I Gotta Feeling...

So I'm spending a little time listening to JJ Heller and Gungor this morning to get my heart quieted and prepared for worship at church.

What are you doing to prepare to corporately worship Our God and Father today?

Holy Adjectives...

So my new study has already proved to be very interesting.

I'm just a few days in to reading Exodus via several translations and I'm finding all sorts of interesting tidbits that I've missed before. A lot of it seems to be emphasis on certain words that you might just run past in certain translations.

(A great tool I've found to help find those emphasized words is the Discovery Bible. It's the NASB New Testament and it has markings to indicate, in it's words, "emphatic sense, which its Greek sentence implies.")

Today I want to talk to you about one of those instances.

In Exodus 3, I did my first read through in The Message and stopped when I came to verse 3:

Moses said, “What’s going on here? I can’t believe this! Amazing! Why doesn’t the bush burn up?”

I stopped because of the colloquial use of the word "Amazing". This is a word that gets thrown around alot in our culture.

My wife is AMAZING!

That song is AMAZING!

Those donuts were AMAZING!

That person just did something so incredible stupid that it is AMAZING!

And therefore I think it has maybe lost some of its power.

Upon comparing it to the ESV and the NET Bible...

(side note: The NET Bible is a very interesting translation. I don't often like the text itself, but it has the most incredible notes and great online study tools at net.bible.org. Check it out!)

...I found that the Hebrew word for which The Message interjected "Amazing" was actually defined as "great." and had the connotation of something extraordinary; that Moses anticipated something special was about to happen.

And I think we might too if we saw a burning bush that wasn't burning up and a voice was talking to us out of it.

But God is still "Amazing" and wants to do something special. And perhaps we miss that these days because we've taken adjectives that were meant for God and use them for sporting events and pizza.

So I want to challenge myself and all of you, let's start reclaiming those holy adjectives for what they were meant for - the praise of our Creator!

Tell me how it goes. God bless.

I Think I've Caught...!

With being cooped up together inside through all this snowy cold weather, my family has caught many things.

We had the sniffles.

One or two of us caught the stomach flu.

There have been several rampant outbreaks of cabin fever.

There were even some early warning signs of Bieber fever as my two-year old Isaac has been going around saying, "What's a Bieber?"

But the one thing all of us have seemed to have caught was...the Space Bug!

Now there have been lots of factors leading up to this:

1) I got to go to the Kennedy Space Center when I was recently in Florida.
2) My son has been studying about space in his schooling.
3) We just commemorated the 25th Anniversary of the Challenger Disaster.

And it seems since then things have just continued to escalate.

My kids are checking out library books on space. We watched Apollo 13 the other night. Ethan watched an episode of Mythbusters about the moon landing. I even watched an old X-Files episode about a shuttle mission crisis (that was suspiciously akin to the Apollo 13 crisis).

It seems everywhere we turn this week, space is involved. It's been kind of neat for me, as I was so intrigued by space exploration as a child. I loved reading the old Sci-Fi novels. I studied about the NASA programs. I even looked into going to Space Camp, where you train like astronauts for a week.

It has been really neat to get to relive some of that and share that with my kids.

So how about you?

What "fever" have you caught during the great snow-in?

That's How I Read...(Part 2)

So my friends Nathan and Amanda have just recently started a study of 1 Corinthians based on a uniquely formatted version of the Bible called Books of the Bible. (You can read more about their study here and here.)

Now once we were all able to dig our ways out from the recent blizzard, Nathan and Amanda came over to visit. As we visited, we got to talking about some of their observations from the study. One of the issues that came up was that of submission to authority. This began with the concepts from 1 Corinthians, including staying in the position you were in when you were saved (1 Cor 7:17-24), lawsuits between believers (1 Cor 6:1-11), and giving up your rights (1 Cor 9).

But we also began discussing other places in the Bible where it talks about this issue of submission to authority. We noted that in Romans 13:1 it says, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God."

And this verse is speaking of the Roman government who was corrupt and oppressive, particularly to Christians!

But we also noted in Acts 4 when the disciples were ordered by the Jewish rulers to no longer speak or teach in the name of Jesus, they answered "Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge."(Acts 4:19)

And we obviously know they went on teaching in Jesus' name!

Well, we didn't come to a concrete definitive answer that night, but did seem to agree that we generally need to give up our rights for the sake of Christ's name, even when that means being wronged and treated unjustly sometimes.

So with that fresh in my mind, I was intrigued by something that jumped out at me when I read Exodus 1.

As I did my initial reading in The Message, this grabbed my attention:

The king of Egypt called in the midwives. “Why didn’t you obey my orders? You’ve let those babies live!” The midwives answered Pharaoh, “The Hebrew women aren’t like the Egyptian women; they’re vigorous. Before the midwife can get there, they’ve already had the baby.” God was pleased with the midwives. (vs 18-20a MSG)

What?

The midwives directly disobeyed the order of the Pharoah. When called on it, they lied. And God is pleased?

Upon further study I found the phrase there in the beginning of verse 20 more literally means that God "treated well" the midwives.

But this brings up some interesting questions.

When is it okay to disobey the authorities over us?
Why was it commendable that the midwives just lied to the Pharoah rather than tell the truth and face the consequences?
What makes God treat us well?

Look forward to the comments.

That's How I Read...(Part 1)

So I finished my first full read through of the ESV Bible this week.

During the process the ESV progressed from my daily reading Bible to my main study Bible and eventually to my main teaching translation.

But now with the complete read through done, I was faced with the decision of what to do for my daily personal reading next. In this last read through, I went from Genesis all the way through Revelation in traditional order.

Therefore, I've spent the last while in the New Testament. So I knew I wanted to do something in the Old Testament. I also have always been very drawn to the Pentateuch (The first five books of the Old Testament).

Since we just finished the Sunday morning sermon series on Genesis, I decided to pick up with Exodus. But I thought I'd try something different this read through - comparing translations!

So I jumped into Exodus 1 with a read through in The Message paraphrase. I then reread my ESV and then compared them both with the NIV and TNIV. While I would never suggest reading The Message as your main study (as it isn't a translation but a paraphrase), I found it a great tool in conjunction with the ESV and NIV/TNIV. It served to bring to attention some parts of a familiar story that I would normally have just read right over. (I'll talk more about this in tomorrow's Part 2 of this message)

Now, I may not do this comparison style reading every day. I actually may try switching things up from time to time.


I just read a great article in Bible Study Magazine (another great tool for Bible Study) on Francis Chan's Bible study methods.

Here is what he said, "Sometimes I read the Bible aloud. Sometimes I read it slowly and take notes. Sometimes I just read through for flow. For me, the important thing is that I don't get away from that time with Him."

But I am going to try doing a lot more comparison between literal, dynamic and balanced translations. (See my friend Nathan's blog for a great series of posts on these three types of translations.) I'm planning on using YouVersion for this comparison as it has a very easy interface for doing quick switches and parallels of translations.

I'll be posting from time to time my experiences. As we are trying to make a greater emphasis on Bible literacy among our young people this year, I thought it would be good to share some of my experiences and tools.

I also would love to hear your tools and experiences as we go on this continuing journey of knowing and understanding God and His Word.

So let me know what and how you are reading right now.

What I Learned from the Storm...

It was so good to be back at church this morning.

With our continued bad road conditions we didn't know how many to expect but we had a great turnout! I think people are tired of being cooped up in their houses so they braved the elements and we had a wonderful time of fellowship. You could feel the excitement and expectation in the air!

While I'm ready to get back to routine, this storm has afforded me some neat learning opportunities. Here are a few things I've learned this week:

1. It is HARD to slow down. With travel, business, education and pretty much any other sector of society you can think of shutting down, a person should have been able to sit back, relax and have not a worry in the world as he watched the snowflakes fall.

I did not find that to be the case.

There is something in the back of my mind that kept telling me, "You need to be doing something!"

So I'd check the Facebook. Check the phone. Try writing a message. Do some research. Check the Facebook again. Make a list of things I needed to do. Check the phone. It went on and on like this.

I don't think I was alone as I saw the hundreds of other people making constant status updates stating that they couldn't figure out what to do with themselves.

2. Snow Storms Get People out in their Yards Visiting. You would think that you would see less people during a blizzard, but I found our case to be quite the opposite. Nearly everyday we had interactions with our neighbors as we checked on each other, shoveled snow and visited about the upcoming forecasts.

Just yesterday I spent hours outside mostly because every few minutes someone else from the neighborhood would stop by and talk for a significant amount of time.

During normal weather we might go two or three days without seeing any of our neighbors.

Not so in a snow storm I guess.

3. My wife is AWESOME! Now I already knew she was incredible, but this week I've seen first hand that the magnitude of her awesomeness is off the scale!

As I've spent more time than normal at home, I've watched as she balances the homeschooling, housework, cooking, potty-training, and infant processing (just to name a few things she does), and look at how put together she still looks!

I tried to help out best I could this week, and things were still hard. I have a new respect for what it takes for Shannon to make it through a day. I hope I can keep that perspective and be a better help when the weather and routine gets back to normal.

So how about you? How has your storm experience been and what have you learned?

McDonalds or No McDonalds: That is the Question...

So I really don't like McDonalds.

Everytime I end up eating there I feel like I've sabotaged my general well-being. I mean their menu barely passes for food.

On the other hand, because of our growing family size and the invention of the McDonald's Playland, it has become one of the simplest and most relaxing places we can take our children. We can hardly resist the call of the Playland when we find ourselves in Springfield. The kids play, we drink overpriced coffee, all are happy.

But recently we had our first "bad" Playplace experience. We couldn't quite put our fingers on it, but something just wasn't right. There was a disturbance in the McForce.

Maybe it was the large & loud group of boys who were throwing their six pound monster truck toys high into the air so they crashed into toddlers heads.

Maybe it was the fact that there was grease and trash on EVERY table and seat in the place.

But I think the blame rested with the group of three young parents who sat just two tables away.

You immediately noticed them when you entered because they didn't seem to quite fit. They were in their mid to late twenties, well-dressed, fashionable hair and shoes. They had on coats they obviously didn't get from Wal-Mart or the Goodwill.

But it was none of these things that really caught my attention. It was their intent focus.

No. It wasn't on watching their children. I'm not even convinced they had children in the Playplace.

It wasn't how interested they were in passionate conversation with each other.

Actually quite the opposite.

It was their unswerving attention to their cell phones. Each of them were furiously tapping the buttons of their QWERTY pads, hunched in their chair, furrowing their brow in what can only be described as nervous concentration.

And they stayed that way.

For at least twenty minutes.

Not a look up at each other or anyone else.

Not a word to one another.

The one time I saw a small child come over and try to ask a question, they all seemed to not hear or notice.

And it was at this point that we decided to leave.

Our bastion of rest and jovial conversation was tainted by this totally antisocial behavior.

So it left me with these questions:

How do we fight this antisocial plague masquerading as "social networking"?
How do we bring back face-to-face conversation and quiet rhythms to our lives?
Should we try to reclaim the McDonald's PlayPlace or is it too far gone?

Look forward to your thoughts!