Notes from the LifeGroup gathering:
Genesis 1:28 - be fruitful and multiply
The church doesn't want to split groups, but it wants them to split organically and naturally. The call this the BIRTH PLAN
John 14:12 - Believes and will do.
Ephesians 4:11-12
Equip the Saints for service
Matthew 28 - the Great Commission
Matthew 4:19
2 Timothy 2:2
Matthew 6:33
John 3:30
Acts 1:8
Pastor suggests the book
Hero Maker by Dave Ferguson
2025-0720
Matthew 14 - Why do you doubt?
Fourth watch, sometime between 3am and 6am
Psalm 46:1
Distazo
Distazo-
James 1:6
Isaiah 41:13
Concourse with Animaniacs
2025-0615
Colossenses 3:17-41
Agape
Ephesians 5
Dulos
1 Corinth 7:21
Eph 5:28
Rom 13 - submit to government authorities
1 John 4:19
Submission looks like respect and leadership looks like love.
The Evening After the Death of Pope Francis
my wife and I were making love,
our bodies warm in the decades
of knowing and touching,
our breathing soft, slow, and quickening -
her hand, relaxed and curled and tightening again
pulling me into rigidity,
when suddenly she said,
"Did the Pope die of old age or do you think Vance had something to do with it?"
And I replied,
"At this particular moment, I really don't care."
And we laughed and we laughed
and then we got down to bidness.
John Chapter 9
We were walking out of the Target near Fry Road and I-10. Judas didn't like shopping there because he said it's too expensive, but that's mainly because he like to keep skimming from the group fund. Thomas always said that he thought he could find better deals and better quality at TJ Maxx, but James had to have his Bustelo, and that was the only place that sold it.
Anyway, as we were walking toward the frontage road, we saw the homeless people camping there among the trees. They were panhandling at the corner, and so we were asking Jesus, "Hey, why should we give these guys money? Are they homeless because sometimes Life just happens, or because they were on drugs and made some bad choices along the way?
Bartholomew said we should see which ones were the Vets and help them and maybe not the others. "Ultimate sacrifice," he said, remembering something Jesus had been teaching us about friendship.
Jesus went to one blind guy. He said, "This man's homeless through no fault of his own. It also wasn't the fault of having bad parents. This happened so that the works of God can be demonstrated through him."
We asked Jesus what He meant by that. He said, "I'm only going to be here a short while longer. You guys need to do this work with me. As long as the sun shines, we have to do the work of God. There will be a time when the opportunity is gone. As Andrew likes to say from his favorite show, 'Winter is coming'"
The scant trees in this section by Fry and frontage road has a depression to catch overflow of rainwater. Jesus walked down to the damp area, scooped up some mud, spit on it, rubbed it in his hands, and then walked back to the blind man with the goop in His hands and while James and John propped the guy up, Jesus rubbed the mixture into each eye.
We all kinda stood around, wondering what was going on. Surely that couldn't be sanitary. At least, that's what I was thinking. Don't know what the others were thinking.
He waited for about an hour or so. The cars were driving by the entire time, most everyone slowing down to look at what we were doing with this homeless guy. If they thought we were doing him any harm, no one ever stopped to check. They just stared as they passed by.
Eventually, the mud dried and began to crack, and scales of it began to fall off, like dried limestone shale that gets brittle and breaks. The homeless guy raised his hands to his face to peel the rest off and his eyes were red and puffy but he started blinking furiously, and then covered his face from the light of the sun.
"I CAN SEE!" he shouted. He shouted so loud that I thought they could hear him all the way at the PetSmart.
Jesus told the man, "Go and wash in the baptismal pool at the Second Baptist Church building. There, the healing will be complete."
The man got up and ran off. Interestingly enough, he knew the direction to the church. I had the sneaking suspicion that he was wandered there a couple of times looking for assistance. I wonder what they would say now.
We looked at the rest of the homeless with new eyes that day. I realized that even all those times I'd gone on church outings to give them clothes and sandwiches, that I always wondered what they had done to get themselves into their situation. I realized today that it was not my place to wonder. Not my place to ask such questions. Not my place to judge.
The scales had fallen off my eyes that day.
Thank God. Before it was too late for me.
LIFEGROUP
2025-0224
Sermon DON’T COME DOWN SERIES
2023-0223 – Nehemiah Chapter 3
Anything worth doing is more difficult thank you think … especially when you are doing something for the Lord. Biggest challenge is not the obstacles themselves, but the desire to give up.
Pastor’s example: Hammer on toe – pain, wait for Heaven
MEAH – Hundred
KOZ – HAKOZ
32 verses in chapter 3 of Nehemiah. Not all of the workers on the wall were from Jerusalem. Some were people outside the city, outside the country, in fact.
God included this on purpose – all the people listed as helping to rebuild the Jerusalem wall.
When we get together and live for Him, God will give us what we need
When we live for the Lord, He makes use of our brokenness.
92-144 years after the destruction of Jerusalem, Nehemiah was rebuilding the wall – they had to hurry, there was a time constraint, because people did not want the wall rebuilt.
Today, modern day, Temple Mount: 32 acres in total. Temple was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. Luke 21:6
Nehemiah – when he first came to survey the job site, he took three days to assess the issue. He rode his horse around the rubble – Ch 2:14 – horse could not get through. City in ruins. The ruins became the building blocks for the repair.
NOTE: during an excavation, Nehemiah’s wall was found. The photo of the wall, filled with pebbles and broken stones, stands in stark contrast to the perfectly cut blocks that are in the current wall.
Isaiah 22:10 – Broke down the houses to fortify the wall. <= prophesy? Written before the event? (Isaiah was writing before Nehemiah was born) … some believe the book was written by various people throughout history.
God used the rubble to bring city to Glory. If God can use that, He can use YOUR brokenness to build something beautiful.
Examples of broken people used by God:
1) Job
2) Moses
3) Rahab
4) Samson
5) David
6) Peter
7) Paul
When you work for the Lord, He will use it for His glory.
Point 2: When you live for the Lord, not task is beneath us.
The rebuilt wall not just skilled labor. Everybody helped. Even the High Priest helped.
V5 Neh calls out the Tekoites. They helped (but not their rich people)
Matthew Ch 20: Disciples asking who is going to be first in Heaven.
Jesus Matthew 20:26 – Whoever wants to be great must become a servant.
Point 3 – Glorious to live for the Lord – we are involved in something bigger than ourselves.
The way God gets things done is to use other people.
Neh 3:7 Gideon and Mispath North of Jerusalem
God used goldsmiths and perfumers to work on the wall
Ch 9 – Ruler of half of Jerusalem helped. His daughters helped too (v12)
Paul 1 Corinth 12 – Body of Christ. 12:20-27
She said, “If any member is honored, the whole body rejoices”
We want more people to know Jesus
Truth Matters: Confident Faith in a Confusing World
Andrea Kostenberger, Darrell Bock, & Josh Chatraw
(c) 2014
B&H Publishing Group, Nashville TN
The premise reminds me of he first God is Not Dead Movie, in that this book is geared toward the young student entering college, who has been woefully unprepared for the rhetoric and mind-opening discourse they are about to encounter. While the book aims at "arming" the student with better defenses against the arguments against Christian Faith, it also admits that our churches and our parenting has done a piss-poor job of raising people with any sort of true knowledge of Christ or Scripture.
Which one could argue, is the greatest problem with Christianity today: too much Sunday School Elementary-level Bible Stories for children and very little by way of true edification in the tenets of our Faith tradition.
I found the book quite helpful, and I'll highlight some of the passages that I liked, but it's best to start with the biggest critique of the book, which is that it seems to focus too much on one man, Bart Ehrman. This professor was apparently raised in the Christian faith but left as a young man when he could not find valid answers to the apparent contradictions among different parts of the Scripture (again, a most evident demonstration of the late 20th Century's lack of coherent and logical apologetics)
Basically, this book is a direct refutation of every book Ehrman has written, which weakens the argument as a book of apologetics when it seems so petty. It's as though these three authors all took one of Ehrman's classes and got resoundingly slapped (rhetorically) by the professor.
That said, some of the passages that seem interesting are as follows:
p 13 Paul writing that, at the time of his writing the First Letter to the Corinthians, there were still at least 500 living witnesses to Jesus's earthly ministry. Basically, Paul was saying, "You can still go check original sources." (I make a note of this, as this ties into a literary WIP I've been toying with)
p19 A quote from Tim Keller "The Reason for God" (2008) - a book I need to check out
"Just because you can';t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn't mean that there can't be one. Again we see lurking within this supposed hard-nosed skepticism an enormous faith in one's own cognitive faculties. If our minds can't plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then, there can't be any! This is blind faith of a high order."
p34 Root Issues
"Most of people's doubts about God in relation to suffering stem from two taproots:
1) a refusal to see God as having divine rights over His creation, and
2) a minimization of the extent of human rebellion against our Creator."
This is a hard pill to swallow for most.
p113 is a section of the book in which the authors do concede that there are no original hand-written documents by the original Apostles, and they show where Ehrman uses this to cast doubt on all New Testament scripture, albeit stating that "perhaps" his agnosticism could be mollified if there were, say, an original manuscript by Mark which was 99.999999% close to the texts that we do have. The authors make a good point that papyri do wear out. However, they take much time to demonstrate how meticulous were the Old Testament scribes that they maintained a high level of authenticity; they also show how such scrutiny by the skeptics is not applied to other texts of the contemporary times (although this is a False Equivalence - other texts do not claim to be THE WORD OF GOD)
I wish that the authors would have taken a moment to insist that the Holy Spirit, the third part of the Triune God, if we teach ourselves that such God inspired and guided the scriptures, then the Holy Spirit can move these texts as God desires, throughout all the transcribing, and that our Bible is not the actual original ink on some papyrus, but the Word as it is spoken to humanity and accepted by the individual.
[that's a note for a future essay on the subject]
p 138 - is in a section that makes a fair point that while most skeptics think the OT was written in the 5th or 6th Centuries, that the original Gospels and Epistles were written in the 1st century, only a generation or so after Jesus's Death, Resurrection, and Ascension.
p150 "AD 33- Jesus dies and rises from the dead. No later than AD 35, Paul is converted and adopts the church's exalted Christology and teaching on salvation."
[NOTE: I really need to delve more into that timeline, because that does seem a bit too soon in the timeline for those events to occur. However, I am no expert - this warrants more study on my part]
p 180 - from the Notes ... Ch 2 Note 8. Alvin Plantinga "A Christian Life Partly Lived" in Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997), 72
Alister E McGrath,
Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2012), 166-67
How does the Church look today?
The Church is supposed to look like Christ,
but if we are to be honest,
it looks more like Satan.
The Church today
roars like a lion -
hunting meat -
eating without ceasing -
ravenous, raving.
It searches for those whom
it can destroy, the Church
yells and rages in the streets,
it turns people into hunters of each other
The Church today covers itself in
rich clothing, gold, diamonds, dripping with jewels
but if can't cover the stench of
bile in its wretched mouth,
or the venomous pus in its clouded eyes.
2024-0915
Galatians 1:1-9
First of the 13 letters written by the Apostle Paul
Laundromat Preacher - this was the most fun, because people couldn't just walk away and leave their laundry. He said it was especially fun when they got someone who had just put the quarters in and HA! they're there for another 45 minutes!
Spring Break Preacher - When asking the question, "If you died today do you know where you would go?" and the partyer would say, "Give me 5 bucks so I can get another drink and I'll answer your question"
Isaiah 64:6 - we are all unclean rags.
NOTE: read the verse - could be made into a song.
Acts Ch 13:38-39 is Paul AT Galatia
2 Peter 3:15-16 - Peter writes that people twist the scriptures (this goes along with what we are studying in Revelation in our Bible Study Group) ... this passage also shows Peter elevating Paul's epistles to the lvel of Old Testament Scripture
Galatians 1:3-5 should be memorized as a creed. Call it the "Galatian Creed"
At Church, the Praise Team has a sign language translator at one side of the stage, signing the lyrics of each song as the band plays.
In between the second and third song, the translator reached down and took a drink from a water bottle.
I said to my wife, "Signing must be thirsty work!"
My wife ... was not amused.
The Greatest Army
The greatest army we ever faced? Strangely enough, it was the army that never came at us with guns or tanks or planes or bombs. They came at us, babbling about their Savior, and how we needed to stop our killing and learn to love and live in peace.
We killed 'em. Sure, we killed 'em. By the dozens. By the hundreds, but they kept coming.
That was the weird thing. They kept coming. Never stopped going on and on about their Savior.
Eventually, though, we did kill them all. At least, we thought we did. You see, they stopped coming, so we thought that was the end of it. But of all the armies we'd ever gone up against, this was the one we couldn't forget. Couldn't get it out of our minds - these crazy soldiers, always going on about their Savior.
Some of us even starting proclaiming this Savior. Just a few at first, and then a handful more, and then more.
So, you see, it's almost as though, in the end, they won. They were the greatest army we ever faced.
Just read an article by a man trying to spin Leviticus 14:33
Saying that to be kind to the foreigner was meant only to be kind to the "Ger" which is a foreigner who had specifically asked permission to be in the lands.
This is an attempt to apply it to modern-day America and his argument is that Liberals are trying to use the Scripture to justify open borders.
OK, on that second point, he is using a Strawman logical fallacy: stating that the Liberal use of scripture is promoting some sort of extreme existential threat. This is simply a lie. By adding that to his essay, one would easily be able to dismiss the rest of the essay by recognizing that the argument being made is in bad faith and with spurious intent.
However, let's give a bit of credence to the main argument, simply for arguments' sake:
He said that the kindness is only to be extended to the people who had asked for permission to be in the lands.
Immigrants on the southern border turn themselves into Border Patrol asking for asylum. They are the modern equivalent of asking to stay in our land.
Additionally, the majority of "illegals" have simply overstayed their visa. They, too, have asked to stay in our land.
A case can be made that the majority of immigrants to the USA have asked to stay in our lands.
Therefore, they fit into the definition of "ger" as the writer of the essay has stated.
NOTES for Deacon
Romans 12:4-8
1Corinthians 12:4-11
Colossians 3:23
Sunday Morning Sermon Notes
I Thessalonians Chapter 2
Jeremiah 23 - wood blech hammer [sp??]
2nd Ministry Journey
Trade route - in three weeks Paul established a church and then was run out of town in the middle of the night.
Psalm 119:97-98
1 Thessalonians 1:6-7
wrote one year after he had left Thessalonica
...
2 Corinthians 9:7
Acts 20:35
Everyone saying that the "Universe has a plan" is really talking about God.
But saying "The Universe" is something that every one KNOWS to be true, and yet still imbue it with a sense that somehow we are loved, cared for, thought about, and special.
But the people who imbue the Universe with these qualities have been cowed by a world that doesn't want them to talk about God, and so they move these needed qualities onto the created (universe) and off the Creator (God).
Full culpability for this, however, must not be given to the world, or the non-believers, but upon Christians themselves, who have either abused the name of Christ for their own selfish ends, or through their complacency have not presented their testimony sufficiently to demonstrate that God is the One who loves you, cares for you, thinks about you, and holds you so very, very special.
NOTES from the Sunday Sermon
"Anger is never an acceptable response from someone who serves the Lord"
AIRAOS
Pastor dice
Interrupción es orgullo
Produca
Conflicto
y aumenta más conflicto
#hopscotch
#poem
MR
2024-0204
The sun goes down on your anger
Ayúdame, Señor
interrupción es orgullo
James 1:19
Dad had always
followed a convoluted path:
swift to hear
slow to speak
but he was not so slow to wrath.
#hopscotch
#Poem
#poetry
MR
2024-0204
James 1:12
My brother said
that he had earned the Crown of Life
he endured
temptation
His prize blessing? A loving wife!
#hopscotch
#poem
#poetry
MR
2024-0204
SERMON NOTES
... The Three Wise Men Go to Buc-EE's <= story title
MORE NOTES
Mateo 2:1-5
Mateo 2: 8-12
Números 24:7
Belen Efretah, small city
Charlie Dyer
Agrada
Maranatha
Nahum 3:12
Teláspora
written 2023-1203, but the poem genesis was on 2023-1202
Julie suffers her third seizure
in the two months since
the operation
to remove half the brain tumor
The brothers at the Kingdom Hall
are strangely silent, but
her aunt prays fervently
for healing
to the name
of a baby
born this month,
born to die.
Dr Pentecost dice: Hay preguntas para aprender, y hay preguntas para enseñar
Christian women will say that they want their husband to be "Head of the Household" as in, be the leader, make the decisions, etc.
but what they really mean is that they want the man to make the decisions that the woman wants made BEFORE she even knows she wants them.
I think probably one of the toughest things about trying to be a good Christian husband and father, if I am going to be honest, is the constant pressure of "Wow, not only do I need to keep a roof over their heads and the lights on, but I also have to worry about where their immortal souls are going to spend eternity?"
I mean, when you really think about it, that's a LOT of pressure.
