Got Fruit ?

Blogging

From Slice of Laodicea, hosted by Ingrid Schlueter: an interview with Pastor Dustin Segers of Shepherd’s Fellowship concerning Christian bloggers maintaining balance,focus and righteousness in their lives with regards to blogging in general and as a ministry, specifically anyone called into discernment.  I do hope readers take the time to listen to this interview in full, Pastor Segers has in my opinion some solid advice for us all to consider and take to heart.

File under: Avoiding Distractions

Christian doctrine etc;

The Marshian Chronicles  and Lindsay Brooks of Apologetics.com have posts from earlier in the week that personally speak to and challenge me to step up even more in proclaiming my faith in Christ.  Part 1 of the post from The Marshain Chronicles is here and Part 2 is here.  I mentioned a few days ago about working on a friend of a friend’s PC.  Well the back story to this "friend of a friend" is that they are Mormon, and during our interaction,I felt a need to witness to this young man about the true Jesus of the Bible (sans John Smith), I didn’t though because of not "feeling" that the timing was right.  I don’t know, maybe there’s truth to it, maybe me just dragging my feet in this particular instance since I didn’t have an established relationship with the young man.  As I’m making this entry though, it does occur to me that somehow, some way, I do need to talk to this young man about his involvement with the Mormon church and His relationship with Christ.   

Lindsay Brooks offers his 2 cents worth regarding proclaiming the Gospel, and The Marshian Chronicles also gives some practical advise and words to ponder to go along with what the believer is told in 1st Thessalonians 5:

1st Thessalonians 5:19-22
19 Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; 20 do not treat prophecies with contempt.

Technology

As much as I enjoy technology, be it computers or AV equipment, I am a slow adopter.  For example, I’s only been in the past 3-4 years that I’ve fully embraced Windows XP as my preferred Windows OS (a long time Windows 2000 holdout).    Likewise, I was a diehard fan of the Musicmatch Media Player.  Even after Yahoo acquired the software and "reinvented" it, I held out on the legacy version as my default media player, forsaking Windows Media Player.  Over the past six months or so Musicmatch has become less and less appealing to use, as Yahoo has made efforts to migrate users to it’s home branded media player.

After a day of frustrations with installing Musicmatch about a month ago, I finally gave in and abandoned the app for Winamp.  For the old Musicmatch fanboys that are looking for a comparable replacement, I highly suggest giving  Winamp a try.

Need a tool to convert your media files or graphics to different formats? Check out the freeware media converter know as Format Factory.  The interface is a little buggy/quirky, but the utility itself has performed wonderfully.

Grace and peace be with you.

I need a break from the study and research I’m prepping for Wednesday night’s class over discernment, so I thought I’d just comment a bit on what’s going on with the preparation (not H) process plus whatever else comes to mind from the past few days.

I had a chance to chat briefly with a friend this weekend and I was sharing with my friend about the "teaching" opportunities put before me; and about how for the past few months I really felt this urging to address the young adults group about discernment.  My friend who serves in a ministry capacity informed me that discernment is a big subject but gave encouragement.

Well let me tell you, I can definitely appreciate my friends outlook.  I must have spent at least 3 hours yesterday evening just trying to weed through notes and information gathered to come up with an outline of the materiel to be presented.   Keep in mind this is a subject that I hope will cover the next 6 to 8 weeks of 1 hour Bible Study/discussion.

Initially my ideas were born more out of concern to specifically inform the young adults about some of the teachings and movements that are Biblically unsound or at least cause me to look on them with a skeptical eye.  Thankfully, I quickly realized (thank you Lord, for your wisdom) that unless approached systematically, there was the potential for any study and or discussion to turn into several non-constructive and distracting practices such as:

• joy derived from witch hunting versus truth seeking
• us vs. them mentality
• an hour of self-righteousness and haughtiness
• discussion of a word with no weight to it (because no one understands from a Biblical perspective what, discernment is)

The last bullet is therefore going to be the base, with everything else discussed in the weeks to come originating from principles disclosed in that base topic (Discernment: What is it?).  Below is an outline (for the curious or for anyone else considering engaging a similar study time)… for what it’s worth.  This is simply a skeleton view of general ideas and questions to develop a broader study upon as it relates to defining discernment before jumping into examining doctrines and beliefs.

 Discernment: What is it?

• What is discernment
• What is the purpose of discernment
• Why study the subject of discernment
• How does one become a discerning Christian

The Gospel and Christian Doctrines defined (via CARM resources)

• Essentials
• Secondary Essentials

Comparison of doctrines (not all inclusive nor exhaustive)

• Prosperity Gospel (Name it Claim It):
• Emergent Church/Social Gospel:
• New Age mysticism/spirituality/Contemplative prayer:
• Humanism
• Charismatic Movement
• Classic cults: Mormonism, Catholicism, Jehovah’s Witnesses

Anywho…  just a few thoughts and ideas being kicked around the ‘ole noodle that I felt like sharing.

Proverbs 15:14
14 The discerning heart seeks knowledge,
       but the mouth of a fool feeds on folly.

folly:
1: lack of good sense or normal prudence and foresight
2 a: criminally or tragically foolish actions or conduct obsolete : evil, wickedness; especially : lewd behavior
3: a foolish act or idea
4: an excessively costly or unprofitable undertaking
5: an often extravagant picturesque building erected to suit a fanciful taste

Grace and peace be with you.

It’s been yet another busy week at  work, church and all the extra things that keep a fella busy until the wee hours of the morning.  Pheww!!

Tech stuff:

I spent the past two or three evenings upgrading yet another WordPress install.  This time for my church’s blog, which was still on the old WP2.3 install  And yet again not quite the 5 minute painless install that "they" say it is. No database corruption this time, just a problem with Permalinks not working. and we lost our PodPress functionality in the upgrade process.

Oh well, on the bright side, I came across two sweet themes that anyone looking for an update may want to check out.  The themes offer a ton of customizations without having to dig into code:

Check out the theme titled Mandigo if your looking for “an elegant widget-ready one/two/three-column WordPress theme, available in two widths, SEVEN color schemes and 38 languages!”

If your looking for "Fluid width, 2 or 3 column theme for WP 2.2 - WP 2.6, with rotating header images, customizable logo and options page. Plug & Play for various plug-ins" then check out this 2 or 3 columned theme titled Atahualpa.

Need a media player for all of the multiple media formats out there in Internet land?  Try VLC, it’ll play .mp4, m4v etc.  A nice feature is VLC’s playback support of RealMedia (arrgghh!) streams, something I found out while visiting the following site  listed under…

Christian PodCast/Broadcasts:

From their tagline, Pirate Christian Radio claims: "This station proclaims "Christ crucified for our sins" and exalts and defends THE historic Christian faith."

Apologetics.com is one of my more favored sites to visit for informative broadcasts on a variety of Christian topics.  Apologetics.com, has a fairly laid back forum… must be all of that that California sunshine.

Another site that I only recently visited (known about it for a while, just busy,lazy, forgetful…), Slice of Laodecia, also has an interesting forum that’s caught my attention.  For the Podcasts check out the top center portion of the page.

Memorable Readings:

I recommend reading Mark Carlton’s post on The God of The Old Testament (Part20): Genocide or Justice, a nice refresher for our perspective of God and His divine justice system.

Lashawn Barber’s 2 cents worth on Why did God make Different race?

By it’s fruit you will know it:

For those that have followed the Lakeland Florida Outpouring closer than I have,there now appears to be more to Todd Bentley’s recent problems.  Link found via Apostasy Watch.

Matthew 12:33
33 "Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.

Grace and peace be with you.

Things took a bit of a turn from the norm this week.  I was asked to give Communion Meditation this Sunday, so I’ve spent the past few days in thought, prayer and preparation vs spending the normal evenings of reading\studying the Bible from a semi-scheduled pseudo systematic approach.  Being a bit nervous about this, I asked for a "critique"  Friday .  The feedback was positive and I believe sincere, so I’ll probably share the thought in a Sunday evening post.

Kinda, sorta related…

Louie of the Marshian Chronicles has a post that carries some ideas similar to the train of thought I had when prepping the communion meditation, of course you won’t be able to see that till I post it.  

In other news..

It looks like another one of my favorite bloggers has returned from a blogging hiatus.  Check out "L" at her new site: http://holidaylonging.wordpress.com.

Also, I caught this post late in the week by "Frankly Speaking".

Skirting politics…

Wickle has a deep post on politicians, infedlity (adultery) and trustworthiness.  It’s a long post that after going back to read again, I may drop my 2 cents worth on or write my own perspective about here, just not tonight this morning. (YAWN!!!)

“[For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. According to Alamoth. A song.] God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”- Psalm 46:1

Until then..

Grace and peace be with you.

I mentioned in Sunday’s post that on Saturday my youngest daughter and I went to go see Batman: The Dark Knight.  Instead of giving a full review of the film, I’ll focus on one of the characters, their shortcomings and a Scriptural thought or two that ties in with the film. For another perspective on the film visit KOG Media .

To those readers that haven’t seen the film yet, be warned, movie spoiler ahead!

In about the final third of the film (runs approx. 2 /12 hours), the second half of the Harvey Dent/Two-Face character (Aaron Eckhart) develops.  The Joker has devised a scheme whereby he springs his multi-tierd plan for chaos and destruction upon Gotham and it’s Kevlar clad Knight.  While being interrogated by “The Bat”, The Joker menacingly toys with Batman in a game of brains verses brawn (ala Tyler Durden and Lou from Fight Club).  After several minutes of being literally tossed around the interrogation room, the Joker let’s on that he has abducted two people close to Batman; Rachel Dawes lifelong friend/forbidden love interest, and hotshot DA Harvey Dent, current apple of Rachel’s eye and shining knight in armor for Gotham.  No, Batman is not the hero in this installment (or is he?), he’s a vigilante in the eyes of the public, and as real life sometimes plays out, things get worse before better (scapegoat).

Dawes and Dent having been abducted are whisked off to separate locations in Gotham by The Joker’s henchmen, each being placed into a perilous situation, where Batman and Chief Gordon are thrust into a mad dash to save them once The Joker “gives up” their locations. Real life tragedy plays out and  in their efforts to save Rachel and Dent, only Dent makes it out “alive”. 

Dent physically and emotionally scarred over Rachel’s death is covertly visited by the Joker while in recovery at Gotham General.  The Joker manages to convince Dent to turn from his schoolboy ideology after manipulating the series of events that led to his current condition.  Having convinced Dent, The Joker’s plan now comes into full bloom as a spiritually beaten Dent succumbs to the allure of vengeance and anger, he’s primed, ready to be unknowingly used to undo all of the good he’s done in Gotham, thus “killing” the hope of Gotham, and throwing wide open the gates that held anarchy at bay.

Dent’s undoing if you will is nothing new, a similar plot played out in Star Wars initially when Anakin Skywalker loses his mother and escalating deeper into the abyss as he loses his love,Padamee.  The analysis of both Batman:TDK & Star Wars being that heroes are deceived by their hearts, their self centeredness in turn leads them down paths of evil.  Art imitating life?

Jeremiah 17:9
9 The heart is deceitful above all things
       and beyond cure.
       Who can understand it?

The final thought however is not from Jeremiah 17:9 but rather from something that Jesus said in Luke 14.  See?  As Harvey Dent had two loves; Rachel and the law, one was elevated higher than the other.  In losing what he loved most, Dent traded hope and determination to carry on in pursuit of true justice  & the well being of many for his own cause; something that in his own distorted sense of fulfilling justice, Batman was able to maintain focus on.

Luke 14:25-27
25Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26″If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. 27And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

Grace and peace be with you.