Ray Fowler .org

Well, I am back from my study retreat. (Last week I took a three-day study retreat to prepare for the next message series at church.)

Wednesday morning I drove up to my parents’ home in Kennebunk, Maine. It was about a three-hour drive, so I began my retreat on the road by listening to some of my favorite music that helps me focus my heart on God. I arrived just in time for lunch (how convenient!) and spent some time catching up with my parents over a meal before settling in to study for the afternoon.

For the retreat I spent my mornings and afternoons in study and prayer. I spent Wednesday afternoon just reading through 1 Samuel 1-7, lingering in the text, taking notes on various themes and looking for connections. The next several days I spent blocking out the sermon texts and themes while interacting with several commentaries. I took breaks for meals and in the evenings to enjoy time with my parents.

It is amazing how much you can get done with large blocks of uninterrupted time. Time management experts say that even a five-minute phone call can disrupt your concentration and easily cost you 30-40 minutes of productivity. The computer with email and internet access can also be a source of small interruptions during the day. To guard against this, I did all of my studying away from the computer, writing out my notes longhand on lined paper in a notebook. Hopefully, I will be able to read my own handwriting as I reference these notes in the coming weeks for sermon preparation!

All in all it was a great study retreat. Thanks to my wife and children for graciously letting me take off for several days. Thanks to my parents for hosting me at their home. Thanks to my church for letting me take the time away from the office for this extended time of study. And thanks to my blog readers for being (mostly) nice in the comments while I was away.

I love baptisms! In fact, I have often said if I were driving down the road and saw a sign outside a church advertising a baptism service, I would pull over and attend, even if I did not know any of the people involved. It is a beautiful thing to witness a person’s profession of faith in Christ through baptism.

We baptized four people during our morning worship service yesterday. Congratulations Peter, Breanna, Christian and Kara! Instead of a full sermon, I gave a brief introduction to baptism, explaining how and why we baptize at our church. Each person who was baptized also shared Scripture and a testimony. You can read my remarks on baptism at the Sermons page under the heading, Baptism Service.

I am off this morning for a three-day study retreat in preparation for our next sermon series. I don’t often get to do this, so I am looking forward to some uninterrupted time with God in his Word in a different setting than at home or at church.

Needless to say, the blog will be on vacation while I am gone. I should get back to posting on Monday. In the meantime, here is a fun little commercial from the Discovery Channel that has been making the rounds. Enjoy!

Discovery Channel: I Love the World
(Video length: 1:00)

Comedian Eddie Izzard plays the voice of talking mouse, Reepicheep, in the upcoming The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian movie. Izzard had this to say about his character:

I realized that he has always been recorded in a high, slightly camp voice because of the overt language that he uses and his chivalrous nature, but actually he is a murderous little so-and-so of a mouse. I see him as the Mad Max of mice.

You can read the whole interview with Izzard here.

Countdown to Caspian:

Click here for more Narnia and Caspian related posts.
Click here for Narnia sermon series.

Update: Taming Technology – Pilgrim Radio Interview
[audio:Taming_Technology.mp3]
Click above (twice) to play | Length: 22 minutes
Click here to download the MP3.

Bill Feltner at Pilgrim Radio recently interviewed me about my blog series: Taming Technology in the Home. Pilgrim Radio serves over 100 cities and communities in Nevada, California, Wyoming and Montana, as well as listeners online through their website. They provide a mixture of adult, contemporary Christian music along with Bible readings, Christian instruction, and interviews on a variety of topics.

The 25-minute interview will be aired Wednesday, April 23 (my birthday!) during the His People segment. The show will air three times during the day: 2am, 12pm and 9pm Pacific Time (5am, 3pm and 12 midnight Eastern Time). If any of those times are good for you, feel free to tune in to Pilgrim Radio on Wednesday to hear the interview. (Click here for Pilgrim Radio home page.)

Taming Technology in the Home series:
    ● Taming Television in the Home
    ● Taming Video Games in the Home
    ● Taming the Internet in the Home

Zondervan just released A Reader’s Hebrew Bible. (This is the counterpart to their earlier release, A Reader’s Greek New Testament.)

Ideal for Hebrew students and pastors, A Reader’s Hebrew Bible saves time and effort in studying the Hebrew Old Testament. By eliminating the need to look up definitions, the footnotes allow the user to read the Hebrew and Aramaic text more quickly, focusing on parsing and grammatical issues.

A Reader’s Hebrew Bible offers the following features:

• Complete text of the Hebrew and Aramaic Bible using the Leningrad Codex (minus critical apparatus)
• Shaded Hebrew names that occur less than 100 times
• Footnoted definitions of all Hebrew words occurring 100 times or less (twenty-five or less for Aramaic words)
• Context-specific glosses
• Stem-specific glossed definitions for verb forms (Qal, Piel, Hiphil, and so forth)
• Ketib/Qere readings both noted in the text and differentiated appropriately
• Marker ribbon

You can view some sample pages from Genesis here. This looks like a helpful resource for anyone with an intermediate knowledge of Hebrew.

HT: Between Two Worlds

Earlier this year, Campus Crusade students surveyed 1,000 University of Florida students on what one question they would ask God. Here were their top three responses (in order):

    1) the meaning and purpose of life,
    2) the problem of suffering, and
    3) the existence of God.

What one question would you ask God?

HT: Stand to Reason

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 19-fold from 430,000 in 1960 to 8.3 million in 2015.
• 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