Yesterday’s message in the Church on Purpose series was called Cultivation – Growing in Christ-likeness. The main idea of the message was that growing in Christ-likeness is one of God’s primary purposes for the church. Here is a brief outline of the message:

    1) Cultivating spiritual growth and maturity (2 Peter 3:18; Colossians 1:28)
    2) Becoming like Jesus (Romans 8:28-30)
    3) Bible, prayer, fellowship and service (Acts 2:42-47; Ephesians 4:11-16)

Click on the Sermons tab at the top of the blog for this and other messages.

Updated with new links:

Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, came out this weekend, and the reviews are all over the map. Here is a roundup of links both positive and negative, and somewhere in between!

The Good:

• Christianity Today: Interview with Ben Stein and Review by Mark Moring
• Darrell Bock: About Expelled and Comments on Reviews
• Expelled Website: Endorsements by Leaders

The Bad:

• Christ and Pop Culture: Expelled: Anyone Listening? Anyone? Anyone?
• Christians in Cinema BLOG: Lessons in Public Relations – Part III
• Reasons to Believe: RTB Scholars Expound on Expelled

The Ugly:

• Orlando Sentinel: Is Ben Stein the new face of Creationism?
• Scientific American: Ben Stein Launches a Science-free Attack on Darwin
• The Boston Globe: Trouble Ahead for Science

Have you seen the movie? What did you think?

Wishlist Butler lets you create a wishlist that can track items across different stores. “Set up a wedding gift registry, a baby shower or a birthday wishlist in less than a minute and share this list with all your colleagues, friends and relatives!” (HT: Presurfer)

Photographer Bill Walsh encourages us to accept truth wherever it appears. “Christians should avoid quickly judging cultural expression as sacred or secular, because God reveals himself in both, through his common grace.”

Albert Mohler writes on marriage and the glory of God. “Marriage is about our happiness, our holiness, and our wholeness–but it is supremely about the glory of God. When marriage is entered into rightly, when marriage vows are kept with purity, when all the goods of marriage are enjoyed in their proper place–God is glorified.”

Pulpit Magazine tackles the question of when to baptize your kids. “The temptation for many parents is to rush their child’s baptism. Our elders here at Grace Church believe it is better to wait, and be absolutely convinced of a child’s conversion, than to baptize the child prematurely — and thereby potentially give an unsaved child a false sense of assurance.”

Chuck Colson reports on the demise of marriage in Britain. “In 2006, there were approximately 237,000 weddings in Britain—the fewest since 1895, when Victoria was still queen and Britain’s population was about half of what it is today. In fact, ‘the proportion of men and women getting married is below any level found since figures were first kept nearly 150 years ago.’”

Ray Pritchard shares six simple words. “A friend e-mailed me with the news that his mother’s cancer surgery had been successful. He ended his message with this statement: ‘God is God, good, and great.’ As I pondered his words I was struck at once by their simplicity and profundity. How much truth those six little words contain. They summarize an entire Christian worldview.”

Mark Roberts discusses the element of surprise involved in discerning God’s will in our lives. “God has continually surprised me in my life, calling me to ministries that I never anticipated. I suppose one might say that I wouldn’t be so surprised if I did a better job discerning God’s will in the first place. I agree. But I think most of us, if we are open to the Lord, will find that he surprises us over and over again as he directs our lives and ministries.”

Bob Hyatt explains why taking notes during a message makes a difference even if you never look at them again. “When we take notes … something happens. As we’re writing, we create spatial relations between the various bits of information we are recording. Spatial tasks are handled by another part of the brain, and the act of linking the verbal information with the spatial relationship seems to filter out the less relevant or important information.” (quoting from a Lifehack article)

Biology professor Michael C. LaBarbera has a fascinating article on the biology of B-movie monsters (lots of science, mathematics and physics involved). “Indeed, sufficiently small animals cannot be hurt in a fall from any height: A monkey is too big, a squirrel is on the edge, but a mouse is completely safe. The mouse-sized people in Dr. Cyclops could have leapt off the tabletop with a cry of ‘Geronimo!’ secure in the knowledge that they were too small to be hurt.” (HT: Presurfer)

Living Together Before Marriage Series:
    ● Statistics on Living Together Before Marriage
    ● Scriptures on Living Together Before Marriage
    ● Living Together Without Sex
    ● What If We Already Lived Together Before Marriage?

Here are some statistics on living together before marriage from Michael McManus, author of the book Marriage Savers. Statistically speaking, living together is not a trial of marriage, but rather a training for divorce.

• The number of unmarried couples living together soared 12-fold from 430,000 in 1960 to 5.4 million in 2005.
• More than eight out of ten couples who live together will break up either before the wedding or afterwards in divorce.
• About 45 percent of those who begin cohabiting, do not marry. Another 5-10 percent continue living together and do not marry.
• Couples who do marry after living together are 50% more likely to divorce than those who did not.
• Only 12 percent of couples who have begun their relationship with cohabitation end up with a marriage lasting 10 years or more.
• A Penn State study reports that even a month’s cohabitation decreases the quality of the couple’s relationship.

Here are some more statistics relating to the children of cohabiting parents.

• Children of cohabiting parents are ten times more likely to be sexually abused by a stepparent than by a parent.
• Children of cohabiting parents are three times as likely to be expelled from school or to get pregnant as teenagers than children from an intact home with married parents.
• Children of cohabiting parents are five times more apt to live in poverty, and 22 times more likely to incarcerated.

Check out the other posts in the Living Together Before Marriage series:
    ● Statistics on Living Together Before Marriage
    ● Scriptures on Living Together Before Marriage
    ● Living Together Without Sex
    ● What If We Already Lived Together Before Marriage?
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Governor Mitt Romney shared the following top ten reasons why he dropped out of the 2008 Presidential Race. Most of these were pretty good. The only one that didn’t seem to go over well was number seven, which I also winced at. Number five was downright mischievous.

(Video length: 3:43)

The Annual Radio & Television Correspondents Association Dinner
April 16, 2008

Mitt Romney’s Top Ten Reasons for Leaving the 2008 Presidential Race
    10. There weren’t as many Osmonds as I had thought.
      9. I got tired of the corkscrew landings under sniper fire.
      8. As a lifelong hunter, I didn’t want to miss the start of varmint season.
      7. There wasn’t room in the campaign for two Christian leaders.
      6. Word leaked out that nobody had bothered to search my passport files.
      5. I’d rather get fat, grow a beard, and try for the Nobel Prize.
      4. I wanted to finally take off the dark suit and tie and kick back … in a
          light-colored suit and tie.
      3. Once my wife Anne realized I couldn’t win, my fundraising dried up.
      2. I took a bad fall at a campaign rally and broke my hair.
      1. There was a flaw in our campaign theory that as Utah goes, so goes
          the nation.

Related post: President Bush Speaks at the Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner

C. J. Mahaney on dissatisfaction in preaching:

I think we should remain dissatisfied with our preaching, so that we are always motivated to grow in our preaching. But I think there is a difference between being dissatisfied and being discouraged. For me, when I’m discouraged, normally that reveals the presence of pride, that to some degree in my preaching I was attempting to impress rather than serve.

This is from a panel session at the T4G’08 Together For the Gospel Conference that is taking place Tuesday-Thursday this week in Louisville, Kentucky. All talks from the conference are available for free listening or download here: Free Audio Downloads from Together for the Gospel.

Lawrence Solomon at the Financial Post:

As I’m writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.

Solomon goes on to explain how every time he corrects certain information relating to climate change in Wikipedia, another editor immediately undoes his changes. It is not only a fascinating look at possible climate change bias at Wikipedia, but also a good reminder why Wikipedia is not always a reliable source of information. (HT: Instapundit)

Click here for more posts on the Environment.

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We ran out of oil for our furnace last week, which I have since discovered is not a good thing. I knew we were getting low, but with oil at $3.85 a gallon, I was trying to nurse it along to the end of the heating season. Obviously we didn’t make it. When we first ran out, I thought we could get by without heat and fill up the tank later when prices are lower. But after a couple nights with the house temperature dropping into the fifties, I quickly changed my mind.

I called some local oil companies to get a delivery of 20-25 gallons just to get us to the end of the season. No go. Every company had a 100-gallon minimum for delivery, and no one was budging. However, a couple of the companies told me that diesel is actually the same fuel as home heating oil. So I filled up two five gallon containers of diesel at the local gas station and poured them into the tank through the outside fill line. The furnace still wouldn’t start.

I did some poking around online and found out why it is not good to let your tank run dry. First of all, you suck all the sludge from the bottom of your oil tank into your oil lines, filters, strainer and nozzle. And secondly, you usually lose your prime. Well, I didn’t know what to do about the first problem, and I am not much of a fix-it-man, but I did some more searching online for how to prime the oil burner pump. Here are the basic DIY (Do It Yourself) instructions:

First, make sure that your thermostat is turned on. Then, 1) turn off your furnace, 2) open the bleeder valve on the fuel pump, 3) turn the furnace back on, 4) allow air, oil and sludge to escape from the bleeder valve until you get a solid flow of oil (be sure to catch the escaping oil in some kind of container), 5) close the bleeder valve, 6) repeat the whole procedure if the furnace still does not start.

I found a couple articles explaining this procedure in detail, but the best one by far was this one at WikiHow: How to Restart a Furnace After Running out of Oil. The other articles instructed me to hold a container under the valve when you opened it to catch the oil that would come spurting out. But this WikiHow article gave me the best tip of all — run a short section of 1/4″ nylon tubing from the bleeder valve to the container. I picked up a two-foot section of nylon tubing at the hardware store for 80 cents and went home to bleed the fuel line and prime the pump. The tubing worked perfectly and prevented a huge mess of oil everywhere.

The instructions online told me this was about a five minute procedure. I multiply estimated times for projects by a factor of six, so I guessed it would take me about half an hour to get this done. And it did! But the furnace is running again, and we now have heat to warm up the house in the morning. I would refer you to the WikHow article referenced above for complete instructions, but here are some helpful hints I learned along the way:

1. Don’t let your tank run dry.
2. You can substitute diesel for home heating oil in a pinch. (Five gallons of fuel will give you about five hours of running use.)
3. The bleeder valve is located on the side of the fuel pump, pointing down diagonally, usually at the 4 or 8 o’clock position. It most likely takes a 3/8 inch wrench.
4. Run 1/4″ clear nylon tubing (1/4″ inside measurement; 3/8″ outside measurement) from the bleeder valve to the catch container to prevent a mess. Clear tubing will allow you to see when you get a good flow of oil going from the pump.
5. You may have to repeat the procedure several times to get the prime going. I didn’t get any oil flowing until the sixth try.
6. If your reset button is in lockout mode (mine was), you will have to press and hold it for about 40 seconds in order to reset it.
7. You can take the oil you capture in the container and pour it back into your tank.

If you came to this article looking for information, I hope that helps. I am not very good at this stuff, so I am guessing if I could get my oil pump primed and running again, so can you!

Click here for more Helpful Hints.

Michael Yon reporting from Iraq:

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about “GoArmy.com.”

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda’s brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

HT: Bob Krumm (who is currently at Fort Benning getting ready to head for Iraq himself)

Oh, the irony: Less than ten percent of adults in the United States tithe. The latest report from the Barna Group focuses on Trends in Tithing and Donating. Here are some of the results:

In 2007, the research revealed that just 5% of adults tithed. Not surprisingly, some population groups were more likely than others to have given away at least ten percent of their income. Among the most generous segments were evangelicals (24% of whom tithed); conservatives (12%); people who had prayed, read the Bible and attended a church service during the past week (12%); charismatic or Pentecostal Christians (11%); and registered Republicans (10%).

Interestingly, Christians gave the most of any one group of donors, and evangelical Christians gave the most of any Christian group.

Christians tend to be the most generous group of donors. An examination of the three dominant subgroups within the Christian community showed that evangelicals, the 7% of the population who are most committed to the Christian faith, donated a mean of $4260 to all non-profit entities in 2007. Non-evangelical born again Christians, who represent another 37% of the public, donated a mean of $1581. The other 42% of the Christian population, who are aligned with a Christian church but are not born again, donated a mean of $865. Overall, the three segments of the Christian community averaged donations of $1426.

Note:  The videos of both performances are at the end of the post.

Last week on American Idol, the eight finalists joined together at the end of the show to sing the popular praise and worship song, “Shout to the Lord.” The next night, they opened the program with the same song. This created quite a stir for a number of reasons:

1. The first night they sang it, they substituted the words “My Shepherd” for the original lyrics, which are “My Jesus.”
2. The second night, they sang the original lyrics, putting the words “My Jesus” back in.
3. People were surprised that a show like American Idol would feature such an overtly Christian song, twice, especially sung by all the contestants together.

There was a lot of buzz about this around the blogosphere during the week. Here are three articles in particular that I thought covered the story well and provided some good food for thought.

• The Christian Post:  ‘American Idol’ Brings Jesus Back to Worship Song.
• Bob Kauflin over at Worship Matters shared some positive thoughts on what happened as well as some concerns.
• Josh Harris posted some interesting inside information relating to the whole incident. This comment from a woman who works at Fox TV is especially worth reading:

I work on one of the “sister shows” of American Idol … so picture an office, with all of the producers, crew, etc. gathered in watching the live feed at our CBS offices, then this song comes on … an office filled with a few Christians … atheists and agnostic Jews. You could hear a pin drop … it was awesome … the power that came through … nothing had to be said … no debates … just people being touched more than they realized … producers, writers … crew that had never darkened a church door in their lives, or their only experience with Christians was a negative one. You don’t always see the workings of us Christians that are behind the scenes … you don’t know how much prayer went into getting a song with that message on a, let us not forget, a SECULAR show. So, from someone behind the scenes, the best thing you can do is write to the producer of Am. Idol and simply state how much you appreciate the diversity they showed in having an very inspirational song in their program. Period. No criticizing. This will go farther than you realize. Also, pray, pray, pray for us Christians that have chosen Hollywood as our vocation, career and our mission field.

And finally, here are the videos of the two performances so you can check them out for yourself.

First performance (Video length: 2:56)

 

Second performance (Video length: 3:08)

So, did you see either of these performances last week? What are your thoughts?

This video of a little girl singing the Lord’s Prayer is one of the nicest things I have seen in a long time. Zoei Isabelle Toh is only 2 years and 8 months old in the video. My favorite parts are when she sings, “And lead us not into temptation,” and also when she starts swinging her arms and conducting herself near the end. Awesome! Thanks to “Mommy” for directing this video and sharing it with the rest of us.

(Video length: 1:58)

HT: Perigrinatio
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