So I was in my Systematic Theology class last week taking a mid-term and noticed after I finished that a gentlman a table over was using his new thick ESV Study Bible. Hmm…is this morally ethical considering that the professor said we could not use our lecture notes but only our Bibles? I’d like to hear your thoughts on using study bibles during exams. The answer should be obvious?
“Assuming you consumed 1 gallon of liquid food mixed with water, this short survey will tell you approximately how far you could walk before you passed out ran out of gas”
Apparently from this survey I get 39 MPG = to a hybrid car. Interesting stuff!
CCLI has a new area of their website worship leaders will want to know about. It’s called CCLI TV, and it gives worship leaders a number of new options, including:
Here’s a clip of Paul Baloche giving a lesson on playing “How Great is Our God.”
In a comment on my blog Luke Gilkerson made me aware that the software accountability program Covenant Eyes has a blog called Breaking Free. I recently checked it out and from what I can see it is a solid resource in the fight against pornography. Breaking Free is a Christ-centered blog centered on providing resources for those seeking to pursue biblical purity.
In a couple of recent posts Shelley Lubben has provided a couple of guest posts dealing with the porn industry. Shelley Lubben is an ex-porn actress and is the founder of The Pink Cross Foundation. I have posted an excerpt from one of her two posts on Breaking Free below. The stats that she presents are overwhelmingly alarming. I would commend this sight with wisdom to anyone struggling with the issue of sexual sin.
Check out her posts:
I have been working with adult industry workers since 2002, when I began volunteering as a teacher and counselor at local rescue missions and prisons in the State of California. I have worked at Madera Rescue Mission, Bakersfield Rescue Mission, Central California Women’s Facility Prison, and Valley State Prison for Women and have traveled throughout the United States as a speaker and counselor on the negative effects of pornography at various churches, recovery programs and secular organizations. My team and I currently work with hundreds of people struggling with pornography addiction in the Pink Cross Foundation Help Forums.
In my daily work of assisting women and men recovering from the pornography industry as well as those struggling with pornography addiction and gathering research over a period of several years, I have learned significant facts to prove that indeed the California pornography industry is causing severe secondary negative effects on adult industry workers as well as the general public, which is involuntarily exposed to pornography, especially children, whose average age of first Internet exposure to pornography is eleven years old.
Mark Driscoll and his wife have been flooded with questions about the topic of sex since his series on Song of Songs. In an effort to try to answer some of these questions they have decided to blog some of the answers to these questions for the next month. Please keep in mind that some of the answers will be quite frank and may not be suitable for all ages. They have intentionally reserved some of these questions to answer in the format of a blog rather than in the context of a regular Sunday service.
The first question has just been posted: How can Christians decide what they should and should not do sexually?
Mars Hill Church recently held a conference centered on biblical parenting this past September. The keynote speaker this year was Dr. Tedd Trip. The Resurgence has now posted the audio and video of the event. Jessica and I do not have any kids now but based on the feedback from the conference this will definitely be a resource that we will be going to in the future.
Media from the Conference
Session 1: The Call to Formative Instruction
Session 2: Giving Kids a Vision for God’s Glory
Session 3: Helping Kids Understand Authority
Session 4: Helping Kids Understand the Heart
Session 5: Overview of Corrective Discipline
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” -Mark 10:25
Hirbet Qeiyafa sits near the city of Beit Shemesh in the Judean
foothills, an area that was once the frontier between the hill-dwelling Israelites and their enemies, the coastal Philistines. The site overlooks the Elah Valley, said to be the scene of the slingshot showdown between David and the Philistine giant Goliath, and lies near the ruins of Goliath’s hometown in the Philistine metropolis of Gath.A teenage volunteer found the curved pottery shard, 15 centimeters by 15 centimeters, in July near the stairs and stone washtub of an excavated home. It was later discovered to bear five lines of characters known as proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
Carbon-14 analysis of burnt olive pits found in the same layer of the site dated them to between 1,000 and 975 B.C., the same time as the Biblical golden age of David’s rule in Jerusalem.
Scholars have identified other, smaller Hebrew fragments from the 10th century B.C., but the script, which Garfinkel suggests might be part of a letter,
predates the next significant Hebrew inscription by between 100 and 200 years. History’s best-known Hebrew texts, the Dead Sea scrolls, were penned on parchment beginning 850 years later.The shard is now kept in a university safe while philologists translate it, a task expected to take months. But several words have already been tentatively identified, including ones meaning judge, slave and king.
The Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, and other scholars suggest it is difficult – perhaps impossible – to conclude the text is Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time. Garfinkel bases his identification on a three-letter verb from the inscription meaning to do, a word he said existed only in Hebrew…
(HT: ETC)
Abraham Piper has some great advice for new and prospective bloggers. I have posted just some of his points below.
1. Keep paragraphs 5 lines or shorter. (If this post were a list of one, this would be it.)
2. Don’t get hung up on whether posts should be long or short. Just make each sentence motivate your audience to read the next one.
3. Interesting titles are good, but it’s more important that they’re informative.
4. Break up longer posts with helpful headings.
5. Put either your main point or a story in the first paragraph of posts.
6. Correct other people’s typos when quoting them (without noting that you corrected them).
7. Connect links to meaningful words so people know what they’ll find at the other end (unlike linking “this” or “here”).
This research is not definitive but does reveal something shocking. Keep in mind that this is just a pilot study.
In one of our pilot studies we had two patients, both had similar backgrounds, education and professional careers. One was severely addicted to pornography. The addiction ruined his marriage and shattered his family. The other patient never had a problem with the vice.
In the MRI machine we had each of them perform various tasks: logic puzzles, identification questions, mathematics etc… Then we had each of them pray for a period of time. The control patient (the non-addict) showed activity in the cerebral cortex and other parts of the brain that deal with cognition. For the addict, it was blank, dead, black and disturbing. Both of these gentleman came from the same faith and had served in similar capacities within their church. But the addict, it seemed, was not really praying.
(HT: Daily Scroll)
Zach Nielsen has posted some practical and helpful advice when it comes to emails. Click here for his comments on each one.
1. Don’t confront people over email.
2. Use email to work on your grammar.
3. Work to have a balance between email and personal contact.
4. Be professional over email.
5. Use subject lines.
6. Don’t multi-task too much with email.
7. Don’t email your spouse a love letter, or better yet, anything to anybody that is emotionally meaningful.
8. Hesitate before you hit reply all.
9. Don’t forward cheesy emails with winged angels and dancing bears.
10. Learn people’s style.
11. Use blind copy (BCC:) when sending to a large group.
Stephen Altrogge has the five step plan here.
Last Monday was my birthday and I’d have to say that this year was one of the most laid back birthday’s a guy could have. It was refreshing! Just me, my beautiful wife, and my crazy cat Bruce. The day basically went like this: slept in; read a little; went to work; came home to a nice dinner of oriental style ribs; then went to the mall to try and find a sweater for the winter of which I came out with nothing and Jessica came out with 3 bags of goodies for herself. Funny how that turns out…
So my wife got this funny looking dinosaur hat thing for our cat. You’d think that Bruce is trying to play/attack his little mouse toy but he’s actually trying to take the dinosaur hat off. Cats sure are funny. I can’t wait to get a dog!
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