Bible Survival part 3

Rob Woodrum2 Comments

Once again…sorry for the choppiness of this video…some of it is editing, some of it is because it got wonky during the digital capture…hopefully it won’t distract too much.

Here are the links I mentioned:

E-Sword

David Guzik’s Online Commentary

Bible Gateway – I forgot to mention in the video that you can listen to an AUDIO version of the Bible at this site as well, for those who don’t like to read!

Follow the Rabbi

Bible study tools on Crosswalk

If you just can’t bring yourself to read at all…you can still listen to teachings on the Bible online at a LOT of different church sites…Eastgate’s included. 

Some other teachers I would recommend are:

Mike MacIntosh ,  Jon Courson , Joe Focht or you may like Mark Driscoll

There are so many teachers who have their instruction online the list could be endless.

Have fun!

Bible Survival

Rob Woodrum3 Comments

Ok…I’m sorry for the late entry today. I’ve been working on this video here and there throughout the day…sorry for it’s length, and for the choppy editing (though in some way, it may achieve a certain stylization by chopping it up the way I did)(Seriously though…I had to chop it up to remove all the extrenious stuff that just made it even longer).

SHALOM!

Luke Benson2 Comments

  Usually one of the first things a person will ask me when they find out I am a follower of Christ is whether or not some activity they are involved in is considered a sin. My answer for that is that for each person it’s different. Some things we know are just out and out wrong. Like murder or stealing, but what about more personal things like smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol?  I go back to, for each person the Holy Spirit will deal with him or her on an individual level. There is no written law for a believer to follow. God has placed a burden on each of our hearts to align ourselves with Him and His will and we can trust in the Spirit of God to convict us when we need it and guide us back into Gods will when we humble ourselves and repent. This is great Luke but is what I am doing considered a sin?

  In the movie Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney looks to get around a traffic jam by taking a different route than usual. As he drives on through the back streets it seems to be getting more and more run down and darker till he finds himself in a very desolate area. Then predictably his very expensive car stalls. He quickly reaches for his cell phone and contacts a tow truck driver to rescue him. Before the tow truck driver arrives a gang of tough street punks appears and threatens him with bodily harm if he doesn’t give them his disabled car. Then just in time the tow truck driver pulls up and earnestly begins hooking up the car to the tow truck. The street thugs protest that he is interrupting their heist. The driver takes the leader of the gang aside and says, “ The world aint supposed to be like this. Maybe you don’t know it but this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without askin you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you guys rippin him off. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here”

  The word Shalom is often used as a greeting in the Hebrew language but its meaning is much more profound than just hello or goodbye. The word Shalom represent the harmony God had intended for the universe and everything in it. His original intention was for us to live out eternity in harmony with Him, each other and everything in the Earth and universe. Sin is the enemy of Shalom. I would think it safe to say that anything that disrupts this perfect harmony or Shalom that God had originally intended could be considered sin.

 

 

 Yea but Luke is what I am involved in a sin? I would say that if it disrupts the harmony God intended between Him and us, us and the rest of the human race or us and the Earth (including the animals and environment) it’s probably a sin.

  

 SHALOM!!!!!

Beatitudes

Rob Woodrum2 Comments

In his book, “The Pursuit of God”, A.W. Tozer writes:

“The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things.  The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the ‘poor in spirit'” 

Where is that voice today?  Where are the leaders calling us to this kind of abandonment to God and His will?  Tozer, in his day, was almost a lone voice calling out a warning about the dangerous, self-oriented path that evangelicalism was taking.  Those voices are still there today, still warning…albeit, mostly from the fringe.

I’m not feeling good today (not just mentally, I think I have that sore throat-flu thing that’s been going about smacking people lately…and given my propensity for asking people to hold hands at Burning House meetings, it’s no wonder).  But anyway…I’m not feeling good, which is my excuse for writing such a biting satire below.  It’s not that I’m trying to be difficult…it’s just that I’m frustrated at what we are passing off as Christianity these days.  Please feel free to take exception to my words.

 

THE MODERN EVANGELICAL BEATITUDES

Blessed are the rich,

For they show off God’s power to prosper and get more stuff.

 

Blessed are the entertained,

For they shall be numbed to the realities of life and responsibility.

 

Blessed are the loud,

For their picketing, protests and demands shall make politicians fear them.

 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for self-help formulas and platitudes,

For they shall find a cornucopia of books to make them feel good at the Christian bookstore.

 

Blessed are the condemning,

For their signs and bullhorns prove they are right and all others are wrong.

 

Blessed are they who are steeped in doctrinal training,

For they shall have an answer for everything, and no more shall mystery be tolerated.

 

Blessed are those who promote the war on terror,

For they shall always know war.

 

Blessed are those who work toward legislating Christian values and morals,

Who force the Christian way of life on all, regardless of individual choice,

For theirs is the kingdom of this world and it’s ways.

 

 

HELP WANTED

Luke BensonLeave a comment

An interesting article caught my attention yesterday about whether or not women should work outside the home. It’s an article written by John Macarthur that’s published in Pulpit magazine. He opens the article stating that it is a decision that the husband and wife must make on a Biblical basis together allowing the Holy Spirit to lead in their particular situation. Ok well that sounds good enough, but then he goes on to put together pieces of Scripture to lead us into his idea as to how this should be decided. The scripture references he uses I believe are taken a bit out of context too. The verses from Titus, I always thought were written by Paul to Titus instructing him on selection and duties of church elders. The idea I get from verses 4&5 is that women elders in the church are to guide younger women and teach them the skills required to care for her family and maintain a household. I don’t think it has anything to say at all about whether or not a women should work outside the home. He then sights a verse from the virtuous women in Proverbs 31 but leaves out a very key verse identifying the women as an entrepreneur, (Proverbs 31:24). Can you find the other out of context scripture references he uses? Here’s link to the article below.

http://www.sfpulpit.com/2006/12/26/is-it-wrong-for-wives-to-work/#more-374

  What is your opinion? Is it wise from a Biblical perspective for women to work outside the home?

Unsearchable? … !

dustinbrysonLeave a comment

“Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” – Jeremiah 33:3

When I first grappled with the notion that there is a King and I am not He I dove headlong into a book Christians read called ‘The Holy Bible’. While I wasn’t aware of the substance that made this book ‘Holy’, while all others remained just bookly, I was hungry to find out.

One of the first pieces of scripture to captivated my heart was Jeremiah 33:3, and while I knew absolutely zero about Jeremiah and I was slightly confused by all the numbers embedded into each paragraph of the book I was interested in the wording of this particular verse non the less. I remember reading it the first time through and stopping, deadpan, on the word ‘unsearchable’.

Up to this point in my life I was always taught that, with enough research, we could find out anything about anything. As a matter of reference the encyclopedia sales man that came to our door once a year said his books had all the knowledge of the cosmos, so I figured with enough digging any fact could be unearthed. So you can imagine my amazement when I found out that this King had this ‘unsearchable’ information and He was willing to share it with me. I felt honored!

It wasn’t until sometime later that I found out that God (the King) was speaking to Jeremiah and that Jeremy was a prophet and God gave him the insight to speak to the nation of Jerusalem. God wasn’t directing his ‘unsearchable’ statement to me directly, but you can see the effect it had on my life.

One sentence captured my heart and I began to read and study, and now some 15 years later I have a hundred verses that have come to life in my heart and head. Some of them have helped me through rough times while others have encouraged me from day to day. God speaks through these sentences, through these chapters. Wouldn’t it would be a pity if you chalked the whole thing up as ‘unsearchable’?

The Power of Tradition

Rob Woodrum2 Comments

You know…Christmas is a wonderful holiday.  I know that many have said that a war is being waged on Christmas, citing the new trend of shoppers being greeted with “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas”…and other strange little insignificant issues that people seem to love obsessing over.  In reality though, Christmas itself is a strange mish-mosh of pagan and Christian symbols, replete with syncretism and outright mythology.

One interesting bit of mythology is the ordinary Nativity Scene.  A typical Nativity Scene looks like this:

It has Mary, Joseph and Jesus, which is a good place to start, but what’s really interesting is all the stuff that has been added which is, as far as we know, pure fiction. 

WHAT?!!  How can you say that?

Well…just hang with me here.  As I said, the main characters are right…but in addition to them, we have three wise men (when the Bible just says “Wise men came from the east”….no number given.  There were three gifts mentioned, but that is no proper indicator of how many made the trip.  Also, we are told that the wise men came and visited the “young child”…which most scholars seem to think indicates this was 1-2 years after his birth).

Also in addition to Mary, Joe and Jesus is a group of animals.  I had always heard the wonderful stories of the animals all bowing down to the Little Lord Jesus and always was fond of them.  They are nice…but totally fabricated.  There’s no scriptural indication that any such thing happened.

Actually, the stable which houses this nice Nativity Scene is apocryphal.  The language the Bible uses doesn’t indicate a western style wooden stable at all, but more likely is referring to the lower room of a family house, where much of the cooking was done, and where smaller animals would be housed and fed during the cold months.

Other things like the Innkeeper (which isn’t in the scene above but is usually part of the story), and even the idea of a traditional western style “inn” are fabrications as well.  Joseph was heading to his ancestral home for the census…he would have had family in Bethlehem.  The word translated as inn is really quite nebulous in our language, and is also the word used to describe the upper room where Jesus met with his disciples and families for the last Passover meal they shared.  The word used for “inn” could just mean there wasn’t any room left in the guest room of Joseph’s family when he came to Bethlehem, so he and Mary had to go to the lower room and bunk there…oh yeah, and birth a child.

It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?  All the stuff of tradition that seeps into our understanding of a story, which really alters the original quite a bit.  There are a LOT of things, just like the Nativity Scene, that have been reverently placed in the concept of church which have no basis in scripture for their origin.  That’s why I still insist that simple is safer.  We know Joseph was there….and Mary was too, and best of all Jesus was.  All the other stuff is just along for the ride, we can take it or leave it.   So with the church.  We know Jesus is there…that he died on a cross to save us and draw us together….beyond that, most stuff is based on cultural preference and view.  If we hold to the peripheral stuff loosely, we’ll stay with the simple….and to me, that’s where its safe.

 Merry Christmas! 

(by the by, here’s an interesting site to read about how the birth of Christ may have gone down)

Prayer

Luke Benson1 Comment

  Recently I was talking with a friend of mine who told me a story I would like to share. This friend of mine is active in a ministry that takes him around the country and the world in his travels. Because he is always traveling he lives out of a combination of suitcases and a storage unit. He is currently taking an expensive medication prescribed for him to relieve his high blood pressure. In his recent travels he misplaced a three-month supply of the medicine, which equates to a large sum of money and would leave him without his needed medication until he could obtain another prescription. After making calls to all the places he had been that week in his travels he unfortunately couldn’t locate the lost medication anywhere. Passing through Atlanta on his way to Panama City he was able to visit a doctor who renewed his prescription and he quickly obtained another three-month supply. Safe once again from the dangers of high blood pressure he continued on his journey to Panama City. After a few days in Panama City visiting here and there, moving things in and out of his storage unit and unpacking his belongings for what would be a three-week stay, he realized he had misplaced his medicine again. He immediately panicked and started tearing through the room he was staying in and all his belongings there. The thought of having misplaced another supply of medication was creating an overwhelming amount of stress for him. Unable to find the medicine in his room he frantically searched through his car, then after not finding it, he drove to his storage unit and spent a good part of the day tearing it apart in search of the missing medicine. He told me that after what had been about six hours of frantic searching he conceded to losing another expensive supply of medication. Getting back into his car and wondering how he would go about arranging to get more medicine something inside him urged him to pray, which through all the frantic searching had never crossed his mind. He said that after about three minutes of praying he was given the thought of searching in the zipper of a travel bag that had been in his possession the whole time, less than two feet away from him in his room and again in the car. The medication was recovered and the trial had come to end.

  So often when faced with stressful situations, trials and challenges prayer is our last resort. It is so often an option only after we exhaust all other options. As we rummage through our baggage trying to fix what’s been broken or replace what’s been lost we often forget we have a loving Father who is above all things and in control of everything. A loving Father who finds the lost and mends the broken. Who wants to be our hope in the troubles that we face and our joy in the victories we embrace. We see over and over in the story God is telling how prayer brings peace to panic, insight to difficulty, healing to illness and joy to hopeless situations.

 

 

  Philippians 4:6-7  Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Sufjan Stevens Christmas

Rob Woodrum4 Comments

I don’t have much to post today.  I came across this video and want to share it with you since it’s timely.  Sufjan Stevens is probably my favorite indy folk artist, and this is a song from his Christmas album.  It makes me feel warm and slightly fuzzy, although it may just be that I need a shave.  It also remeinds me of Schoolhouse Rock, which makes me sort of nostalgic as well.

Anyway, enjoy: