On Sunday, May 14 (which is Mother’s Day) we will begin a two-week series at church called “Escape the Debt Trap” based on a book of that name by Dr. Kregg Hood.
Since MHCC just signed for a large loan on our new building, you might wonder about the consistency of talking about debt as a trap from which we need to escape. Well, consider:
1. Borrowing money isn’t a sin. In the Old Testament, God allowed his people to loan money to one another as long as they charged no interest, and He allowed them to loan to foreigners with interest (see Deuteronomy 23:19-20). I would guess that 90% of us borrowed money to buy our homes. You can bet that our church wouldn’t stand still for this if lending and borrowing were sins. Still, even reasonable borrowing limits us, for: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender” (Proverbs 22:7). Now that MHCC has creditors, paying them is a moral and legal obligation, and they have a right to review our books.This is more than a little relevant to our personal finances too, because we participate in a market that encourages debt. We’re told: “If it’s OK to borrow for your house, why not for a car, and a computer, and for carpet and clothes? Why not use your credit card for groceries, utility bills and gas? And if you can’t pay it off at the end of the month, just extend it out as long as you need to (and pay the interest).” That leads to my second point:
2. MHCC is a reflection of her people, and so our church’s financial situation reflects the finances of the people who attend here. What I mean is that MHCC’s need to borrow may reveal that many of her people are trapped in personal debt.I think you will enjoy reading Dr. Hood’s short book (which we began handing out on Sunday, April 30 ). If you are completely out of debt, or you have your debt under control, you’ll find this study to be a rewarding review, and maybe it will inspire you to mentor others. If you have a debt problem (moderate or serious), you will find real help in this practical, Biblical study.
As a follow-up to this study, we will offer in June a four-week class on Biblical Financial Principles, and we will make available some personal financial counseling to those who will commit to it.
Since this is such an important issue, be sure to invite your friends to this special study on May 14 and 21.
We just got back from the stores at Turkey Creek where I perused the book sections at Target and Wal-Mart, and I noticed an interesting thing: Not only are Dan Brown’s books everywhere (The Da Vinci Code and others) but half-a-dozen other fiction authors have also “found religion” and have produced new novels about conspiracies involving church history. At the Lifeway Christian bookstore, it’s the same thing only different. Nearly every shelf holds an anti-Da Vinci Code book.I read The Da Vinci Code last year and found it to be a highly entertaining fantasy, but I’m basically ignoring it in my teaching (and sticking with The Andy Code).
But I do want to direct your browser to a good article at Relevant.com by Brian Lowery that deals with the hoopla and discusses why this movie attracts our attention more than others.
—-
Techcrunch has a post today about a soon-to-launch web service called Rapleaf, a site which plans to bring eBay-style rankings to all types of transactions, even offline. Imagine that you can give your next-door neighbor a bad ranking for that dysfunctional chainsaw he sold you, or praise a friend who sells cosmetics. I have a hard time seeing how they can pull this off. And while I can see the value of the idea, the thought of having a bad yard sale transaction following me around for decades reminds me of how grateful I am for God’s grace.
All About GOD is a website devoted to answering lots of questions about God, Jesus Christ, and Christianity. It’s a great place for seekers or for Christians who want to review the basis of their faith.
Back in 1993 or so, I picked up an old computer book in the used book store. The author, writing in the late 60s or so said that computers would evolve so that common people would have “terminals” in their home and they would pay for access to a central server. In ‘93, the internet was just starting to take hold among home users and the real story was the personal computer. As I looked at the book, I thought that the author was wrong in his predictions in that he didn’t take into account the power that each “terminal” or PC would possess, that we would in fact have the main computer on our desks and wouldn’t have to connect to the central server.
But thirteen years later, I have to admit that this author had the right idea. PCs have continued to evolve in power, but even more compelling than what’s on my desktop is the power and content I can connect to “out there” - not on a central server exactly, but on the millions of servers that make up the web.
With high-speed access becoming more common, possibilities about where we have to work are expanding. I used to have to sit in my office to work on my sermon, go over my list of church prospects, hospital calls, etc. For a long time I wished for a notebook, even though I find them tedious to use, just so I could take my work anywhere. But my paradigm is starting to change, and I’m realizing that it’s possible to have access to whatever I need anywhere there is a computer.
ITRedux.com recently posted a list of many applications on the web to take the place of MS Office, Wordperfect Suite or whatever you use. A lot of these are free and offer a basic feature set. Others are professional grade and require a monthly fee.
I used MS Outlook for quite awhile to pick up my Yahoo email and organize my tasks, but I have recently switched back to My Yahoo for mail and calendar (it has improved over the last few years) and I use Backpack for my to-do list. Last night I prepared my small-group Bible studies at home using Writley’s word processor and Bible Gateway’s Bible.
I’m really just getting started with this work anywhere concept, but I like it.
Here’s a post I meant to make this past Saturday, the day that stands between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Philip Yancey writes eloquently that we live in a Saturday world, a world that stands between the hope announced on Resurrection Day and the time of the end when Christ will return and reign victorious. He writes:
“What the disciples experienced in small scale - three days, in grief over one man who died on a cross - we now live through on a cosmic scale. Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment…It’s Saturday on planet earth. Will Sunday ever come?”
Yancey, of course, believes that it will. Through the miracle of Amazon’s search-inside-a -book, you can view the page from The Jesus I Never Knew that contains this passage here.
Brett McCracken draws from this same idea in recent article at Relevant: “We exist in a Saturday world. Between Friday and Sunday, when the world was still, the tears fresh, the grave sealed—the darkest day past, a brighter morning imminent—but until then … waiting.”
Come Lord Jesus.
If you’re up for some intellectual heavy-lifting, Mark Dever has a good article at Christianity Today called “Nothing But the Blood”. The article summary says:
“More and more evangelicals believe Christ’s atoning death is merely a grotesque creation of the medieval imagination.” Atonement is the word we use to indicate that Christ’s death paid for our sins - his blood in place of mine.
Dever opposes this view of course, and so do I. But the criticism he outlines in his article makes me wonder if we emphasize enough the other two explanations of the cross in Scripture besides atonement. Namely:
- Ransom - “…humanity’s main problem is that we are trapped and oppressed by spiritual forces beyond our control. Christ’s death, then, is seen as a ransom that frees us from captivity.”
- God’s love demonstrated - “Christ’s death on the Cross demonstrates God’s love so dramatically that we are convinced of his love and are now able to share it with others.”
In my own preaching, I probably tend to emphasize atonement and the demonstration of God’s love more than ransom. All three are Scriptural.
In listing the problems some people have with atonement theology, Dever hits on a valid concern - that focusing only on Christ’s payment for my sin often leads to a very individual Christianity that is only about personal guilt, ignoring social action. His article is worth reading just to see the other potential problems.
Andy Crouch is one of my favorite writers, one of the best in the world at essays on Christian faith and life. So good is he that his latest effort for Books and Culture makes me want to cast aside my disposable razors and start “wet-shaving” like they did in the old days - even though it is infinitely less practical and somewhat dangerous besides.
I wonder if I can get you to like Andy Crouch as much as I do. A treasure trove of his writing can be found here.
Peter T. Chattaway of Christianity Today has posted a list of his top ten Jesus movies. I’ve seen only four of his picks - The Passion, The Miracle Maker (a wonderful animated movie from 2000), The Greatest Story Ever Told (with a slow-paced but interesting performance by Max von Sidow as Jesus) and Jesus, a made-for-TV movie from 1999 which I thought was poor. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen 1977’s Jesus of Nazareth, a six-hour mini-series that looks excellent (from the few clips I have seen).
Film is a great medium to explore the Gospels, and it tends to reveal our interpretations of Scripture. For example, The Visual Bible’s version of Matthew (which we’ve used at MHCC quite a bit) is word for word out of the NIV, but when you watch it you’re struck with things like tone of voice, facial expression, and emotion, and you find yourself thinking: “I never pictured it like that.”
For any of you who love to shop eBay, Jeffrey Young has a cautionary tale for you in an article at ZD Net. This one goes beyond getting swindled (in fact, he apparently got his money back on an obscenely-priced purse) and deals with apparently-questionable practices that eBay encourages.
Charles Colson writes in Christianity Today a pointed critique of today’s praise music, with a special level of disgust for MHCC favorite “Draw Me Close”. Is he an old fuddy duddy who hasn’t learned to worship a loving Father from the heart, or a sharp-minded cultural critic making a needed appeal for a stronger evangelical mind? Maybe both. Every era of church music has its share of wheat and chaff. “In the Garden” was the feel-good hymn of a couple of generations ago. I still don’t know what it means (do you?). The fact is that “Draw Me Close” expresses emotions you’ll find in the Psalms.
Colson is also disgusted that his radio talk segments are being pulled by Christian stations in favor of an “all music all the time” format. Colson sees this as a case of trading intellectual growth for emotional cotton candy. I haven’t heard Colson in years, so I don’t know if the reason could be that he has lost some of his appeal. His writing is still good, but he has used a co-writer for many years. In any case, he’s probably right about Christian stations going “Christian-lite”. Radio in general has been plain vanilla for years, and the Christian stations are among the last to have both music and talk in significant amounts on the same station.
Anyway, Colson sees in all this a sign of the dumbing-down of evangelicalism, which may be too convenient a scapegoat. If the level of discourse on the MHCC discussion board is any indication, he may be wrong. What do you think?
Read a good counterpoint to Colson’s take on praise music here.
I recently heard of two web services that seem to represent a giant leap forward for internet technology. The first is Podzinger, which uses sophisticated speech-recognition to read spoken-word content and make it searchable. Let’s say you were driving home last week and you remember hearing Samuel L. Jackson talking about his upcoming movie Snakes on a Plane. You’d like to find that interview, so you head over to Podzinger and type:
NPR samuel jackson snakes on a plane
That search takes you here, where the NPR story is the second one on the page (NPR Movies), and if you look at the text (which isn’t 100 percent accurate) you can easily see that the relevant conversation begins at 25:48. You can click the icon next to it and begin listening at that very point.
Podzinger does for audio and video what Google does for text (and if it does well, I’m confident that Podzinger will soon be part of Google or Yahoo).
If you’re interested in the technical aspects of Podzinger, you can listen to that here.
The other groundbreaking service is Riya, a place to store your photos. That’s been done before, but get this: Once you upload enough of your pictures and train Riya, it uses facial recognition technology to identify the people in your photos and make them searchable. If you have a couple thousand pictures on Riya, it can find the 25 of Uncle Fred. It can also read text within photos too (on signs, etc.)
Rather than coming up with my own April Fool’s joke, I thought I’d refer you to Wired’s top ten internet spoofs. You’ll recognize some of these as email legends that date back to the mid-90s. A few of them I’d never heard of.
