Great Themes of the Bible. Honor Thy Parents.

This last week we talked about Socrates and Plato and how they used their minds to explore what they considered the most important aspect of life itself, "Truth". We looked at some examples of sentences that we use on a regular basis and discovered that what appears to be a simple sentence can actually be quite complex and that the other people who are with us, who hear and read the same sentence, have different understandings of what the sentence means. This suggests that the "truth" of a sentence can be either illusive or it may have mulitple meanings relative to the individual contemplating it. The sentence we wrote on our flip chart was, "We will be studying the great themes of the Bible." The words we dug into were: study, great, themes, and Bible. The meaning of those words apparently isn't all that easy to grasp. However, after significant discussion we did understand that at some level "themes" meant either "the meanings", "truths", or "spiritual goals" of the Bible. We also determined that for our purposes "The Bible" was in fact "God's written word to us." This was an "article of faith" and we didn't have time to explore that sentence, but trusted that we would in the future.

This Sunday we will explore the theme of "Honoring Parents." Why is it that God made such a big deal about this matter? What are parents? What is the meaning of the concept of honor? What is the benefit of honoring parents? What are the consequences of failing to honor parents? Is it a big deal or is it not? What does the world teach us about parents and how we should relate to them? Is the world's view in conflict with that of the view "commanded" in the Bible? I think this could take most of the one hour we have. Sixty minutes goes by slowly if you are looking at the seconds tick away, but not if you are flying through a "Great Theme" with your unbelieveablly wonderful mind. I can't wait until tomorrow.

It is Hard to Have Friends Who are Hurting.

Wouldn't it be nice if you always knew that everyone that you ever came into contact with was having a great day? Wouldn't it be awesome to know that everyone who was having a great day would have one great day after another for the rest of their lives? Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone always succeeded, always deserved the best, always got the best, and continually were able to praise the Lord for the fact that they were never, ever in any pain or discomfort? Sounds like heaven to me. Perhaps that is what heaven will be like. However, it is certainly not how it is on this planet, at this time, in this universes, in our lives. There is pain all around us and you don't have to look far.

I just purchased a new computer as the one we had before was over ten year old. It could no longer handle the challenges of the anti-virus programs much less some of the new operating systems and updated application software. We were becoming vulnerable to viruses and hackers, so, to the recycling plant it went. This new one is a "screamer" by comparison, though I know that it will be slow in another two or three years as the computer industry routinely obsolesces one model after another keeping us on this vicious treadmill of technological one-up-man-ship. It must be nice to create the very need you are equipped to meet. Such a deal! Such a pain in the pocket book.

On this computer I have high speed Internet access and by pushing one button I can have at my fingertips the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, L.A. Times, MSN News, AOL News, Reuters, and more. Within a few seconds I can scan the world and see if there is any pain going on in people's lives. Needless to say...there is perhaps more pain than not, more agony that happiness, more abuse than caring, more selfishness than love. It sometimes amazes me that people have children at all considering the consequences. Yet, for some reason, God gave us this desire to live, to multiply, to survive despite what we might be facing.

Actually, it is more common that people are nice to each other, or tolerate each other regularly. When you think of population of the United States being somewhere in excess of three hundred million people, if cooperation wasn't the norm then we would all be beat up, or broke, or dead. I think that in large part it is the nature of the new media to make things seem that they are worse than they actually are. However, there is plenty of pain out there.

"I will pray for you." You know, that is so easy to say. Yet, my guess is that most of us who say that sometimes don't actually do the praying. It is what I like to call "Christian Chatter" or our "Religious Code" that we use. It makes us feel real good about ourselves...if we don't think about it too much. At the same time we "believe" that it makes others feel better, more loved, that someone actually cares about them. But, it is pretty easy to say. So often things that are easy aren't worth much.

Don't get me wrong! Prayer is by all measures vastly important for the believer. There is nothing wrong with telling someone that you are praying for them. BUT, I THINK YOU'D BETTER BE DOING IT. Saying that you are praying for someone and not praying for them is in fact, not praying for them. In fact it is fraud. Christ takes some pretty hard shots at the "Super Spiritual" types who pray in public and put on a good show. To Christ their prayers are hollow, simply sounding brass. He encourages the private prayer. The closet prayer. The prayer from the heart that is between each of His children and Him alone. If you pray for someone, pray with deep compassion and love and sincerity, and if He answers your prayer for another because of His relationship with you, to glorify himself...why boast? Oh, to know that God answered your prayer for another because He loves you! You can't tell that to someone else...all you can do is bask in the sweetness of it.

So, pray. But, don't just say. And then, after we have prayed what shall we do? Hey...we thought about someone, we prayed in faith about someone, now let's act on someone's behalf. Let's act. "Thoughts and Faith and Action" baby. That is what this web page is all about. Let's take some concrete actions. That Samaritan of old had no monopoly on "doing" the right thing. Think about doing right things for those in pain and need. Think about it, but do something. In action you will be fulfilling the desire of God's heart. You will be the hands and feet of Jesus.

In Our Class We Will be Buddies

We had twenty-five in our class this last Sunday morning for the 7th-9th grade men. That is an increase of four and is a good thing. We continued to set the ground rules and expectation level for our time together. The first week we covered John Chapter 3 and Christ's conversation with Nicodemus about how we must be born not only in the flesh of our bodies, but also in the eternal spirit which is a gift from God to us through His son Jesus Christ. It is always good to review especially when the review is about such a wonderful and incredibly important subject as our eternal life in relationship to our creator.

This week we did a short review on John Chapter 3, then added some additional text, which the men in our class are going to have to look up on their own. I am not going to do all the work. We talked about Jesus meeting with two other people. One is the Samaritan woman at the well. The other is the woman who was caught in the act of adultery and brought before Jesus by the rulers of Israel. We consider the application of the term "bipolar." Magnets are this way with each end being either negatively or positively charged. From physics we know that opposite ends attract and like ends repulse. There is something magic about magnets and there is power in them too. We also talked about how some folks have a mental disorder known as being "bipolar". Victims will have wildly swinging emotional states that are uncontrollable. A person can go from being very excited and happy one moment to instantly depressed within seconds. It is a terrible problem to those who suffer such mental challenges. It is part of the "brokenness" we all experience at some level in our fallen world. I am thankful for the medical people who have studied mental health issues. They have done so much for those who suffer such deseases and have contributed to making lives more whole than they would otherwise be. But the idea of a "bipolar" situation means that we are presented with extreme opposites and that is what Christ does in these stories.

Nicodemus was part of the ruling class, a Pharisee. He would have been highly educated and somewhat wealthy. He came to Christ in the night as he was afraid of what his peers would think of him having a personal discussion with the man they were growing to hate. On the other end of the spectrum of society Christ meets with the Samaritan woman who Nicodemus's friends would have considered an outcast or unclean. Also, the woman taken in adultery was considered so unclean and sinful as to be worthy to be put to death. Christ talks to all three, both ends of society, the high and the low, and he tells them exactly the same thing. You need to be saved and I am the one who can and will accomplish this for you. "Believe in me...drink of my living spirit" and you will be saved. The Gospel (Good News) of Jesus Christ knows NO special classification. It covers, "to the opposite polls," the human experience. As God separates us from our sin as far as the east is from the west, so he embraces people regardless of social status, ethnic background, health, intelligence, body type, whatever "defining differences" we humans can come up with in our sin filled and broken world .

Our ground rule is simple, yet it is so difficult. We want our class to be like Christ. We want to embrace and love everyone. Everyone is welcome. We are not to have cliques, clubs, exclusive friendships. We are to look for the weak and help them to strengthen. We are to be compassionate and forgiving when someone is having a bad day or is perhaps ill. Our ground rule is that here, in our class, we are all part of the same team, the Body of Christ.

Our First Flight! Sunday September 9th!

One would think that the "New Year" would start on January the first. Not so! For me the new year is the beginning of the Sunday morning class for the 7th through 9th grade men at church. It is also when the 10th through 12th grade men's group starts meeting on Sunday night for their small group Bible study. We took off with the younger men in our new "digs" at the elementary school near by. We have the entire gym to ourselves. There is plenty of floor for smooth and or crash landings. We do miss our old room. One thing was apparent; we have room to grow. So, we prayed about this matter and are going to trust the Lord to bring more friends to the class to study Scripture together and share our lives. Instead of making someone who answers a questions with "that question" doing push ups...we decided that running laps could be the way to go. Maybe we could have the culprit run "heart attacks" between the center court line and the base line? Look out now. Plug in your brains or you will be running and running hard!

This coming Sunday night should be the kick off for the older men. I am looking forward to this time together very much. Many of the members of last year's group have moved to serving the junior high "Oasis" team that night and will no longer be able to attend. I am sad that they will not be with us, but I am glad that they are serving the Lord in this time and not wasting it. It is never a waste to lovingly reach down to those younger than yourself and help them up and along. I am sure that there will be others who will be able to join us and I look forward to meeting them and getting off the ground. This is my favorite time of the year! It doesn't get any better than this.

As the season is upon us we will get this blog out to everyone. Please read the title vision and the first post entitled "Humble Beginnings." This will give you a sense of what we are attempting to do with this sight. If you have time to read others that would be good and I'd love your comments. We will be posting reviews of our discussions, dates of events, questions that have come up, and other general information as it comes to us. Please access the sight multiple times per week as I hope to make multiple entries as the week progresses to the upcoming Sunday classes.

Amazed by the Palm in My Hand!

Reading has become a passion for me. I have had dozens and dozens of hobbies over the years. I have failed at almost all of them with the notable exception of riding bicycles. I am pretty good at that and have enjoyed it ever since I was ten years old. I've tried to build models of cars and airplanes and ships. I have attempted the Cutty Sark a thousand times, so it seems. With the opening of each new model came the dream that this time it would end up just like the picture on the box top. Sadly, after many hundreds of attempts and many hundreds of dollars, none ever looked anywhere as nice as the pictures. Those who were real model makers were bonified artists. I am not. Oh, well. So I would try my hand at music. Ask any family member if I am in fact a musician. Be sure you have ear protection on when they tell you , they scream at you, that I am no violinist! Painting, wood burning, drawing, chess, checkers, running, weight lifting, singing are just some of the "tried and false" hobby starts for me. There are more, but I don't want to embarrass myself too much. It is one thing to be honest. It is another to beat up on yourself. Life is hard enough. I'll stop with the hobby list now.

During my official educational career I was a poor to slow reader. That always bothered me. I wanted to be an English teacher. I loved stories. Literature always seemed to benefit my being. The Bible was a book. To be able to really read it and understand it felt so necessary. All the way through college I read slowly. I had good to excellent comprehension, but I simply could not read fast enough to get enough of what I needed to know into my mind in time to get the excellent grades required. I graduated from the twelfth grade in 1970 and from college with a bachelor's degree in 1981. I was on the eleven year college program. As I said, I was a slow reader. That made my official educational training twenty-three years long. It took me a long time to read a book.

Something happened to me. Something in me clicked about eight years ago. I would have been forty-seven years old. I am not sure what it was. I did get seamless trifocal glasses at about that time. That may have had something to do with it, but there is more than just the pieces of glass I wear on my nose. Suddenly I developed a burning desire to read and read and read. I pursued this desire and ordered video courses on the subject and I studied them diligently. The passion did not pass. It grew. A year went by and I continued to practice. I got faster and faster maintaining the same comprehension levels as before. I got faster and faster and my comprehension levels went up. I got faster and faster and I started to have more and more fun. I began and now do love to read. I just love it.

During this period I discovered the new technology of eBooks. They are electronically stored books that can be read using a computer. I purchased an RCA iBook about five years ago. It was great and I stored almost one hundred books on it. Sadly that company went out of business. The idea stuck with me though and I kept my eye out for and read in the computer trade magazines anything that sounded interesting associated with eBooks. I discovered that the Palm company, famous for inventing the handheld computer, had purchased the electronic library of the RCA machine company which had gone out of business. They improved it and came out with a large screened Palm and the necessary software to download and read eBooks. I had business reasons for purchasing a new Palm Pilot. I went with the Palm T/X which is pictured above. It is pretty pricey, but it is very capable. It plays music in the MP3 format, it plays video, it has scheduling programs, writing programs, MS Word and Excel, a vivid color screen and more. It has a memory slot that will take as much memory as can be purchased. I bought a 512 megabyte card for it, which now can be replaced with as much as 4 gigabytes. Wow! I may have to get me one of them cards!

Here is the kicker. In the old RCA machine I stored 100 plus books the size of "War and Peace." (I calculated one time that this would represent a bookshelf twenty-five feet long.) If you don't know it, that is a very large book. In that machine I had 128 megabits of memory. It was the size of a medium hard covered book. The Palm T/X operates even more smoothly. It is a sort of "Next Generation" in eBook readers. It is also more flexible as the RCA could only read books. The Palm fits in the "palm of your hand." I can surf the Internet using my WiFi modem, make phone calls, schedule, and play a seemingly infinite number of computer games on the Palm. With the memory I can store as many as 400 books such as "War and Peace." If I purchase a 4 gigabyte card...well, you do the math! The slots on the left side of the carrying case are for extra cards. What if I have three 4 gigabyte cards! Well, you do the math! You will need a computer. The Palm can do the calculating for you. I'm thinking I could download into the palm of my hand the entire Library of Congress if it were on a compatible data base. I think it is! Wow!

In the Palm of my hand I hold a man made miracle. It is that indeed. It is beyond comprehension for this fifty-five year old man. Oh, and I can download all the files to my laptop computer and it has a sixty gigabyte hard drive. Well, you do the math! So, I asked myself, "What should I download first?" The answer was simple.

The "Bible" seemed so important and necessary to read and understand. So, I did.