I Agree with Tim

At the Life In Student ministry blog, Tim posted his reasoning for keeping High School and Jr. High combined.

I agree with his assessment.  I grew up in a ministry that had a combined big group mid week and then more age specific sunday school.  The big gathering on wednesday nights were some of my favorite times as a Jr. Higher because I saw people older than me actively engaging their faith, and maybe our group was unique (i hope not) but I always felt that the older kids were very inclusive with the younger ones.

What do you think?

Wise as Serpents?

Matthew 10:16 “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

This verse has always confused me. I don’t understand why Jesus would reference the serpent.

In the context of the verse Jesus is talking about the risk of being a disciple and the coming persecution. I can understand being gentle as doves, but I don’t really get why the serpent is so wise. Is it because snakes are hard to grab? Not saying that Christians are supposed to be evasive, but we should also not try to cause trouble.

I know it’s not saying that we should strike like a serpent, because that’s not gentle like a dove. When the disciples where arrested in Acts we never saw them fighting the arrest.

I don’t know, this verse has always confused me.

Things in my brain

In No particular order

  • I really like coffee
  • my kids are super cute
  • blogging is hard to keep up on when you have a job, a family, and purusing a masters degree
  • the Bible is amazing, read the Drama of Scripture and you’ll see.
  • Malachi is one of the most intense books in said Bible.
  • My wife is crazy hot
  • I love Pho’ (but now I smell like onions)
  • I am not a web professional, but I’m learning a lot about DNS, CNAME, MX records.  IT people speak several languages
  • I like Third Day’s newest album more an more
  • I think I’m really going to enjoy LeaderSync tonight at Creekside.
  • I am looking forward to some future ideas that have been percolating in my brain

That’s that.

Resolutions

Last year I made the New Years Resolution to read only one book at a time. And I am proud to say, I Did It!!! That is actually a major accomplishment for me, because during college I developed Literary ADD and I could not focus on one book at a time. As a result, a lot of the content I was ingesting would become muddled with so many voices speaking at once. Reading one book at a time has really helped me to focus and get more from each book. If you are a reader, I would recommend doing something like this for yourself.

Not only was I able to read more books, I was also able to stop reading some books if they were terrible and not feel like I had to finish them.  This year I’m going to try to increase the number of books I read.  My goal for this year, will be to read 75 books.  This shouldn’t be too difficult since I am pursuing my master’s degree.  But it will take a lot of determination.  I’ll keep a list in my readings page.

Bible Reading in 2009

Happy New Year!!! Let’s make 2009 the year we read the whole Bible!  Found this post on Scott H’s Blog, and I thought, hey why not share it with my readers as well:

Just for the record, I’m not a huge fan of reading the entire bible in one year. In general, I’d rather drill down on a few passages over long periods of time than read the bible like drinking water from a fire hose. But, every couple years I feel led to read the whole thing in a year to reorient myself to the big picture.

2009 is such a year. I will read it chronologically and have chosen The Message. I’ve created a couple tools to help me access the daily schedule and content.

  • RSS feed. If you’re like me and check your RSS feeds almost daily this will be a easy way to have access to your schedule and content.
  • 2009 Bible Reading Plan Google Calendar. This is a public Google calendar. You can view it, subscribe to it and even embed it on your blog/site. Or just bookmark this post and come back every single day. ) The following schedule will update daily thanks to my friends at Google.

So I hope this helps you build a bible reading rhythm for 2009.

Preaching on Sunday 12-28-08

Lately I have been privileged to speak on the last Sunday of the year.  I like to take this particular Sunday and try to talk about the mission of God, the church.  This year the title is The Year Of Living Missionally, not a great title but it works.

I want to help Creekside become more that a gathering place, I want to see Creekside become a sending place.

I came across this video, it’s a great video, but I’ve been unable to get a high quality version of it, so I won’t be using it on Sunday.  But I wanted to share it, so I guess that’s what the blog is for.

I know I’ve been posting a lot of videos here.  And that can be annoying, for some of us, but I like videos, and my brain has been pretty tired lately.