I've Been Thinking About This…

Ever wonder what you’d do if you were completely committed to God, doing His work as a missionary overseas … and found yourself in prison because of something you believe He told you to do? How would you feel? How would you act?

How about if you’d been stripped and beaten first, and then put into chains?

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I’ve used Scott Yang’s excellent “Scripturize It!” Bookmarklet in my browsers (Opera & Firefox) for some time now. Whenever I bump into a web page (for instance, a blog page) that has a Scripture reference on it and I want to see the Scripture itself, I click the “Scripturize It!” bookmarklet and it converts all references on the page into links. Then I click on the text I want to read and it turns into a popup box with the Scripture inside it. It’s brilliant. (more…)

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Taught the confirmation class today. Didn’t do a good job.

See, here’s the thing. The title given was ‘The Basic Message of Jesus’. And the text was the Sermon on the Mount. But I’m not sure that the Sermon on the Mount was the basic message of Jesus – or at least, the only basic message. I tend to think, “First things first.” And the first thing, it seems to me, is to harvest the crop (John 4:35). The second is to turn it into bread, which you can’t do until you’ve harvested. So the first ‘basic massage’ is that new life is only as far away as repentance and acceptance. The second message is how to live this new life – the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon includes how to respond to the World’s response to the new life.

So I broke it up that way and overwhelmed 15 ninth-graders with too much. Every once in a while I felt a thought ‘click’, but on the whole it was too much. (more…)

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The Bible in a Day has now been booked into Thomaston Congregational Church for October 4, and I’m printing their books at the same time as the ones for Center Church, which makes it handy. Thomaston, at least at this point, is a private session – although if I hear otherwise I’ll post it here and Twitter it; add a comment if you’d like to get on the announcements list for future sessions, BTW.

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I’ve been reading Justin Phillips’ excellent book, C. S. Lewis in a Time of War whenever I go out to eat. (It’s exactly right for that purpose – deep enough and not too deep. I don’t like biographies as a general rule, but I like to read about WWII in the UK so the one balances the other. The WWII thing is probably something about the David-and-Goliath courage: the secretary walking over piles of rubble to get to work and then saying, “I’m terribly sorry I’m 2 hours late, but my street was blitzed last night.” But I digress…)

As Lewis gets into his series of BBC broadcasts in the Spring of 1944 titled Beyond Personality he notes that,

“God has no history – He is too real to have one.”

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