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The Grail
Last summer my oldest daughter began spending vast amounts of her time rewriting/repurposing Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the hopes of persuading the powers that be at Evangel Classical School to allow a student performance of her adaptation. Well, said powers approved, and Maggie has selected a cast and been directing practices for the last few months. Not only her fellow students, but a bunch of friends of the school have been working to make this fun, and there will be three performances next week!
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#SamePageSummer
I’ve been using the M’Cheyne Bible reading plan for 2019, but am excited to add the #SamePageSummer readings through the New Testament for June-August. Mo and all four kids are also going to do it, so we’ll be same-paging as a family along with everyone else. “What happens when Christians are coming to the Word regularly? They are being worked over, regularly, by the Spirit and by the Word.”
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Proclaiming the Lord’s Love Until He Comes
Whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever you do, let all of it be done in love. This is a conflation of 1 Corinthians 10:31 and 16:14. I’m not rewriting the Scripture, I am connecting two ways of dealing with the same thing. In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul exhorted the church about using their theological understanding about God’s creative generosity and their liberty in Christ to love one another in what they willingly did not eat and in what they did eat with thankfulness.
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I Like Job, but I Don’t Want to Be Like Job
Most of us appreciate the story of Job. God regularly uses his story to bless us, to sustain our happiness, or at least our hopefulness, when things are difficult. In Job’s narrative we see how our faithfulness to God brings trouble, not that trouble always comes from our disobedience. We see how nothing happens apart from God’s control, even the worst loss and pain. And we see God’s grace to restore good to His servant when His point to Satan is made.
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4 of 5 stars to The Two Cultures by C.P. Snow
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5 of 5 stars to A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix by Edwin Friedman
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3 of 5 stars to Call the Sabbath a Delight by Walter Chantry
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4 of 5 stars to Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
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Not a Crumb of a Cardboard Cracker
How would you persuade someone that the church’s eating and drinking at the Lord’s Supper should be more happy than heavy? We believe that the bread and the wine represent the body of Christ tortured and crucified, the blood of Jesus spilled from His head, His hands, His back, His feet. We acknowledge that our sin drove the bitter nails that hung Him on that judgment tree. The murder of God’s Son is the most heinous and unjust offense committed in history, and, according to divine justice He had to be crushed for our iniquities.
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Where It Wafts
Sometimes Christians are able to take obedience and make it ugly; it’s one of our specialties. In 1 Corinthians 16:5-8 Paul wrote about his plans to visit Corinth, but also acknowledged that the Lord must permit the visit or it wouldn’t happen. Paul wasn’t expecting an approved itinerary handed down to him by an angel from heaven, but he would recognize by providence if God allowed it. Solomon wrote that “the heart of man plans his ways, but the LORD establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9).
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All Sanctimoniousness and Powerlessness
I’ve wanted to share this video and connect it with the quotes below it for some time. Since the interview came out at the beginning of December, it’s apparently been on my mind for half a year. Ha!
The interview is with John MacArthur on The Ben Shapiro Show. Some of you watched it already, and great. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it, and I recommend it as a perfect example of the kind of Dispensationalist (like MacArthur) I want to be and the kind of Dispensationalist I also want to build on.
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To Be Clear about Hell
A few things happened over the last year or so that have caused the elders to propose an addition to our What We Believe statement of faith. We have been in different conversations about the reality of eternal death and, specifically, the existence of hell. When reviewing the doctrinal statement as part of our annual elder affirmation process, Jonathan suggested that we add something more specific. Currently we only have a couple references to what happens after physical death to those who reject Christ.
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The Future in a Snap
ECS is a classical Christian school which means, among other things, that we are concerned about the classics. In our curriculum we read and reference some of the all-time greatest works as not just relevant for today’s snobs, but as part of how we got to where we are today as a society.
I’m trying to build up my knowledge and appreciation of these rich resources, and also pass that culture onto my kids.
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Steal Like an Artist
4 of 5 stars to Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
This is a small book, easy and enjoyable to read, with good reminders to keep looking and learning. I laughed at the following quote, used it in a talk already, and think it’s a good summary of the benefit of Kleon’s book. As the French author André Gide wrote, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said.
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North! or Be Eaten
5 of 5 stars to North! or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson
Book #2 in the Wingfeather Saga was no let down, though it’s not quite as light a story as #1. The plot surprised me multiple times all the way to the end. At a few points in the middle of the book I’ll admit I was irritated, but in good ways, because I wanted to know what’s going to happen?
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Roaring Lambs
4 of 5 stars to Roaring Lambs: A Gentle Plan to Radically Change Your World by Robert Briner
A friend recommended this book to me a few months ago and it really was worthwhile. It was first published in 1993, so there are more chapters that could be added now, but I appreciated Briner’s encouragement for Christians to get out of boycotting and grumbling and into screenwriting (for movies and TV) as well as into journalism and other writing endeavors, along with visual arts and higher education.
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Digital Minimalism
2 of 5 stars to Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
There used to be a short answer to the problem posed by Newport that he takes almost three hundred pages to answer. What should we do about all the time-wasting, social-media-hyped, internet-exacerbated problems in society? We need self-control. So all he really needed was a hyphen, not hyperventilation. Though I thought Deep Work was a smidgen too precious, this book is supersized precious.
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What a Perishable Seed Can Do
It’s not a new observation, but it seems appropriate after such an extended amount of attention on the resurrection (in 1 Corinthians 15) to note that when Paul delivered the practice and reason for communion a few chapters earlier he did not mention the resurrection at all.
As Paul explained, Jesus gave thanks and then gave bread to His disciples and said “This is my body which is for you,” without adding “and it will be raised for you, too.
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Is It a Sin to Be Weak?
If the Bible commands us to be steadfast, as it does in 1 Corinthians 15:58, then is it a sin to be unsteady? If God desires us to be immovable, same verse as above, is everyone who is erratic in disobedience? In other words, is it a sin to be weak? It could be, depending on the type of weakness and reason for weakness. Our physical bodies are in a state of weakness, certainly compared to our bodies when raised in power (1 Corinthians 15:43), and that corruption isn’t moral.
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So Let’s Do Something About That
A few months ago a friend of mine recommended to me Roaring Lambs: A Gentle Plan to Radically Change Your World. I’m about to finish it, and will give a Goodreads review soon. But since there’s a group of us working to start a college in the near future, I really appreciated the following quote from chapter 8, “The Christian Academe: Underachievers.” “Christian college graduates typically have commitment, but not confidence.