I read this today:

When the LORD saw that man’s wickedness was wide spread on the earth and that every scheme his mind thought of was nothing but evil all the time, the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. Then the LORD said, ‘I will wipe off the face of the earth: man, whom I created, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky–for I regret that I made them.’ Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD.”
-HISB

I wonder what history would look like if this cataclysmic event hadn’t occurred.

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?

Yesterday, I started a new blog, and I thought I would document all the technical details of setting it up, partly for my own future reference and partly to help out others who want to go all out and do this thing properly.

This step-by-step is for the Wordpress blogging platform:

1. Register a domain name and sign up with a web host. I currently use Lunarpages. They have great hosting plans at very competitive rates with good technical support when you need it.
2. Install Wordpress.  You may need to download it from wordpress.org.  If you are using Lunarpages, they have a simple click through installation using Fantastico.
3. Explore the thousands of Wordpress Themes available and pick one you like.  A good place to start is the Wordpress site.
4. Download the theme, unzip it, and upload it via FTP to your “blogdomain/wp-content/themes” directory. For FTP, I use the FireFTP plugin in combination with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.
5. Now comes the fun part, customizing your Wordpress installation.  For a detailed look at what all you can do to customize everything from timestamps to maximum comment links, check out the Wordpress Codex, Blog and Forums.
6. Something else you’ll want to look into are plugins. There are way too many of these all waiting for you to bloat your blog with them. Here are the ones I use regularly and find very useful:
   1. Akismet spam blocker. This does an excellent job of keeping comment spam at bay.
   2. Google Analytics for Wordpress. A best-of-breed website statistics suite. You’ll need a Google Account.
   3. Wordpress Stats. For when you just want to see simple statistics in a very elegant way. I actually prefer using this over Google’s most of the time. You’ll need a Wordpress.com account.
   4. Google sitemap generator.  This tells the “big three” search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) how to list your website in their search results.
   5. All-in-one SEO Pack.  Used in conjunction with Google’s keyword tool, you can drive more search engine users to your website with carefully crafted page titles, meta tags, keyword rich content etc. This is just one tool in a Search Engine Optimizer’s toolkit of wizardry.  It works quite well.
7. One last step I usually take is publishing a feed using the Feedburner service.  This gives you detailed statistics on who has subscribed to your blog with a feed reader of their choice (example: Google Reader) or via their email.  There are many more features to this service, but statistics is what I mainly use it for.
8. Once your blog is set up, you can start posting about whatever fires you up to start writing or linking, or embedding media from other websites.  I may write more about this last process in a future post.

I listened in on this morning’s message at Ephrata Christian Fellowship. Mose Stoltzfus used the following example to show how we as Christians can live at times if we do not accept the all sufficiency of Christ for our lives.

Homer and Langley Collyer were sons of a respected New York doctor. Both had earned college degrees. In fact, Homer had studied at Columbia University to become an attorney. When old Dr. Collyer died in the early part of this century, his sons inherited the family home and estate. The two men—both bachelors—were now financially secure. But the Collyer brothers chose a peculiar lifestyle not at all consistent with the material status their inheritance gave them. They lived in almost total seclusion. They boarded up the windows of their house and padlocked the doors. All their utilities—including water—were shut off. No one was ever seen coming or going from the house. From the outside it appeared empty. Though the Collyer family had been quite prominent, almost no one in New York society remembered Homer and Langley Collyer by the time World War II ended. On March 21, 1947, police received an anonymous telephone tip that a man had died inside the boarded-up house. Unable to force their way in through the front door, they entered the house through a second-story window. Inside they found Homer Collyer’s corpse on a bed. He had died clutching the February 22, 1920 issue of the Jewish Morning Journal, though he had been totally blind for years. This macabre scene was set against an equally grotesque backdrop. It seems the brothers were collectors. They collected everything—especially junk. Their house was crammed full of broken machinery, auto parts, boxes, appliances, folding chairs, musical instruments, rags, assorted odds and ends, and bundles of old newspapers. Virtually all of it was worthless. An enormous mountain of debris blocked the front door; investigators were forced to continue using the upstairs window for weeks while excavators worked to clear a path to the door.
Nearly three weeks later, as workmen were still hauling heaps of refuse away, someone made a grisly discovery. Langley Collyer’s body was buried beneath a pile of rubbish some six feet away from where Homer had died. He had been crushed to death in a crude booby trap he had built to protect his precious collection from intruders.
The garbage eventually removed from the Collyer house totaled more than 140 tons. No one ever learned why the brothers were stockpiling their pathetic treasure, except an old friend of the family recalled that Langley once said he was saving newspapers so Homer could catch up on his reading if he ever regained his sight. Homer and Langley Collyer make a sad but fitting parable of the way many people in the church live. Although the Collyers’ inheritance was sufficient for all their needs, they lived their lives in unnecessary, self-imposed deprivation. Neglecting abundant resources that were rightfully theirs to enjoy, Homer and Langley instead turned their home into a squalid dump. Spurning their father’s sumptuous legacy, they binged instead on the scraps of the world. Too many Christians live their spiritual lives that way. Disregarding the bountiful riches of an inheritance that cannot be defiled (1 Pet. 1:4), they scour the wreckage of worldly wisdom, collecting litter. As if the riches of God’s grace (Eph. 1:7) were not enough, as if “everything pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3) were not sufficient, they try to supplement the resources that are theirs in Christ. They spend their lives pointlessly accumulating sensational experiences, novel teachings, clever gurus, or whatever else they can find to add to their hoard of spiritual experiences. Practically all of it is utterly worthless. Yet some people pack themselves so full of these diversions that they can’t find the door to the truth that would set them free. They forfeit treasure for trash.

I’ve been using some new Bible study software called Bible Desktop. It is written in Java, which for you non-techies simply means it can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux with a few minor differences in the way it works on each. For Bibles, dictionaries, commentaries, glossaries, etc., it uses modules from the Sword project, which means you have a whole library of books to choose from and which download and install easily from within the interface.

Some of the features I really like:

1. The user interface consists of one pane with fluidly resizeable  internal panes that contain the Bible on the left with a right sidebar containing a list of study helps that you’ve downloaded, an index of whatever resource you’ve selected, and of course the text of that resource.
2. The search feature, once the resource has been indexed is lightning fast.
3. In the English KJV version of the Bible, there are multiple “layers” you can turn on and off, such as linked Strong’s numbers, so while you are studying, you can just click on the number beside a word and the full text from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance shows up in the sidebar. I was never one to, out of curiosity, go look up a word in that behemoth of a book in our family library. This allows me to do just that in a fraction of a second. I have been amazed at the different meanings behind identical English words that in Greek or Hebrew have very different meanings. In English I have often had to stare at the text numbly for a second, scratching my head, and finally figuring out the meaning, by looking at the context around that particular difficult word. Needless to say, I love this feature!
4. There are many other features that are great too such as changing the font and size of the text, determining whether you want to line break on verses or paragraphs, tabbed view of open Bibles, a daily reading schedule and more.
5. The best one is the fact that this resource is free!

And you’ve gotta love the logo:

Sitting here in the Harrisburg International airport waiting for my flight home, I’ve been thinking back over the week at Charity Youth Bible School and wondering what aspects of it I should write about. Spiritually, it has been close to, if not the most challenging week of my life. I studied the Bible along with 569 other students in amazing depth and sincerity through over 20 hours of life changing preaching and hours of prayer and small group sharing. One of the most encouraging aspects of the experience was to meet so many other Christian youth who are passionate about Jesus Christ and His work in their lives, churches and mission outreaches.

I don’t plan to write a whole lot about the details, though I will be sharing these with my home church and friends. The messages that were preached are available to listen to from Charity Gospel Tape Ministry’s website HERE.

If you are a young person and you get the opportunity, I would highly recommend going next year!

“Whatever happens, as citizens of heaven live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then, whether I come and see you or only hear about you in my absence, I will know that you stand firm in the one Spirit, striving together with one accord for the faith of the gospel.”  – Philippians 1:27 TNIV

I just read this verse along with many others that spoke to me from the book of Philippians.

After watching a well-crafted film, the first thing I usually do is to find the “making of” video. I find it fascinating to hear the director being interviewed and learn exactly why that one shot was the way it was, to see the world, real or imagined (but preferably real) through the eyes of the director.

That’s the feeling I get after reading any one of Paul’s epistles. I’d love to hit the menu button and view the “making of” clip for Philippians, or better yet, be the one interviewing him, so I could ask the questions!

I wonder what the Christian church would be like if God had not arrested this zealous individual on that long dusty road to Damascus. Think for just a moment of the doctrines and practices that we take for granted thanks to Paul’s obedience and willingness to be the spokesman, the scribe for God as the early church ironed out the wrinkles of the Christian experience.

After a good discussion about our scripture memorization program at church, I thought I’d jot down some notes about the subject.

I have never been good at memorizing exact quotes.  I love to paraphrase an idea or saying, so I can understand it better in “my own language”.  However there is a definite advantage in memorizing Bible passages word for word.  We can share God’s Word with others even if we don’t have a Bible in our hands, we can be encouraged in our own daily lives as we meditate on the verses we’ve learned, we can refute Satan’s lies with scriptures that come to mind, and we can allow the words from the Bible to impact our day to day decisions and responses to life.  

So how do we go about it, is there an age level advantage, and how do we stay motivated?  Rather than write out a detailed work on the topic, I decided to just provide links to some websites that I have found helpful in my own scripture memorization endeavors.

Here they are:

http://www.memoryverses.org/

http://scripturememorychallenge.org/

http://www.scriptureverses.org/

This e-book in particular (http://www.memoryverses.org/how1.htm), I found to be very helpful.  I strongly recommend it.  It is very detailed and insightful.

(By the way, feel free to comment… How do you go about memorizing scripture?  Any ideas you’ve found helpful?)

And a final thought about Bible memory that has helped me…  Just Do It!

If you have 58 or so minutes to spare from your busy life, watch this video preached at a youth conference by Paul Washer. As a disclaimer, I don’t know him, however the message he proclaims is excellent.

I am in the process of listening to the audio recordings from Youth Bible School 2006 in Ephrata, PA. Very challenging messages from the various speakers: Ross Ulrich, Dale Gish, Dean Taylor (editor of The Remnant magazine), Jerry Mawhorr, Patrick Waldner (Manitoba, Canada), and David Cooper. I have been greatly influenced to examine my own personal beliefs on the various subjects that were touched on, especially the messages about Nonconformity to the World. I think I have been influenced by the world’s hopes, aspirations, and ideologies more than I would like to admit. Lots of homework to do. You can download the individual messages or order the MP3 CD containing all the messages + youth testimonies at http://charityministries.org/tapeministry/detail.cfm?index=MYBS06