Luke 20 presents the final moments of conflict between Jesus and the Jewish religious authorities, ending with the Lord's warning to his disciples against the scribes' greed.
Click on the tiny link above for the article. Worth your time, even if I did write it. ;-)
For those interested in sending help, the Park Avenue church in Memphis is receiving funds for Japan. The link and a report of the brethren’s safety is now up on BNc. We give thanks, but risks are still great, so we continue to pray for them.
UPDATE: The direct link to the Japan disaster relief page at Park Avenue is HERE.
With his experience, Eduardo’s getting the huge burden of paperwork in order and has already managed to secure the donation of a new Volkswagen van from a car dealership.
New horizons for the Lar Cristão Children's Home. Check the link above.
Realize that you don’t have to make your own mistakes just for the sake of learning.
The saw that there's no teacher like experience must have been made by a libertine.
I have learned that contracts are not for dishonest people. Contracts are to preserve and protect agreements made by dead people and forgetful people.
If you're forgetful and need to write things down, it ought to be the same for people who make agreements between them. Very good article by Barber. Click above and read the whole article.
We tend to think that spirituality means escaping the concern with detail. Spiritual people, we think, live simple lives. They don’t worry about mortgages and dentist appointments and going to church committee meetings. They wear sandals, meditate and feed the birds. But that is not the biblical understanding of spirituality. According to the Bible, the obstacle to our spirituality is not that we pay attention to the details of life, but that we pay too much attention to the wrong details.
See the link above for suggestions on details that Jesus didn't worry about. Do you agree?
Few skyscrapers in the United States can withstand a 9.0 earthquake — should we stop making tall buildings? The lesson here just might be that the earthquake proved the system worked, not that it failed.
Calm is the need of the moment, cool heads should prevail.
The most important lesson from the Japan earthquake is that there are no lessons for human behaviour; and over the next few days it is vital that we watch out for the preachers and the moralisers who will try to use it to further their campaigns.
None? What a sweeping generalization! How about that we are small in this world, subject to forces beyond our control or imagination, prone to suffer in the cataclysms of this earthly life, which ought to lead us to call upon the God who controls all and place our trust, our lives, and our future in him.
Yes, people have always misused the tragedies of life to make a buck or a misguided point, create a following or their own social, political or religious upheaval. But there is still much we can learn when the harsh realities of physical life interrupt our frenetic rush for the material.
Tragedy tends to bring opportunity, opportunity most often met with physical provision. Will we be satisfied to send money, food, water, and clothing?
This tragedy should remind us of the opportunity to help people prepare for the ultimate destruction of the earth. It will be an event exceeding 8.9.
My point exactly over on my personal blog at http://randalmatheny.com/2011/03/14/tweets-quotes-truths-and-a-prediction/
A great deal of debate has occurred over the question of "literal" translation as opposed to the "dynamic equivalence" approach that the NIV and most modern translations employ. This is the effort to translate the thought rather than give a word for word rendering. The fact is that there is no such thing as translating word for word from one language into another. The KJV does not do it. The ASV does not do it. There are many examples of dynamic equivalency in these and all versions. Translations will necessarily involve some paraphrase. I have worked enough with translators in preaching in foreign lands to understand this reality.
He stole my thunder. :)