Finding Love In The Best Place

What is love? If we look to ourselves, we'll never be able to really answer that question. God answers the question in 1 John 4:10. I studied the verse in my Bible Arc course.

"In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

Here is the passage video:


1 John 4:10 from Bible Arc on Vimeo.

A Great Bible-Study Tool

Quick post before I head to bed. Just finished studying a passage in Proverbs. The Bible study method I used is called "arcing". You can find out more about it at Bible Arc.

In the meanwhile here is the video of the "trainer". Yup, after you finish studying the passage, you can watch the video to see how you did. PS: the website isn't as old as the video makes it out to be. :-)


Proverbs 2:1-6 from Bible Arc on Vimeo.

Should Jesus remain the "Son of God" in Arabic Bibles?

Last week I spent hours enjoying tea and conversation with a muslim friend. He had many questions. Frankly, I often did not know how to answer. For I could sense how differently my north african friend would respond to the standard "evangelical answers". His most pressing question was clearly: "How can the Bible say that Jesus is the Son of God?" For a muslim, "Son of God" implies God had sex with Mary.

Christianity Today has an article by Collin Hansen, on the "Son of God" controversy among arabic world bible translators. I highly recommend the article. You can find it here.

After reading that 7 page article, you'll be interesting to follow the debate on Ed Stetzer's blog. To wrap it all up, you can than read the excellent article by a man named "Rod".

Tim Keller About The Lord of the Rings

Just read this quote regarding JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, in a recent interview of Timothy Keller.

Tolkien has helped my imagination. He was a devout Catholic—and I am not. However, because he brought his faith to bear into narrative, fiction, and literature, his Christianity—which was pretty ‘mere Christianity’ (understanding of human sin, need for grace, need for redemption)—fleshed out in fiction, has been an inspiration to me.

What I mean by inspiration is this: he gives me a way of grasping glory that would otherwise be hard for me to appreciate. Glory, weightiness, beauty, excellence, brilliance, virtue—he shows them to you in some of his characters.

When people ask: how often have you read Lord of the Rings?, the answer is: I actually never stop. I’m always in it.

(Via)

Before I pick up my Bible in earnest

C. S. Lewis:

For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others.  I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

B. B. Warfield:

Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. What! Than ten hours over your books on your knees?”

HT: JT

A Brilliant Quote on Preaching

 I'm preaching at my church this week. I love this quote. I don't think my manuscript is even good enough to qualify as "pitiful":

“How utterly dependant we are on the Holy Spirit in the work of preaching! All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other. You go to your study and look down at your pitiful manuscript, and you kneel down and cry, "O God, this is so weak! Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life (2 Cor 2:16). My God, who is sufficient for these things?"

John Piper in  The Supremacy of God in Preaching

Apple is REALLY killing it

Just thought I would pass on the news. 36% of people planning on buying a laptop in the next 90 days, are planning on a mac.

Is Apple ever going to stop? I must admit, I wish Apple wasn't so popular. I liked the good old day, when owning an iBook was cool. Now it's just "normal".

This Blog Know How to Write

Every once in a while I read the blog 6 Year Med. The woman writes very insightful posts that choke me up.

Here is a recent post about her last year. This is good.

To All My Football Friends…

In Paris for the Weekend

A friend of mine is getting baptized tomorrow. She became a believer during the summer of 2009. I love baptisms. Its a sign of life: God still saves today. Grace is evident in her life.

For a little piece of French culture, I live two hours away from Paris. For a Frenchman, that means that traveling to Paris is a rare and special occasion. Two hours is a long trip (I'm exaggerating slightly). In anycase, French certainly don't live on the road like Americans.

By the way, I love Paris!