I got an email today with one of those slide video presentations about being thankful for today and yada yada yada. There was accompanying text and one of the lines read (roughly, from memory): Today I will remember that worry is just a waste of time because my faith in God and His Divine Plan ensures everything will be just fine. (emphasis mine)

1. What is your gut reaction to (initial thoughts about/interpretation of) this message?
2. What do you think other people - say, Americans who may only be culturally or nominally Christian, or even non-Christians - would think about it?

I think this message is reflective of our society's perception of Christianity, and I tend to have a problem with it.

Check out this site.

A pretty cool online resource and magazine publication. They have an interesting recent article about philosophy by Calvin Seerveld.

Generally speaking, I really enjoy resources that come from a Christian worldview - like Comment or World or Discipleship Journal or First Things or many many other such examples of magazines/media/etc. But sometimes I think we (as Christians and a culture of Christianity) surround ourselves with this bubble and lose touch with those things - be it music, magazines, literature, philosophy, movies, etc - that are shaping and influencing our neighbors and peers. Next thing you know, we're nodding our heads along with the latest article or editorial because we, generally speaking, trust its source, and forget to think for ourselves, and forget to realize that there is a wide range of opinions and diversity within Christianity and Christ does not call us to be cultural cookie cuttters... and that it shouldn't be anathema to disagree with a brother or sister on disputable subjects or to do something like, gasp!, not voting Republican or something...

anyway...

This is actually supposed to go with the previous post, but I haven't quite figured out how to hack blogger to let me put certain elements of this kind into comments (comments are HTML-restricted). Actually, as I just typed it, I figured out a method. But it would take an hour or so to code and I don't want to right now.

Anyway, the point is: This is a nifty little flash file I am leeching from the BBC News web site. There's a slider that lets you move years. Note that the 2002-2004 Arctic Ice levels are dramatically lower than the years before. But also note that the years before are considerably higher than the 1990 levels -- which was a low spike between the relatively high 1988 and 1992.

Without a corresponding data set by which to make a comparative analysis, this means nothing in particular (as far as causality), but it does show a fairly high regular fluctuation of arctic ice annually. If this is tied directly to human manufacturing (etc.), then it looks like we can control at least this phenomenon pretty easily. If not, then it seems that the trend is pretty vast fluctuation regardless of human mfg (etc.).

hey, everyone. have any of you seen "An Inconvenient Truth?" if so, what did you think about it? I'd like to hear people's thoughts on it...

(in light of Father's day... ;) ... and happy Father's day to the new fathers around here...)

How do we understand the concept of honor? Specifically I am thinking of the commandment to honor your father and mother. I would think that the specific practical workings of honor would be different today than when this command was given, just taking into consideration the context of culture and time period and such. I also am aware that I don't really know anything about honor at all.

Also, the command does not just have the blanket statement to obey your father or mother... so I'm not going to jump and say honor is obedience or even necessarily entails obedience. I'd love for someone to do a little Hebrew word study (ahem, Laura...) since I have no Hebrew resources nearby at the moment, just to get a feel for this word... But in the meantime would like to hear anyone's thoughts, especially how one would honor their parents in different phases of life (childhood, adulthood, single, married, etc).

Hey everyone,

I've re-written the template for this blog. I mimmicked the old one as closely as I could while making the changes we decided upon. For reasons that barely qualify as such, I switched the side navigation from right to left. If people want it back on the right, let me know, please say so.

Here's a quick rundown of what was changed:

1. Navbar switched from right to left.
2. Comments now appear below each post in collapsed form by default. To view a comment, click on it anywhere. You'll know which comment you are hovering over because it will highlight canary yellow.
3. When you expand a comment, it will have a little button at the bottom that says, "(hide this comment)." Click that to hide that comment. You can also hide it by clicking the same bar you used to show it.
4. Comments are yellow with a pink-orange border to make it clear what is post and what is comment.
5. The top item on the side bar is now "Recent Contributions" which includes recent posts as well as their comments. The usage should be obvious.
6. I've changed some colors a little for stylistic reasons -- I think these are pretty.
7. You may notice that post titles are truncated in the side bar. That's just because I happen to think it's very ugly when post titles wrap to the next line and make the list look all decroded... so I decided to do something about it =)
8. On any page, the title of the blog is a link to the home page.

Please feel free to let me know if you would like other stuff done -- tweaks done, kinks ironed, colors changed, etc. -- If anything comes up that seems worthwhile I'll pop it in.

Also, I'll write a comment to this post to demonstrate the comment changes.

Consider the following ...

Mark 3

1Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. 2Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. 3Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Stand up in front of everyone."

These are his accusers.

4Then Jesus asked them, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they remained silent.

5He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. 6Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

7Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the lake, and a large crowd from Galilee followed. 8When they heard all he was doing, many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon. 9Because of the crowd he told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him, to keep the people from crowding him. 10For he had healed many, so that those with diseases were pushing forward to touch him. 11Whenever the evil^[a] spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, "You are the Son of God." 12But he gave them strict orders not to tell who he was.

...

22And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebub^[c]! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."

This is their accusation.

23So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: "How can Satan drive out Satan? 24If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. 27In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house. 28I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. 29But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."

30He said this because they were saying, "He has an evil spirit."

This time, this is his response -- he taught them with Truth. It is not just truth about the casting out of demons, but about the Holy Spirit of God, and of condemnation and guilt and righteousness and forgiveness ... teachings that do not come from unclean spirits. He makes the claim here "You accuse me of casting out these spirits by the power of Satan, but you blaspheme the Holy Spirit when you do so." He is making a claim that he is doing this by the Spirit of God. He backs up his claim by teaching the Good News of the merciful forgiveness of sins (which no unclean spirit would utter).

Undaunted, the accusers persist a little later (note, by the way, that they are playing the role of Satan here: "The Accuser").

Mark 11

27They arrived again in Jerusalem, and while Jesus was walking in the temple courts, the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders came to him. 28"By what authority are you doing these things?" they asked. "And who gave you authority to do this?"

Again the source of his power is questioned.

31They discussed it among themselves and said, "If we say, 'From heaven,' he will ask, 'Then why didn't you believe him?' 32But if we say, 'From men'...." (They feared the people, for everyone held that John really was a prophet.)

33So they answered Jesus, "We don't know."
Jesus said, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things."

In essense he told them, "I don't need to defend myself against you." He backs this up later when he declines to defend himself to Pilate. In general, this is his response to accusers in the scriptures, as best I can tell: "I am doing my Father's business. If you question me, you do not know the things of God" and also, "The Spirit of God (who is the Spirit of Truth) testifies to these things."

If such a demonic show is possible, then how did Jesus defend himself?

Dwight,

It seems to me that the things of Matthew 7 work something like this:

Prophecy, exorcism, and the working of miracles are not the fruit to which Jesus was referring when he said that we would know them by their fruit. It's important to understand that miracles do not occur only for Christians and from God. In order to understand this, first understand the nature of a miracle (as I am using the word here): A miracle is a physical effect induced by a spiritual cause. Or, again, when the so-called "physical world" is influenced by the will of some spirit. Non-christians call all such miracles by the same names. Christians, however, differentiate between such. Miracles of the Holy Spirit (or his faithful follower spirits) we call "miracles." Miracles of unclean spirits we call "sorcery." The distinction is one parallel to our distinction between, for example, "angels" and "demons": all demons are angels, but by separating off a certain subclass of angel, we tend to reserve the name angel for those not members of the distinguished sub-group. Similarly, all sorcery is also miraculous, but we reserve the word "miracle" for those miracles that do not also fall into the category "sorcery." Thus, for example, Moses's staff becoming a serpent is a "miracle" (in the lingo usage), whereas the staves of Pharoah becoming serpents were by "sorcery."

So we see it that prophecy is that miracle by which a person speaks, having heard a message from a spirit. If the message he heard was from an angel (a messenger of God), he is a prophet. If that message he heard was told him by a demon (a messenger not of God), then he is a false-prophet.

We don't have a similar set of class / sub-class lingo for the casting out of unclean spirits. Unclean spirits don't cast other unclean spirits out (that's what Jesus was saying with the "a house divided" speech). Sometimes they'll do a little play for us -- one guy listening to an unclean spirit will do some ritual, and the other unclean spirit will leave with a big show. This is a pantomime designed to lend credence to the false teaching of the would-be "exorcist" -- a calculated effort to lead people astray.

Having said this, we can also see that there are some things that come from God (possibly via his messengers) that cannot be produced or mimmicked by unclean spirits. The first and foremost of these is TRUTH. In fact, this is so crucial that John even advises us to use this as a test for spirits to determine if they are clean or unclean, saying:

This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges
that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does
not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist,
which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. (1 John 4:2-3)

We see the theme again, this time phrased more pointedly at the question of prophecy, in Revelation 19:10 when an angel says explicitly to John that

... the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. (Rev 19:10)

We see again and again (especially from John, but frequently from Paul as well) that "the Spirit is the Truth" (because, of course, he is the spirit of Him who is The Truth). Truth is a better test than other fruit (love, peace, patience, kindness, etc.) because while the Spirit of Truth always produces these fruit, these fruit can be mimmicked by the lies of the enemy by generating appearances of love, peace, patience, etc. where there is none that testifies to the Good Work done when Jesus saved us from the fire.

I would conclude by pointing out that this particular speech by which he points out this whole "fruit and tree" topic by saying, "Watch out for false prophets." Later we see that the behaviors of these people are the working of miracles, casting out of demons, and prophecy. These are all actions of prophets (though not necessarily exclusively in the case of miracles and exorcisms). The key fruit is Truth -- the law of God, the necessity of condemnation, the punishment of death, the atonement of Jesus, the repentence of the believer, the forgiveness of sins, and the participation of the believers in the resurrection of Jesus. From this truth comes all other fruit of the Spirit of God.

Hey all! Read about our Rome trip!

allthine.blogspot.com

Love,
Rhonda

Jackson:

My main difficulty with comments is when there ARE multiple conversations going on at the moment, then I have to scroll through the whole page and check each comment blurb for each post to see if there is anything new, because I can't remember just based on looking at the "#" of comments whether there is anything new... and it seems that once someone posts something "new" on the main page, the comments sort of die out on previous posts. But I don't think it has to be that way, I think it's fine to keep 2 or 3 or however many different topics of discussion going on. This may not always happen of course.

Sir had previously suggested to me about bringing the comments onto the main page, under the original post, like what he has done over at his blog. My problem with that format is that it does not eliminate the problem of scrollscrollscrolling to search out new comments.

I don't use RSS feeds, but I still thought collapsible posts would be helpful. You could see lots of topics really quickly at once, without scrolling, and easily identify the new posts/comments/replies that you haven't read yet.

But I am still open to other suggestions. I am not the most HTML-web-savvy person...

hey, can we hold off on eradicating the comments and get a little more discussion on this before we ? is there anyone else who uses RSS feeds who would prefer that we do things in some sort of collapsible-post form like Kristi's suggested? I, personally, have a few concerns about useful stuff (and I'll just be honest, stuff that I like about the current setup!) that I would like to see implemented in whatever the new setup is...and these would certainly be blown away in the elimination of the comment function.
so let me tell you what I'm concerned about. having a single post acting as a kind of "heading" under which others can post their own responses to the topic addressed, the questions raised, etc. has clear organizational advantages for the conversation. it gives structure to the dialogue, you know? focus.
basically, it allows a lot of different conversations to go on at once, in a way that's easier to navigate than a massive unsorted bunch of "re:" posts, all arranged in reverse chronological order so that the original posts are at the bottom. I could also see the opposite problem occurring: I mean, when Kristi asks us to "bring the convo to the main page," my first response is "which one?" we have a variety of discussions going on here, and it seems to me like if comments bit the dust, we might well have ourselves a single chain of posts, not really going in a particular direction or sure of what points it wishes to address, and perhaps with random abrupt subject shifts. of course, this is from the guy who transferred out of SJC pretty much because seminars and classes suffered from the same problem of going in one meandering, directionless, quasi-linear path.
so what do other people think? is the convenience of an RSS feed outweighed by the convenience of the comment format? is there a way to have both? let's have some discussion about discussion! let's get recursive.
but not too recursive. our resident Talamini can warn you about the dangers of that.

Comments will be disappearing... just a little heads up. Sir offered to help me with a new template/organizational flow, which might feature collapsible posts or something or the other... but he's pretty busy being a dad right now, so it might be a little while before that is implemented.

But yea... bring the convo to the main page! :)

The bonus about making an "RE:" post instead of using the comments is that people like me who use RSS can keep up with the whole conversation, instead of just the new posts...

Or, I could just get off my lazy butt...

O LORD, how my adversaries have increased! Many are rising up against me. Many are saying of my soul, "There is no deliverance for him in God." Selah. But You, O LORD, are a shield about me, My glory, and the One who lifts my head.

I was crying to the LORD with my voice, And He answered me from His holy mountain. Selah. I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the LORD sustains me. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people Who have set themselves against me round about. Arise, O LORD; save me, O my God! For You have smitten all my enemies on the cheek; You have shattered the teeth of the wicked. 8 Salvation belongs to the LORD; Your blessing {be} upon Your people! Selah.

Psalm 3

I have this habit of sometimes not wanting to ask questions... Possibly because I subconsciously think that my perfect doctrine cannot handle the stress... I'm like the Mooninites "Don't question it"

Anyway...

What is up in Matthew 7? Particularly the bit about fruit and the bit after that about miracles. I had always thought that prophesy, exorcism, and miracles were fruit*. If they are, how can these grapes be found among thorns? If they aren't, what is?

Do we go with the fruits of the spirit? I guess then, these people were doing miracles, but in an unloving, unjoyful, etc. manner...

*Not exclusively, but at least a part of the set.