Nothing But Space This Last Sunday

This last Sunday we had nothing but space in my family room as only two of us showed up for small group. I guess that the Timberbay retreat was more tiring, the homework burden greater than we thought the week before when we agreed to still meet. That is alright. Mark and Garret and I had a nice time talking for about forty-five minutes. I took Mark home and Garret drove himself home. They were both pretty tired too. Mark was also hurting from a leg bruise received during a short pickup game of soccer.

We also decided to have small group this coming Sunday night after Thanksgiving. Well, I have made an executive decision. It is in the best interest of all of our families that we take this coming Sunday off. No harm done. I will miss everyone as I love our small group so much. However, family and family time is so important during the holiday season. Let us all focus on our families and enjoy the blessings the Lord has provided for us through them.

We will next meet on Sunday the seventh of December. A good day to get together and get back into the book of Isaiah, which, by the way, is "Out of this world!"

Isaiah The Man Of Words And Visions

We took the first two weeks of our fall 2008 small group schedule to determine our group's direction as to what to study. We landed on the Old Testament book of Isaiah. After a slow start due to student schedules and my vacation we had our initial study in Isaiah last night (11/16/2008). We studied Isaiah; the man's context, his culture, his social position, family life, dates of the beginning and end of his ministry, and the international setting he was living through. We uncovered a most interesting aspect of Isaiah which is that he was song writer, poet, and prose author all wrapped up in one. He also used incredibly beautiful metaphors and also authored some most famous personifications, "the fields and the trees will clap their hands." He is a song writers dream come true and in going over the text we realized that there is more than one praise and worship song that we sing at church that borrows from Isaiah.

Only the first chapter was read. It is a poem. It points out the folly of Israel's ways, the consequences of those ways, and also God's great love for His people. We dissected the chapter in verses of five looking for themes, metaphor, applications. The group got through verse ten and then we broke for prayer, but another issue came up.

That issue was the question, "How do we, as followers of Christ, deal with the debate regarding the challenges that the Theory of Evolution has to the biblical account of Creation?" We took a little detour for the better part of thirty minutes. What is really at stake in this debate? Is it actually necessary to defend the faith by proving that creation happened and that there is a creator god? Or is the real issue about who Jesus Christ is? We talked a bit about this and I think it would be good to come prepared to discuss it a bit more this coming Sunday.

The painting above is a rendering of Isaiah having his lips cleansed by hot coals. Interesting? No?