By Jesse Jost

We sure seem to be in the thick of spiritual battle right now. When in the heat of a war zone, armor suddenly becomes a lot more precious! We desperately need our spiritual armor.

The first piece of armor that Paul mentions in Ephesians is the Belt of Truth. The belt in his day provided a place to tuck the long tunic so you didn’t trip and fall on your own clothing. Truth is one of our most critical protections.

But what is truth?

Today with the vast amounts of data, memes, talking clips, and rumors, information and disinformation, truth about what is going on is harder to discern than ever.

With trust in mainstream media evaporating, people are turning to social media for their news and information. It seems more free and less subject to government censorship, as anyone can share their perspective.

The problem is that social media outlets like Facebook, don’t care about informing you as much as they care about winning your attention.

by Jesse Jost

“The science is clear” has to be one of the most division-causing sentiments of our time. It is a phrase used confidently and sometimes condescendingly by people on opposite sides of an issue.

If you can find intelligent people arguing for opposite positions, there is a good chance that the science is not as clear as one side wants you to believe it is.

We live in confusing times and we are desperate for certainty and clarity. But the reality is that 2020 has thrown us a whirlwind of issues that are complex and baffling. We have educated experts confidently giving us articles and sound bites that make their point of view sound obviously correct.

It’s easy to come away from these articulations feeling confident that we have the truth, and that those who see it differently are gullible “sheeple” who refuse to think for themselves. Both sides can feel this way about those who disagree.

Emotional certainty that we are correct and have an issue all figured out is comforting in confusing times, but this confidence is rarely warranted by the evidence.

Scientific truths are far more challenging to discover and establish than Facebook memes would have you believe. Here are some cautions to keep in mind as you navigate scientific claims and arguments.

By Jesse Jost

Seeds are remarkable. They can lie dead and dormant for years. Yet put them in the soil and water them and new life magically springs forth with enough explosive power to crack concrete.

Seeds are always faithful to their DNA. They always reproduce according to their kind. You will never get a watermelon from a pumpkin seed. If you want a watermelon, you had better plant a watermelon.

Whether we realize it or not, our words are like seeds. They have the same explosive power to shape someone’s world. Proverbs says that “Death and Life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” (Prov 18:21)

The thing about words and seeds is you don’t have to realize what you are sowing to reap the consequences. We put some straw on our garden one year to protect our strawberries. What we didn’t realize was that the straw was full of Canadian thistle seeds. Those thistles are unbelievably nasty and sharp. They have taken over our garden and made weeding a nightmare.

It didn’t matter that we didn’t consciously sow those thistles. Just the same, we have been dealing with the fallout of our careless choice. 

By Jesse Jost

I’ve struggled most of my life with being overweight. So the subject of diet and weight loss is fascinating to me. Lately I’ve been on a research binge, devouring several books on the topic as well as running a two week experiment on myself by wearing a blood glucose monitor to see how different foods affected my blood sugar levels.

After processing all this information, I wanted to write up some basic conclusions that I have gleaned.

Weight gain is at root a basic issue of calories in exceeding calories out. Everyone knows this, right? Except for the fact that while that is true at a physics level, there are so many more additional psychological and biological factors that complicate the equation. Simple ideas about calories in and calories out are very unhelpful.

Calories In

Take the calories in portion of the equation. Some calories are far more satiating than others. 100 calories of broccoli will fill your stomach far more than 100 calories of Reese’s Cups.

There are calories that will incite a raging fire of cravings and desires that cause you to overeat.

And there are calories that will leave you feeling satisfied.

There are calories that will trigger fat storing hormones, and there are calories that will boost your metabolism.

Calories Out

Now let’s look at the calories out. It’s easy to think that our bodies are a basic machine right off a Ford assembly line that come with preset daily caloric needs.

 We think that some bodies need 3,000 calories to maintain weight, and other bodies need 2,000.

With this understanding, it seems like weight loss should be an equation of eating less and moving more.

 Some weight loss books tell us that if we can just cut back 100 calories a day, that will translate to 10 pounds lost in one year. Conversely, adding 100 calories a day (1 banana or a slice of bread) will lead to 10 pounds gained.

What this completely misses is that our bodies have powerful regulating systems.

For instance, our body temperature will stay in a narrow range because, when we are in the cold, it will raise our temperature and when we are in the heat, it has cooling systems.

In the same way, our bodies have developed a set point of weight. While many of the factors contributing to this are still unknown, our bodies seemingly do have a set point of weight.

By Jesse Jost

Anger is a very motivating emotion. If you want people involved in a cause, getting them angry enough to step up and make a difference seems like the only way to see results.

Christians believe in a God who displays his wrath in spectacular fashion. The sinless Son of God vented outbursts of anger on the corrupt and hypocritical. So surely “righteous” anger should be a powerful force for positive change in a believer’s life, right?

You’d think so if you never opened up the New Testament. But James warns in James 1:19-20, “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”

That verse should rein us in before we embrace anger as an unmitigated force for good. “The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” In Ephesians, Paul warns that we need to be careful not to sin in our anger, or “let the sun go down” on our wrath, because it could “give place to the devil.” (Eph 4)

How can we discern between righteous anger and the sinful “wrath of man”?

By Jesse Jost

In the last year and a half, my soul has been so refreshed by taking up the habit of scripture memory again. The Word has been so comforting and invigorating. If there was one spiritual habit I could convince other believers to take on, it would be the memorization and meditation of the Word.

Unfortunately, in most cases, all my nagging and pleading with other believers has resulted in very few verses memorized. I’m not judging them. In conversation with these people, motivation is not the problem! They WANT to memorize. It’s just so hard to change our habits, especially with memorizing, which seems so difficult at first, and is also a habit that will cause you to face spiritual opposition.

I have been so encouraged lately by studying behaviour change, and the power of tiny habits to produce long-term change. I realize that I have been going about motivating people the wrong way. I have been challenging them to make too big of a change at once by giving them the goal of a whole book of the New Testament, or asking them to do a verse a day.

The problem is that these goals seem insurmountable at first and make people feel like this is too difficult. It makes them feel like a failure. We hate the sense of failure, so we quit or neglect the activities that make us feel bad.

A tiny habit is one that starts so small, we can’t fail to do it. And as we consistently do this small change, we start to believe that change is possible. We feel good; we feel hope.

By Jesse Jost

Six months ago, few of us would have believed the reports coming from the future. We seemingly have entered a police state overnight. We have lost the freedom to travel and assemble. We face fines for simple activities. There is talk of increased military presence in our towns to enforce lockdown. And some communities have set up hot lines where we can report our neighbour’s violations.  We’re also hearing about tracking devices and mandatory health checks.

For the most part we have accepted these shocking conditions willingly because we understand we are in a pandemic, and sacrifices must be made to protect the vulnerable.

However, I am hearing more and more rumblings from some quarters that we have relinquished our freedoms too easily, that human rights surrendered to the government in times of crisis are not willingly handed back when the crisis is over.

It’s haunting to read what life was like under communist or fascist dictatorships.  I’ve wondered how long we in North America could hang on to our freedom and whether we might end up in a state like Nazi Germany, or Communist Russia.