This morning, I listened to a powerful message by Paul Washer, preached at last week’s Revival Conference, that disturbed me — and that’s a good thing.  The sermon is titled Ten Indictments (link below).  I won’t comment on my response to it too much as there are things from the message that I have to go wrestle with God about before I would trust myself to write out my thoughts, however I’ll just post a few memorable quotes and encourage you to go listen for yourself.

A few memorable quotes:

No one has ever been able to bear the preaching of the gospel. They will either turn against it with a fierceness of an animal or they will be converted.

Speaking about the response to some methods of Evangelism:

“What? God loves me? Well, that’s great because I love me, too. Oh, this is wonderful. And God’s got a wonderful plan? I got a wonderful plan for my life, too. And if I accept him into my life I’ll have my best life now. This is absolutely wonderful.”

My dear friend, everybody wants to go to heaven. They just don’t want God to be there when they get there.

Because the preaching of the gospel is so low, the church is basically… the majority of it are carnal lost people and because it is a democracy they by and large govern the direction of the church. And because the pastor doesn’t want to lose the great number of people and because he has wrong ideas regarding evangelism and true conversion, he caters to the wicked in his church and his little group of true sheep that belong to Jesus Christ are sitting there in the midst of all the theater, in the midst of all the worldliness, in the midst of all the multimedia going, “We just want to worship Jesus and we just want someone to teach us the Bible.” And pastors are going to pay for that.

You can download the message from sermonindex.net. There is a PDF transcription of it as well.  Curiously the message cuts off before the end.  If anyone who attended knows what else was said, feel free to comment here.

10/28/2008 Update: A low resolution video of this message is now available on Youtube and it includes the last few words that are missing on the audio version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_r-bGk8KG8

Most parts of Washington State look like the following photo during the month of October.

Scattered here and there however, you will find more traditional fall color like the photos below that I took while out walking today.

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Yes, it’s autumn, and a beautiful autumn it is turning out to be here in the Pacific Northwest.  But I was thinking about a different fall this morning.

I was thinking of what the remaining 31,040 verses in the Bible would look like if two verses in Genesis read differently:

6And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

7And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

We see the results of this choice through the rest of history and in our own lives.  The only question remaining is how will this decision made thousands of years ago affect our decisions today?

Open Office 3.0 is officially available today.

I wasn’t able to download it from the official site, because their servers were so slammed by traffic, however there is an alternative download at the University of Utah.

I was smiling when I read this on the Open Office website which is stripped of its usual graphic-laden appearance in an effort to keep it up and running:

Apologies – our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented
demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are
trying to come up with a solution.

Thank you for your patience.

One of my favorite aspects of running an onsite computer service business is meeting interesting people.

I’ve met:

• A retired lead design engineer of the Boeing 747
• A best-selling author who remembers voting for FDR!
• Someone who helped build Bill Gates’ house.
• Another individual who because of the weather, canceled a job interview with a startup called Microsoft about 30 years ago.
• A Christian comedian who I found very stuffy and boring.

…and so many more.  While I’m sitting there re-installing their camera driver or cleaning out the 100’s of spyware instances from visiting questionable websites, I get to hear all their stories.  It sure breaks up the boredom of firing up ccleaner for the 300th time!

Video games have always fascinated me, not because of the games themeselves, but because of their effect on the individual playing.  Here’s a video from TED that covers the topic illustrated by a video clip of someone who was born the same year I was.  (A side note: I rarely play video games because I feel the disadvantages from a spiritual, physical, and sociological view far outweigh the benefits.)

It looks like mankind has not given up on building a tower that reaches to “heaven”.  CNN has an interesting story.

‘Space elevator’ would take humans into orbit

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/10/02/space.elevator/index.html