I've come up with a question that I've got to ask myself for every Biblical passage I'm going to preach:
What is the one thing in this passage that people need to hear someone get excited about?
Two qualifiers
Let John Piper help you allay any remaining fears of bad luck. My fears of Friday the 13th were erased 9 months ago.
Became thoughtful while reading 2 Corinthians 12.5-10 tonight. I'll lay out verses 8 to 10 for you:
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
I was reflecting on how true this has been in my life. It's when I've been insulted and accused (sometimes rightfully), when I've been close to the heart of some controversy, when I've just narrowly avoided catastrophe, or when I've sinned awfully and good friends confronted me on it (like when I lost my temper in front of my family, or slandered a Christian brother), that I have learned what I was really made of. When I get glimpses of what my dark heart is really like, I'm forced to look at Christ and rely on Him. When I am weak, I am strong.
We all feel a need to hide our weaknesses as long as we can. We have to, we say, in order to protect our relationships. My relationship with Christ is the only one in which I am free not just to acknowledge my weakness, or confess it, but to actually embrace it. To boast of it.
To embrace my weakness is to be embraced (in a manly way, you know) by Him. To boast in my weakness is to boast in His strength.
Anyways, after my reading I noticed this good post by Nathan Weselake. Also, Dave Black's got a book on the subject (I think). I bet it's good!
Would you evangelize with this tract?
Certainly Jesus did not sound like someone desperate to create a following when he summons us like he does in Mark 8.34: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me!"
"Anyone interested in following me? You get to carry a cross! You get to die! You get to be shamed!"
The Lord Jesus does not offer many perks. When men and women decide to follow him, it is because of how attractive HE is, despite the "perks".
Thought I'd do a little post on what I look for in a Bible. One of the most important criteria for me is that it lay out the text in paragraphs. As Fee and Stuart say in "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth", we must learn to THINK PARAGRAPHS. It's vital to remember that the Bible is not a collection of golden nuggets and trite sayings, but rather it advances via paragraphs of thought. My reading of Scripture grew in leaps and bounds when I started using a Bible that laid out Isaiah or Mark's Gospel paragraph by paragraph. So much so that I'll rarely pick up a good version like the NASB95 because it doesn't place spaces between paragraphs. (For those who want to use the KJV, I believe Cambridge puts out a beautiful paragraph edition. The Penfold-Newberry is OK. The Scofield's paragraphing is too arbitrary, it seems to me.)
What criteria are important to you in selecting a Bible? Hopefully not size!
With the following free software you can:
* access your work on any computer, and write it at the same time as a colleague
* never lose your work - automatically save to the internet every few seconds
* never ruin your work - previous versions of a document are always available
* add library catalog entries to your bibliography automatically, in your chosen style
* attach notes to a book or article which you can search and find later
* copy web pages or articles or documents which you can search later
* search videos from many sources (like YouTube) and save them (increasingly important!)
* copy pages from online books and save them as searchable documents
* save photocopies online and search them as though they were text documents
Two young men walked in the den where grandma was watching her "stories". They shuffled their feet, made small talk, but finally got down to business.
"Grandma, we've all talked about it, and we don't think you're doing your job the way you once did - the way we need you to," the first man started.
"What do you mean, son?" the older lady asked, trying to see the TV around the two men.
"Well, you can't cook or clean anymore. You don't tell us stories of the old days. We haven't heard any wisdom from you in a long time. You usually just watch television and sleep. We're going to have to let you go," the second man said.
Grandma hung her head. "I realize that I'm getting older and can't carry out my duties that I once did. Will you at least give me a few weeks to find a new family?"
"We'll give you two weeks and a good recommendation. I'm sure that God is calling you to a good older family out there somewhere," her son said.
Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.***
It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.***
What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama’s America is one in which being human just isn’t enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama’s America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the laws. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: “that question is above my pay grade.” It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator’s pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy—and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.
What are we? and what do we make of ourselves, when we expect that God and his ways should be upon a level with our understandings? We are infinitely unequal to any such thing, as comprehending God. We may less unreasonably expect that a nut-shell should contain the ocean: Job xi. 7. "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." If we were sensible of the distance which there is between God and us, we should see the reasonableness of that interrogation of the apostle, Romans ix. 20. "Who are thou, O man, that replies against God?"The sermon ends with even less foolin' around:
You shall consider it; you shall know it; God will make all men to know that he is God. You shall either know it for your good here, or to your cost hereafter.
