives get toys, buy them books), but also big toys like boats, or Jet Skis, or 4-wheelers. If you borrow money you lose interest, depreciation, and you will have to put insurance on these types of items. All of these costs add up to major bucks. The resale value on these things is very low as well. Borrow or rent, if you don't use these things consistently or if you don't have the cash to pay for them.

10. Buy in bulk if possible. If you can save 10% on something that you consume over a six month period by buying in bulk this is tantamount to a 20% return! What kind of investment do you know of that would give you that kind of guaranteed return. For that matter, realize the power of time value of money. This is one of the most important laws of finance that if everyone knew, they would act drastically different than they do. For instance if you thought about that $2 dollar Coke actually costing you $70 in 50 years you may think twice about buying it today.

There are any number of other things that I could put in this post, but this ought to be enough food for thought for the time being.

Girl's Night Planned To Remember Jill

From the Wyatt Baptist Church Website:

Attention young ladies (13-40ish). Were you impacted by Jill's life? Would you like a way to celebrate her devotion to Christ with other girls who knew Jill? On Friday night, March 20, you are invited to gather with other girls from Jill's life for a "Girl's Night" at Wyatt. The evening will begin at 7pm in the choir and include guest speaker Marian Jordan. Marian is the head of Redeemed Girl Ministries and was a childhood friend of Jill's. The night will also include special gifts for everyone attending and a dedication of the new girl's resource section of the Wyatt bookstore in memory of Jill. Please come and remember Jill while honoring Christ. Facebook users, click here.

Separation of Church and State

This subject makes me nervous. I'm a pretty opinionated person (for those of you who have never read any of my blogs) but this subject seems to be a very controversial issue. There are Facebook groups about putting God, Christ, and prayer back in schools, and a call for us to return to our Christian roots as a nation. There is a notion that because prayer came out of school, it precipitated our great moral decline. That somehow the ten commandments being prominently displayed on the walls of our public places will transform our culture.

All of these sentiments come from people who love their country and love their Savior. They put some energy into these types of efforts, but we must be careful not to waste our precious time on things that, while full of good intentions, are not transformative in nature.

Separation of Church and State is a very controversial topic, and one that is not simple. I disagree with the rank secularists who want to put "faith" in a category completely separate from reality. Some extreme secularists want to say that your "faith" should not inform your ideas about public policy and legislation, and therefore anyone whose faith informs those things, is automatically excluded from participating in those processes. This issue gets into matters of public education and in particular the teaching of evolution and or intelligent design. The issue of public education is another issue altogether, as are the other issues that separation of church and state influences.

I also disagree with some in the religious community who see no value in the separation of church and state, or at least claim that it is harmful. While the ideas of some of the rank secularists mentioned above are harmful to liberty and religious freedom in general, the separation of church and state as instituted by our founders was not at all. Think about the circumstances under which our country was born. We were escaping religious oppression when our forefathers came to this land. In their minds it was not a good thing for the state to decide what you believe or where or when you go to church.

The Founders of our country had the idea that while the church and the state should not mix, we should also be free to allow our religious views to affect our stance on matters of public policy.

I think separation of church and state (as stated by our country's founders, and as practiced and defended by early Baptists like Roger Williams in Providence Road Island) is an excellent idea. I believe the government has a role to defend it's people and protect us against outside threats, and to provide a system of justice so that criminals can be prosecuted in a fair way. The government's job is to protect our freedom and therefore I think government should strive to allow the maximal amount of freedom to it's constituents without those freedoms impinging on others. Freedom is what our country was founded on. That includes religious, economic, and individual freedom.

The government has a responsibility and so does the church. The church's responsibility is to be the prophetic voice in the culture. The church's role in a society like ours is not to try to force our views on others, but to proclaim, persuade, and plead with those around us to turn from their sin and trust in Christ. Trying to force them to participate in our religious practices will not transform, but alienate. One of the fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity is that a Muslim can win converts at the tip of the sword, at the barrel of a gun, or at the proclamation of the state. A Christian cannot win converts at the tip of a sword, at the barrel of a gun, nor at the proclamation of the state.

The church is most effective not when we have the government in our pocket but when individual believers and churches take a stand in the public square and prophetically call other individuals to faith in Christ, and live lives that display that radical change that comes only through a vital relationship with Him.

I realize this is controversial, so if you have an opinion please feel free to share it, but try to be civil and gracious.

What say you?

When I Don't Desire God

I had someone email me the question about how to persevere through times of spiritual lethargy. To some degree we will all struggle with this daily. Until we are perfected we will have to deal with our laziness. The person who has been most helpful to me in this area has been John Piper. He writes often about it and even wrote a book called "When I Don't Desire God." You can read this online here.

Here is a little list of things you can do to fight for joy in God from Piper.

How Shall We Fight for Joy?

By John Piper January 1, 1995


1. Realize that authentic joy in God is a gift.

2. Realize that joy must be fought for relentlessly.

3. Resolve to attack all known sin in your life.

4. Learn the secret of gutsy guilt - how to fight like a justified sinner.

5. Realize that the battle is primarily a fight to see God for who he is.

6. Meditate on the Word of God day and night.

7. Pray earnestly and continually for open heart-eyes and an inclination for God.

8. Learn to preach to yourself rather than listen to yourself.

9. Spend time with God-saturated people who help you see God and fight the fight.

10. Be patient in the night of God's seeming absence.

11. Get the rest and exercise proper diet that your body was designed by God to have.

12. Make a proper use of God's revelation in nature.

13. Read great books about God and biographies of great saints.

14. Do the hard and loving thing for the sake of others (witness and mercy).

15. Get a global vision for the cause of Christ and pour yourself out for the unreached.

Love, Sex & Mammon

"We are not, we pray, on the verge of another Great Depression. Still, we see signs of economic failure all around us. Stores in the strip malls we drive past every day advertise “going out of business” sales. Those of us who are pastors know church members who have lost jobs, and we weekly see the faces of others who fear that the next pink slip belongs to them.

Some Christians, on the Left and on the Right, would tell us that economic matters are of paramount concern right now. They would assert that we’ve no time for the “luxury” of “culture war” discussions about “abstinence” or divorce or “gender roles” or other such matters. Instead, they tell us, we should concentrate on tax cuts or economic stimulus projects or Wall Street bailouts or home ownership.

They’re wrong."


In this article Dr. Moore (one of my teachers in seminary) talks about priorities for families. For the rest of this great article click here.

Why Matthew Smith and Indelible Grace Represent and Important Genre

In short:

The "worship wars" are based on the faulty assumption that the church is a producer and attendees are consumers, and that the job of the church is to please the consumer by producing what they want.

There is nothing inherently sinful about traditional worship with hymns, and there is nothing inherently sinful about contemporary worship with new music and lyrics. There is also nothing inherently sinful about preferences for types of music. There is something inherently sinful about members of churches drawing lines between themselves based on externalities that are secondary to the gospel. When we create new churches or divide old churches into groups based on a style of music or even a social group, we do damage to the gospel. One of the implications of the gospel is that we can look past our skin color, our age, our socioeconomic status, and certainly our preferences to love, worship with, and fellowship with other believers. When we raise preferences to be primary (something about which we will divide from other believers), we believe and spread the lie that Jesus and His gospel lacks the ability to bring us together under His name.

All of that to say that movements, like Matthew Smith and Indelible Grace represent, that make the gospel central to our worship should be applauded and supported by Christians who are concerned with the divisions that we are so vulnerable to in our churches.

Other thoughts?

Concert Tomorrow Night at Wyatt Baptist Church!

Matthew Smith and Indelible Grace at Wyatt Baptist Church in El Dorado.

You can get directions here

We also have a Facebook Page set up for the event where you can RSVP and find out more information about the concert.

Later, I'm going to post an article about why Matthew Smith and Indelible Grace's ministry is an important response to bad philosophies that are prevalent in our churches today.

The Third Brother

This is a very interesting way of thinking about the parable of the prodigal son. Tim Keller has written a book on this parable called "The Prodigal God" exposing this wonderful parable.

Oh to be a third brother like Jesus.

Read the article here.

Why We Shouldn't Resort to Violence In the Fight Against Abortion

I had never heard this question addressed until now.
Here is the link.

http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/AskPastorJohn/ByTopic/47/3504/