The comment circus update

I am going to be compiling the comments from Saturday's Comment Circus
into a report later this week. If you haven't commented yet, sign up
and give us some insights. I have been encouraged by the remarks.
Thanks for your wonderful words!

Comment Circus

I’m a great listener. You may not know this because I seem to do all the talking here at Sumballo, but I want to listen today.

I want comments. More than that, I want to hear your heart. So here’s the deal. I’m going to ask a simple question. I want a one-sentence answer from you. Now it is a challenge sometimes to land that airplane in one sentence and I don’t care if you use comma splices and semicolons (after all, Paul could stretch a sentence over a couple of hours) but try to hold your answer to one sentence.

I’m very curious to see how many comments we can gather, mostly because I want to hear your thoughts. Here’s an incentive: if we get more than 15 comments, I promise NOT to e-mail each of you an extra barn kitten. (we have plenty....) However, if we miss our goal, be very careful opening attachments with a .cat extension.

Invite your friends to come over. I’d like to compile these into a Sumballo article soon, so the more, the merrier.

Here’s the question: For you, why follow Jesus?

Post your comments. (and post your blog address so I can visit). I’m going to post mine soon. And I’m anxious to listen for a little while.

Friday Five: Servant

Five comments on a servant:

It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. Mt. 10:25

Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will proclaim justice to the nations. Mt. 12:18

No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. Lk 16:13

At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, 'Come, for everything is now ready.' Lk 14:17

But made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. Phil 2:7

And a few servants:

Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God's truth, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs. Romans 15:8

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God- Romans 1:1

Moses was faithful as a servant in all God's house, testifying to what would be said in the future. Heb. 3:5

James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. James 1:1

Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, 2 Peter 1:1

Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, Jude 1:1

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, Rev 1:1

Guarding the temple

Jack’s background didn’t hinder him much anymore because he’d found God. Well, it wasn’t an awful background anyway because he’d found God as a boy and really hadn’t done much wrong before that. You know, kids will be kids.

He’d gone through the ranks at his church. He’d written a spiritual resume once, just out of curiosity. He had done nearly every job in the church and knew his spiritual gifts, because he’d done the questionnaire in Sunday school.

His witnessing plan was to let his light shine. He had no moral issues. His youthful longings were behind him now. He didn’t even speed, so that his values could witness to the state patrol as he drove by.

When the committee was formed to clarify worship rules, Jack was there. He did not want to sanctuary desecrated. The rules – er, guidelines – were printed in the bulletin so there would be no misunderstandings.

· No loud noises in the sanctuary.

· No food or drinks. (He scowled when his daughter Sarah asked whether communion counted or not.)

· No magazine reading during the sermon.

· Babies crying longer than 45 seconds needed to be taken out.

· No talking during the hymns.

· The offering must be in an envelope, to preserve privacy.

· Kids must not be in the sanctuary without an adult present.

· Adults were defined as over 21.

· Teenagers must not question their fathers on bulletin rules.

Actually, Jack didn’t put that last one in but Sarah kept pestering him about the biblical basis for his rules, er, guidelines - and he didn’t have time to look up any verses. He was busy crafting the rules – er, guidelines. Besides, he didn’t know where to look. What, Leviticus?

Jack was frustrated when attendance at church began to slide. What was with people’s priorities anyway? You have to make sacrifices. He had, after all.

Sarah had come back from a youth conference and asked him how close he felt to God. He e-mailed her his church resume to illustrate. When she asked him the last time he’d talked to an unbeliever, he sent her the bulletin rules – er, guidelines. She just didn’t get it. Neither did unbelievers, for that matter. Once they got their priorities right, they’d be in church and needed those rules – er, guidelines.

A Pharisee: devout, moral, value-centered, above and beyond the law.

John Newton said, “The closer you get to God, the harder you are on yourself and easy on other people. The farther you are from God, the easier you are on self and harder on others.”

Jesus told a parable about “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” (Luke 18:9)

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Luke 18:14

Turning back

I once sat in a Sunday school class where one woman fretted. “What should I say to these teenagers who are wearing a cross when I know they aren’t believers?”

There was an uneasy rustling as the others worried. They should confront but didn’t want to.

You know what I think Jesus would have said to that teenager? I think he’d have said something like, “Tell me about that cross you’re wearing. Why do you wear it? What does it mean to you?”

And I think he’d have eventually turned the conversation around: “Let me tell you what it means to me.”

I think he’d have used that cross as a tool to interact with the person, hear their heart and show them truth, like he did with the Samaritan woman at the well and so many others. He loved them and interacted in ways they could understand.

Churchianity wants to protect the cross as a symbol of their pure beliefs. We need the cross on our churches, on our neck, on our cars. It is a symbol of our separateness.

If you don’t regularly read A Small Scribble, you need to read the last couple of posts. Kate is tackling a topic that gets me raving. I call it “churchianity.”

What’s being discussed at Kate’s site is how many in the church today disdain the arts unless images are in familiar, comfortable modes. Do you have a nightlight with an angel on it? Do you have your plastic nativity scene? Do you have a fish on your bumper?

The discussion at Kate’s site asks how we interact with art that doesn’t have a cross or a glowing angel but explores new ways to communicate God’s truths. While those in the church are polishing their church symbols, a world outside is dying without wrestling with God. The church looks irrelevant with its old-fashioned secret language and obscure signs.

What have we done? In our rush to protect our purity and our separateness, we have morphed into mediocrity. Christian movies are usually corny. Christian literature is usually predictable and patterned after the hot-selling secular stuff. Christian art usually has symbols, not ideas.

I tend to identify myself as a follower of Jesus because even the word “Christian” speaks of legalistic mediocrity to today’s culture. What have we done?

How do we turn back?

Kate has some wonderful links at her site. I’d like to compile those and more. If you know authors, artists, movies, whatever that rise above the modern day Christian fluff, would you get those to me? I want to put a list on the sidebar, a place where we can all check out artists going deeper.

E-mail me (see my link at the top of the right hand column) or leave a comment with names and/or links.

This is an important issue for us as followers of Jesus. We have been commanded to go into the world and we must speak a language the world can grasp.

Dive In: Textual Error?

Someone just handed you a sheet of paper with 10 sentences on it. Here’s the first:

The flowers are red and blooming in my front lard.

Here’s the second:

The flowers are fed and blooming in my front yard.

And the third:

Rhe flowers are red and blooming in my front yard.

Do you think you could come up with the correct sentence even though every one of the 10 sentences was different? I'm think this is easy pie.

We rest our defense of God on his errant, inspired Word, so you should be aware of arguments that may be thrown in your face:

• We do not have any original texts of biblical writings.
• Many of the copies of the original texts have mistakes.

Both of those statements are true. However, we have roughly 5000 copies of the original texts. That’s bushel baskets more than any other historical writing. Scholars would love to have five copies of some of the ancient Greek poems.

Let’s go back to our example at the beginning. The mistakes in the biblical copies are those kinds of mistakes. The original texts were copied by scholars who used scrupulous methods. One technique had a teacher to read a text to 10 or 20 scribes. Their job was to write down exactly what he said. They provided a safeguard for his possible slip of tongue plus they could compare with each other.

They worked very hard to get every mark exactly right, but sometimes “typos” happened. A letter was forgotten or two words run together. Maybe a scribe did what we sometimes do. Ever quoted a Bible verse and added “The Lord Jesus Christ” when that particular verse said, “The Lord”? Those kinds of errors happened, too. A scribe may have added a phrase from common usage, even if it wasn’t in that particular verse. He may have forgotten a mark that changed a letter.

The discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls underlined the overall accuracy of the copy system. Many very early copies were discovered. The closer the copy is to the original text, the more accurate it is assumed to be. So biblical scholars were anxious to compare more recent copies to the old copies discovered with the Dead Sea collection. What they discovered were that very few mistakes had been made.

The newer texts were extremely accurate, and many of the errors were of the sort we’ve discussed – easily recognized and understandable.

I’m discussing the area of textual criticism. (Don't think of criticism as disapproval but as serious examination of a subject.) There are many resources available but one I’d recommend is James White’s The King James Controversy. It has several excellent chapters that explain textual criticism in non-scholastic terms.

This is an important area for us as we dive in to the text, because many bash the Bible as error-filled. Although written texts can have errors, the ideas contained there are inerrant. Today, a typo in a Bible does not diminish its value as the inspired word of God and the same principle applies to the texts carried forward over the centuries.

God’s Word is not limited by ink and frail human hands, but has been protected from ancient times to today. We can trust His Word and can defend it against charges of error.

If you comment on today’s lesson on your blog, would you link to it below? We’d all enjoy gaining your insights and/or questions on the subject.

The wind of prayer

Ours is a different love story. He was a widower with four children and I was a long-time career gal. We had known each other for several years through our church. I’d worked on committees with his wife. We’d been in Bible studies together and I’d taught his kids in Sunday school. After his wife's tragic death in a car accident, we discovered we shared many values and we wanted to sail to the same destination.

For quite a while, I’d sometimes wake up in the morning and think, I’m married to him? Always before, he had been someone’s husband.

We came home from our honeymoon to four children, ages 4 to 15. Keep in mind that I had left single life – and my house – behind while he had suffered the loss of his wife in a tragic car accident. Then, three months later, I got pregnant. Shortly after that, the older kids decided it wasn’t all that fun to have a step-mother and could we just unwind everything? Sometimes it felt like a blizzard of emotions.

The teenager was testing her wings while the youngest just wanted a mommy and I would do, even if I didn’t have any training. I quit my job so I could be home with him and learn how to be a mommy before the baby came. Hormones were like wind to my sails, tossing me on the waves.

We survived that first year of marriage. I’ll tell you why. God brought us together and covered us with the prayers of our friends and family. I have never been as clear on God’s leading as I was in accepting Matt’s proposal. And, when things got hard and I didn’t understand, I clung to that word from God, his answer to my specific prayers.

We knew that our church family prayed for us daily. Those prayers were like a gentle breeze correcting our ship day to day. The winds of conflict were intense but not as regular as the daily breath of communion with God.

Lessons we learned? Pray in marriage and pray for marriages. Matt insisted we prayed before he left for work and before we fell asleep at night. I suspect that when we earnestly pray, we are less willing to let go.

We celebrated 17 years of marriage in May. We're still sailing to the same destination. We still start and end each day in prayer and we still ask God to make this a union of three. And we know that he is faithful.

He has taken me to the banquet hall,
and his banner over me is love.

Song 2:4 (NIV)