Welcome Blogging Expertise readers!

Yes, it’s true. I just won 5th prize in the Clever Blogging T-Shirt contest put on by Sarah Lewis over at Blogging Expertise. I feel like Ralphie’s dad in A Christmas Story: “It’s not just a lamp. It’s a Major Award. I won it!”

My winning t-shirt slogan was this: “Don‘t stop me now, I‘m on a blog roll.” You can check out the other winning entries here. My prize?

Ray will receive Organic Body Wash, Organic Lip Balm and Organic Insect Repellent. (Provided by Tennille Chambers’ Organic Lifestyle Income Opportunity.)

Hmmm, I think I will put these on the same shelf as the Cherry Blossom Shower Gel.

Thank you, Sarah, for running such a fun contest and for providing such an excellent blog for your readers! And thank you, Tennille, for the great prizes!

I don’t normally wish antichrists a happy birthday, but Shabbetai Zevi is one of the more memorable false Messiahs in Jewish history. I first learned about him back in December 1999 while researching a message on the millennium in reference to Y2K.

Shabbetai Zevi was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor on July 23, 1626, and proclaimed himself Messiah in 1665. Excitement spread throughout the Jewish communities of Europe and the Middle East as he announced that on June 18, 1666, he would depose the Turkish Sultan and redeem the Jewish people. Shabbetai caused such a stir that even many Christians in Europe began to teach that Christ would return in 1666.

Shabbetai failed to deliver on his promises, however. When he arrived at the Sultan’s palace, the Sultan easily disarmed him and gave him a choice – convert to Islam or be executed. Shabbetai promptly converted, and the Sultan spared his life.

Yesterday’s message was the fourteenth in the Doing Church Together series from the book of 1 Timothy. The message was called, Looking for Christ’s Appearing, taken from 1 Timothy 6:11-16.

1 Timothy 6:11-16 – 11 But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 13 In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you 14 to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 which God will bring about in his own time — God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen. (NIV)

The main idea of the message was that looking for Christ’s appearing will impact our lives in powerful ways. Here is a brief recap of the message:

What are you looking for in life? If there is one thing we should be looking for that affects everything else we do, we should be looking for Christ’s appearing. How will looking for Christ’s appearing affect your life?

1) It will help you to live your life for God (verses 11-12)

Learning to look for Christ’s appearing will help you to establish priorities and make appropriate decisions. It will help you to eliminate many unhelpful or unnecessary options in life. It will help you to escape the traps of the world and to pursue the things of God.

God never said the Christian life would be easy. If you ever feel discouraged because the Christian life seems like a fight or a struggle to you, take heart. It is supposed to be a fight. But notice it is a good fight. It is a good fight because it is worth it. It is worth the effort. It is worth the labor. It is worth all the pain and sacrifice you endure for the sake of Jesus Christ.

If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, then God has called you to eternal life. You have a great and glorious future that awaits you when Christ returns. God says take hold of that now. Make it your own. Be looking for Christ’s appearing, and it will help you to live your life for God now.

2) It will motivate you to witness (verses 13-14)

Just as Timothy made his good confession in the presence of many witnesses, so we should witness for Christ by confessing our faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. Even Jesus confessed before Pilate that He was the Christ, the Son of God who had come into the world, and that he would one day return on the clouds of heaven to rule over all. (Matthew 26:63-64)

We should witness to Christ not only with our words but also with our lives, as we are told to keep this command “without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul adds in verse 15: “which God will bring about in his own time,” which reminds us that we do not know when Christ will return, and so we should always be watching and ready and witness while we can.

3) It will prompt you to praise (verses 15-16)

As Paul reflects on Christ’s return and all that it means, he breaks into praise. God is is the sovereign ruler of the universe in whom all true blessing and happiness are found. His rule is absolute, and all other kings and lords will bow before him one day. We are dependent on God for our life; God is dependent on no one. God is self-existing from all of eternity, and he is the one who gives life to everything. Only Jesus has seen the Father, because Jesus came to us from the Father’s side and made the Father known to us. And one day Jesus will come back for us to bring us into God’s presence.

When I was a child I remember hanging out by the kitchen window around supper time looking down the street for my Dad to come home from work. We lived on a dead end street with very little traffic, so every set of headlights that suddenly turned up the street made my heart jump. “Hey, Mom, here comes a car. Do you think it’s Dad?”

What was I doing? I was looking for my Dad’s appearing. I couldn’t wait for him to come home. He had been gone all day, and I couldn’t wait to see him again. Are you looking for Christ’s appearing? Does any little sign that he might be coming soon cause your heart to leap in anticipation? Oh how we need to be watching and waiting and looking. What a difference it will make in your life and mine. It will help you to live your life for God. It will motivate you to witness. It will prompt you to praise.

Note: To read the complete message, go to the Sermons tab at the top of the blog.

Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Tammy Faye Bakker) died Friday after an 11-year struggle with cancer. She was 65 years old. In the 1980′s Tammy Faye appeared with her then husband, Jim Bakker, on the PTL television program, “The Jim and Tammy Show.” Their marriage and ministry fell apart in a well-publicized scandal after Jim was convicted on fraud and conspiracy counts connected with lifetime memberships at the Heritage USA theme park. Jim later wrote a book titled, I Was Wrong, in which he apologized for his misdeeds.

Blogs for Fred is having a Guess the Date Contest. See if you can be the first to guess the date when Fred Thompson will finally announce his candidacy for President of the United States. You may not apply if your haircut costs between $400-$1200.”

No time to cook? The New York Times Summer Express offers up 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less. Sample: “Pan-grill a skirt steak for three or four minutes a side. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, slice and serve over romaine or any other green salad, drizzled with olive oil and lemon.” Yummmm.

Joe Carter lists (in his own words): “the top 100 blogs that I have found to be the most convicting, enlightening, frustrating, illuminating, maddening, stimulating, right-on and/or wrongheaded by Christians expressing a Christian worldview.” No, I am not on the list, but Joe has some great blogs represented here.

Doug Groothius shares lessons learned from Francis Schaeffer. “Having recently reread many of the works of Francis Schaeffer, it seems right to list several lessons he can teach Bible-believing Christians (and others) today.” Francis Schaeffer’s books had a significant impact on my life as a young Christian. (HT: SmartChristian)

Michael Hyatt, president and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, is pleased with the results of his email experiment. “I have been unbelievably productive . . . I have made major progress on several projects that had languished on my to-do list. I have also found myself thinking more clearly than ever.” (HT: Unashamed Workman)

John Mark Reynolds writes about 5 things you can learn from Harry Potter. “Third, some people choose to be wicked, enjoy being wicked, and cannot be helped in the end . . . We can pity He Who Must Not Be Blogged About and understand why he became what he is, but he still has to be stopped. The delusion that everyone bad is ‘sorry’ or ‘misunderstood’ is more a fantasy than the magic in Potter.”

Claire Wolfe explains how she works and lives in a 360 square foot cabin. “First learning experience: In small spaces, every dirty dish left on the counter, every pile of bills you set on a tabletop upon return from the Post Office, becomes—proportionally—a big mess. Unlike in a large house, they’re right there in your face . . . Also, when all your activities are confined to one small space, that space will get dusty and dirty more quickly than when your activities are spread around 2,000 square feet.” (HT: Lifehacker)

Chinook is the world’s first unbeatable checkers program.

The scientists at the University of Alberta who developed the program report that they have rigorously proved that Chinook, in a slightly improved version, cannot ever lose. Any opponent, human or computer, no matter how skilled, can at best achieve a draw.

In essence, that reduces checkers to the level of tic-tac-toe, for which the ideal game-playing strategy has been codified into an immutable strategy. But checkers — or draughts, as it is known in Britain — is the most complex game that has been solved to date, with some 500 billion billion possible board positions, compared with the 765 possibilities in tic-tac-toe.

If you enjoy losing, you can actually play a game against Chinook here.

What a great idea! The COLOURlovers site presents a collection of 18 beautiful birds and their color palettes.

In sizes ranging from the tiny hummingbird to the tall earthbound ostrich or emu, birds of the world show us color in a huge number of arrangements — 9,000 to 10,000 species to be more exact.

Males mostly do the more vibrant presentations to attract mates, while females are usually muted and earth tone to guard their homes and their eggs, but either way, it seems that birds of a feather have the right idea when it comes to great colors.

Here is my favorite picture from the site along with it’s color palette: the Brazilian Red Cap Cardinal.

I love cardinals anyways, and this one is simply stunning. Be sure to visit the COLOURlovers site for more great photos of birds and their palettes. God is definitely the master designer when it comes to patterns and color.

HT: Challies

We have had some good discussion and comments over at this week’s Sunday Morning SoundBytes. So I thought I would share a couple of the quotes that I shared at church during Sunday morning’s message on contentment.

The first quote is by Henry David Thoreau from his masterful journal, Walden; or, a Life in the Woods. Although Thoreau was not a Christian (and could be quite smug about it at times), he puts most of us to shame in this book when it comes to living simply and doing without. Here is his definition of what it means to be rich.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. (Henry David Thoreau; from Walden)

There is a contrarian viewpoint for you. A man is not rich according to what he has but according to what he does not need. Thoreau understood that contentment does not require more things or stuff. But he missed out on the deeper secret of contentment – which is finding your satisfaction in God. Philip Ryken, pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, PA, fills in the rest of the picture for us:

As long as we base our sense of contentment on anything in the world, we will always find some excuse to make ourselves miserable. Our problem is not on the outside–it’s on the inside, and therefore it will never be solved by getting more of what we think we want. If we do not learn to be satisfied right now in our present situation–whatever it is–we will never be satisfied at all. . . .

The truth is that if God wanted us to have more right now, we would have it. . . . If we were supposed to be in a different situation in life, we would be in it. Instead of always saying, “If only this” and “If only that,” God calls us to glorify him to the fullest right now. . . . Contentment means wanting what God wants for us rather than what we want for us. The secret to enjoying this kind of contentment is to be so satisfied with God that we are able to accept whatever he has or has not provided. (Philip Ryken, Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory, pp. 673-74)

Contentment is not found in things but in God. If only we could all learn this lesson well.

Same time next year. A teacher from Toronto flew thousands of miles across the Atlantic to Wales to attend his friend’s wedding, only to discover he had arrived one year early. He had received an email from his friend earlier in the year saying the wedding was July 6th and assumed he meant 2007. The flight cost him $1,015.

Help! Police! A 38-year-old man was arrested after he called 911 to report that he was surrounded by police officers and needed help. He was charged with misdemeanor misuse of 911.

When it’s over . . . The White Stripes played the shortest concert ever on Monday, July 16 in St. John’s, Canada. The musical duo played a single note (a C-sharp) before hundreds of adoring fans. I have always heard that the secret to a good show is leaving the audience wanting more. (HT: Challies)

Last week was an interesting week behind the scenes on the blog. Starting Tuesday I noticed an increasing number of people arriving at the blog after searching for “Habakkuk” and especially “Habakkuk chapter 2.” It turns out that the schedule for the International Sunday School Lessons for last Sunday called for a lesson on Habakkuk 2. I had run a whole series on Habakkuk back in the spring, and so the search engines were directing people this way.

What was interesting was how the closer we got to Sunday morning, the more people started arriving at the blog looking for material on Habakkuk. I figured that the number of visitors would peak on either Friday or Saturday, but the numbers continued to increase right up through Sunday morning, just hours before services were scheduled to begin.

I wonder how typical this graph is of when Sunday School teachers begin their preparation during the week. (By the way, I thank God for all of you who faithfully teach Sunday School, no matter when you prepare!) So, when do you start preparing for Sunday?

I posted a poem by Wendell Berry recently, so I was interested to read this interview with Berry in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. In the interview Berry talks about the difference between a total economy, in which people “pay for everything; they are total consumers,” and a local economy, in which people “take back a certain amount of economic initiative and do things for themselves.” He then applies this concept especially to sustainable agriculture and the purchase of food.

There is a movement toward the local economy. And it’s coming about as a response to people’s understanding of the costs to the world of an economy based entirely on long-distance transportation. They say that the average distance that food travels from the field to the dinner plate is 1,500 miles. And this has a cost in fuel depletion and pollution. It’s a part of the permanent drawdown of necessary resources that are the basis of an industrial economy.

I found this article interesting, especially the reminder that much of our food travels hundreds if not thousands of miles from the field to the dinner table. We live in an area with lots of local agriculture and enjoy this time of the year tremendously. Last night for supper we ate freshly picked corn from a local farm and our salad items were grown locally as well. There is something just so good about fresh vegetables from the local market.

How about you? Do you take advantage of locally grown food when you can?

HT: Fire and Knowledge

Yesterday’s message was the thirteenth in the Doing Church Together series from the book of 1 Timothy. The message was called, Choosing Contentment, taken from 1 Timothy 6:3-10.

1 Timothy 6:3-10 - 3 If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, 4 he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions 5 and constant friction between men of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.
6 But godliness with contentment is great gain. 7 For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. 8 But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. 9 People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. (NIV)

The main idea of the message was that you should choose contentment. Contentment is not dependent on your outward circumstances. It is dependent on your attitude and your will. Contentment is not something you gain or achieve in life. Contentment is something that you choose. Here is a brief recap of the message:

Choosing to be content is one of the basic principles of Christianity: learning to be satisfied in God above all other things. Choosing contentment for your life rather than discontent is one of the most important decisions you can ever make.

1) Watch out for false teachers seeking financial gain (verses 3-5)

Paul begins with a warning about certain teachers who did not choose to be content. They were not seeking God’s kingdom or truth, but were merely seeking financial gain for themselves.

2) Godliness with contentment is great gain (verses 6-8)

But godliness is not a means to financial gain; rather godliness with contentment is great gain in and of itself. The word “contentment” here speaks of having a sufficiency, or, having enough.

At some point in your life, you need to decide which of two words will rule your life when it comes to having things: either “more” or “enough.” If your answer is “more,” then no matter how much you get, you will always want more. But if your answer is “enough,” then no matter how much or how little you have, you will always be satisfied and content. Choosing contentment means deciding that you will let go of the word “more” in your life and hold on to the word “enough.”

We really don’t need a lot in order to be content or to have enough in life. If we have the basic necessities of life, then we can say, “I have enough,” rather than “I want or need more.”

3) The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil (verses 9-10)

If godliness with contentment is great gain, then what is the alternative? Paul goes on to say in verses 9-10 that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. The phrase “people who want to get rich” is literally “people who want to have an abundance” or, I suppose we could say, “people who want to have more than enough.” You see, we are back to the choice of “more” or “enough.”

There is nothing wrong with money itself. Money is a tool that can be used to help others and to further God’s kingdom. But it is the love of money that can be a root of all kinds of evil. Love of money violates the first commandment – “You shall have no other gods before me,” (Exodus 20:3) and the tenth commandment, “You shall not covet.” (Exodus 20:17)

Which word would you say characterizes your life? “More?” Or “enough.” It doesn’t just have to be about money. Some people want more out of their marriage or more out of their church or more out of their job or more out of their life. They have never learned to say, “I have enough.” They have never learned to be content. And so they go from church to church, or job to job, or even from marriage to marriage always looking for something more.

Choosing contentment means being satisfied with God and with what God has given you in Christ. Being thankful for the many blessings you already have instead of constantly wanting more or different blessings. Seeking to live a godly life that pleases God in every way. Godliness with contentment is great gain. Choose contentment.

Note: To read the complete message, go to the Sermons tab at the top of the blog.