Ray Fowler .org

Here are some great space walk pictures from the space shuttle Endeavour’s TST-118 mission in August 2007. (Click on the picture for a larger image.)

Can you imagine looking down on our planet from such a height? Just beautiful.

Click here for more International Space Station photos.
Click here for more Space related posts.

Piedmont College professor Barbara Brown Taylor laments her Christian students’ lack of knowledge of church history and tradition.

They never noticed that Matthew and Luke tell different stories of Jesus’ birth, or that Mark and John tell no such stories at all. They never imagined that the first Christians did not walk around with New Testaments in their pockets. No one ever told them about Constantine, Augustine, Benedict or Martin Luther. They never thought about what happened during the centuries between Jesus’ resurrection and their own professions of faith. In their minds, they fell in line behind the disciples, picking up the proclamation of the gospel where those simple fishermen left off …

College students in all other regards, they remain fifth graders in religion. How, when they meet someone who asks them intelligent questions about their faith, will they come up with equally intelligent answers? Keep your class notes, I tell them. You never know when you may need them.

STUPID CRIME EDITION:

Not Houdini. A thief in Germany was caught breaking into a supermarket and handcuffed to a railing. He managed to escape from the railing but was apprehended a second time when he went to a nearby police station to get the cuffs removed. “It was stupid of him,” said a police spokesman. “They took the cuffs off, but they kept him.”

Gotta have my Starbucks. A Boulder, Colorado man robbed a Starbucks, and then later returned to the same store wearing the same clothes he wore during the robbery. He got in line for coffee where he was recognized and promptly arrested by police investigators who were in the store interviewing employees at the time.

Just wrong. A man in Indiana was arrested for stealing cash from a kids’ lemonade stand. The robber then ran into a house down the street where police later arrested him on a felony robbery charge. The amount stolen? $17.50. The kids will get their money back, but they’re just glad the thief was caught. “I didn’t think anyone would come up to a lemonade stand and steal money. That’s really low,” 12-year-old Fred Erskine said.

Dr. James Stobaugh has put together a helpful series of posts answering frequently asked questions about the SAT 1 (Scholastic Aptitude Test), PSAT (Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test), and the NMSQT (National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test).

• Freqently Asked Questions – I
      1) What is the SAT 1?
      2) Should I take practice Sat I tests?
• Frequently Asked Questions – II
      3) What are the PSAT and NMSQT?
      4) Should I Take the PSAT?
• Frequently Asked Questions – III
      5) How important is stress reduction?
      6) How is the 2005 SAT 1 different from other SATs?
      7) What About Learning Disabled Students?

Stobaugh also offers his personal recommendations for the day of the SAT:

Here is one example of a typical test-day schedule. Times will vary depending on the actual time of the test, how far away the test site is, etc.

Click for Map of the World’s Religions.

Poor Garfield! Personally, I don’t think Mondays are all that bad!
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Click on a month for more Garfield Mondays:  January, February, March,
    April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December

Click here for Real Life Garfield.

Check back the first Monday of each month for more Garfield Mondays.

Yesterday’s message in the Life of Samuel series was called God Can Take Care of Himself, taken from 1 Samuel 5:1-12. Here is a brief outline of the message:

1) God is Lord of all the earth.
    – God is not surprised by circumstances
    – God is not limited by geography
    – God is not threatened by competition

2) God is not served by human hands.
    – God does not need us to watch over him
    – God does not need us to protect him
    – God does not need us to defend him

3) God will judge the world with justice.
    – God will judge the false idols of the world
    – God will judge those who stand against him
    – All will eventually acknowledge him as Lord

The Ultimate Proof: The resurrection of Christ from the dead!

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

Josh Etter quotes William Temple on salvation. “All is of God; the only thing of my very own which I contribute to my redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.”

Tullian Tchividjian quotes Nicholas Berdyaev on beauty in the world. “All beauty in the world is either a memory of Paradise or a prophecy of the transfigured world.”

Jon Bloom looks at the miracle of Jesus feeding the five thousand. “When Jesus performed this wonder, he was giving Philip, the disciples, the boy, the crowd, and us a crucial lesson in kingdom supply-side economics. Namely, that God will supply every need of ours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19). If we really believe this, our worries are over.”

Jeana shares ten things that don’t make sense to her. Here are the first few on her list. “1. How having four children quadrupled the love I have for my kids instead of dividing it into four. 2. How focusing on meeting my husband’s needs results in my needs getting met. 3. Why having a lot of ‘me’ time tends to make me more self-centered, not less. 4. Why serving other people makes me more content, not less.”

Justin Childers challenges you to figure out one intentional way to serve your church today. Here are a couple of his suggestions. “1. Call a member of your church that was not at church on Sunday (for whatever reason). Tell them you missed seeing them and summarize your pastor’s sermon for them. 2. Call or e-mail a family in your church with young children and offer to babysit for a few hours 3. Call an older member of your church and offer to bring lunch over to their house tomorrow.”

Michael Patton at Theological Word of the Day provides a helpful definition for theism. “Worldview that believes that an eternal God freely created all of existence (time, space, matter, celestial realms and bodies) out of nothing (ex nihilo) and that he continues to act within the creation in varying degrees. This is to be contrasted with atheism (the belief that there is no God), pantheism (the belief that all is God), polytheism (the belief in many gods), and deism (the belief that God does not interact with creation).”

Joe Carter reflects on celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, and other silly atheist arguments. “Why exactly we are to prefer an unintelligent designer to an intelligent one is one of the questions that remains unanswered. Obviously, not all atheists believe that arguments must be intelligently designed; but that does not mean that arguments for intelligent design are without merit. Perhaps if they used their noodles for something other than creating spaghetti creatures they’d see that obvious point for themselves.”

Ken Keathley relates the interesting story concerning Jesse James and church discipline. “Jesse was a member in good standing when he led the first daylight bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri, a town about ten miles away. The church minutes record that deliberations to discipline Jesse were complicated by the concern that he might burn down the building … Two deacons were selected to go to confront him according to the guidelines of Matthew 18. The minutes of the next business meeting report that, for one reason or another, the deacons never could find the time to visit the notorious bandit. Then the minutes report that Jesse himself arrived at the meeting, and wishing to cause no embarrassment to the congregation, requested his name be removed from the roll. The church obliged.”

I don’t usually begin my sermons with a joke, but last Sunday I did. Here it is in case you missed it.

There were two brothers, ages 8 and 10, who were getting into a lot of trouble. Their mother brought them to see the pastor to see if he could help straighten them out. The pastor talked with the younger brother first. He looked at the young boy and asked him, “Where is God?” The boy’s eyes opened wide, but he didn’t answer, so the pastor asked again, more forcefully this time, “Young man, where is God?” The boy began to squirm in his seat, so the pastor asked yet another time in a very loud voice, “Young man, answer me, where is God?” At that, the boy leaped out of his seat and ran out the door right past his brother who was waiting to go in next. The older brother chased him down and asked him, “What’s the matter?” To which the younger brother replied, “We’re in big trouble this time. God is missing, and they think WE did it!”

From the sermon: Losing God in Religion – 1 Samuel 4:1-22 (The ark’s capture)

• Ask Calvin’s Dad. Calvin’s Dad from Calvin and Hobbes explains how life works.
• Christianity Today Interviews WALL•E Director. “Pixar’s Andrew Stanton first thought of WALL•E in 1994, and now it’s hitting theaters. We caught up with Stanton to discuss his faith, creativity, and that lonely little ‘bot.”
• People God Killed. Adrian Warnock shares a C. J. Mahaney sermon that changed his life.
• Credit-Card Reporting. This sounds like a bad idea. “Payment-card reporting would require banks and other providers of merchant account services to report credit- and debit-card payments to the IRS.”
• Academia and Religion. “Academics have a highly negative view of Evangelical Christians and very little hostility to Jews.”

Mistrial. An Australian drug trial lasting more than three months and costing taxpayers nearly $1 million was derailed after a number of jurors were caught playing Sudoku during testimony. Sudoku is a puzzle where you complete a grid of numbers in the correct sequence. The judge was alerted after some of the jurors were observed writing their notes vertically, rather than horizontally.

Easy credit. Six-year old Bennett Christiansen received a credit card in the mail. Bennett had filled out an application truthfully stating his age as six and his income as $0. He indicated that he was neither a homeowner or a renter. He signed the application in his own six-year old handwriting. In return, Bank of America sent him a valid card card of his own (with a $600 limit).

Under-age driver. A 7-year-old Indiana boy drove his grandmother’s car more than a mile to a shopping mall before another motorist blocked the car and took the keys. Several motorists called police around 9 a.m. Tuesday to report a small child driving toward Muncie Mall on the city’s north side. The boy was so small that some motorists could not see anyone behind the wheel.

Ben Witherington points out that the word “reader” in Bible times had a different meaning than it does today.

Both in Mk. 13.14 and in Rev. 1.3 the operative Greek word is ho anaginōskōn a clear reference to a single and singular reader, who in that latter text is distinguished from the audience who are dubbed the hearers (plural!) of John’s rhetoric.

As Mark Wilson recently suggested in a public lecture at Ephesus, this surely is likely to mean that the singular reader is in fact a lector of sorts, someone who will be reading John’s apocalypse out loud to various hearers. We know for a fact that John is addressing various churches in Asia Minor (see Rev. 2-3), so it is quite impossible to argue that the reference to ‘the reader’ singular in Rev. 1.3 refers to the audience. It must refer to the rhetor or lector who will orally deliver this discourse to the audience of hearers.

I would suggest that we must draw the same conclusion about the parenthetical remark in Mk. 13.14, which in turn means that not even Mark’s Gospel should be viewed as a text, meant for private reading, much less the first real modern ‘text’ or ‘book.’ Rather Mark is reminding the lector, who will be orally delivering the Gospel in some or several venues near to the time when this ‘abomination’ would be or was already arising that they needed to help the audience understand the nature of what was happening when the temple in Jerusalem was being destroyed.