Staying Awake

Archive for the ‘Prepared Christian’ Category

So it has obviously been a while since I’ve posted anything here.  I’d like to think it is due to being overwhelmed with other stuff in my life.  Alas, I’m fairly confident there is a fair bit of laziness that has contributed.  Nevertheless, my journey has continued and our Prepared Christian class has continued to meet throughout the summer months. I do have a backlog of posts to make.  Fortunately for me, my implementation of GTD seems to be holding up fairly well and I’ve captured all of the To-Do’s for the pending posts.

Before getting into the subject of this post, a couple items that might be noteworthy.  I am currently participating in a 90-day Labor Day Challenge to read the entire New Testament by Labor Day.  Pastor Mark is heading it up as he is posting the American Standard Version (not the “New”) on-line and each day as he posts it, it becomes a reading for that day on the plan.  The posts themselves are over at the Graham Friends Church web site, but I get to them via Facebook posts he makes each day.  I have to say it has been one of the better uses of FB that I’ve come across.

The other item worth mentioning is that I am currently trying to get hooked up Wycliffe Associates as a volunteer.  Wycliffe Associates supports the larger Wycliffe organization which is engaged in Bible translation in an effort to spread the Word to people in their native language.  Seemed like a good fit for my gifts.  I have gone through the process of being approved as a volunteer.  Just waiting for them to identify a position for me now.

I’m also looking at Voice of the Martyrs and trying to figure out whether there is anything there I might be able to help with.  The stories of Christians fighting persecution throughout the world are very powerful imo.  May hook up with the Be-A-Voice Network.

So, that is enough catching up.  On to the “real” subject of this post.  Back in the middle of June, one of our weekly lessons was on the history of the Old Testament.  In working through that material, one of the items we ran across was the concept of antecedent texts.  These are texts that are referred to in the OT, but which we have no copies of to know what they said.  Since they are referred to in the OT, they existed before the OT section that includes the reference was written – that is, antecedent.  So to some extent, the OT (ok, sections) was “built” using these other texts.

To demonstrate this, Pastor Mark introduced us to “found poetry”.  Found poetry takes words, phrases, sentences from other sources, and then puts them together to create a new work (see, kind of like taking an antecedent text and then adding to it to produce new, inspired text).  As an exercise, we went through eleven pages of our textbook for class and picked out a word, phrase or sentence from each page and put them together as a poem.  One could do some cleaning up if they wanted.  But I am leaving mine it its raw form.  So, without further ado, here is the found poetry (untitled at present) I came up with during our class:

Neither of them thought much of the idea

They cannot recognize the risen Jesus

He opened their minds so they could understand

These actors and props are an integral part to God’s self-revelation

God called

You will be enticed to turn away

Culture shift is witnessed

Political and religious upheaval

Set the stage

The one true God’s character

Challenging the community

After missing a few weeks for various reasons, our Prepared Christian class got back into the swing of things a couple Sundays ago.  Last week’s chapter was on the doctrines of humanity and sin and before jumping in to a discussion on what it means to be human, we were given this quote (at the beginning of the chapter):

God made man to be somebody – not just to have things.
-Brotherhood Journal

After class (we were still working on the chapter this past Sunday), Pastor Mark sent us an “assignment” to help drive home some of what we were studying.  The assignment included a link to a video of Tamara Lowe doing a little “rap”:

Yeah, she goes pretty fast in trying to point out to her audience a little bit about what matters and what doesn’t matter.  And we were to examine a passage from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

These then are the two points that I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Finally, Pastor Mark pointed out that a similar idea can be found in Romans 7:14-15:

¹⁴ For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. ¹⁵ For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Out of all this material (and another bit I’m about to mention), it seems there are two main concepts to consider.  First is the whole idea of what it is to be human.  Second is a bit on the nature of sin (hmmm…and the chapter was on the doctrines of humanity and sin – seem to go hand in hand, eh?)

The material clearly points toward the idea of inescapability of sin (the red squiggly lines say that is not really a word!).  We know how we ought to behave, we fail to do that.  As we discussed in class, sin is so much a part of our nature that we can’t escape even if we try.  Perhaps those paying attention to the Bible or their preachers will think, “of course!” – it is only through our belief in and faith in Jesus that we are able to be freed from sin.  But I think both Paul and Lewis are trying to say that even when we understand and really know that “law”, we will still end up sinning.

If that is the case, clearly we need to examine our response to our sin since we can’t avoid it or escape from it.

For some reason though, I find myself drawn a bit more to this question about what it means to be human or to be somebody.  Pastor Mark mentioned that we might want to read The Velveteen Rabbit (which I found on-line).  I suppose the whole story applies to our attempt to understand what it means to be somebody, but I particularly liked this little bit near the beginning of the story when the Velveteen Rabbit is discussing the process of becoming Real with the Skin Horse:

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time…”

I think that is something that lots of folks lose track of – that our lives and what we strive for take a long time.  It doesn’t help that we live in a society/culture that values the instantaneous.

I do like how the Skin Horse expresses the process of becoming real – “You become”.  I guess a lot of people would naturally ask, “you become what?”  They kind of touched on this in the Raising a Modern Day Knight book, how men seemed to be defined by their career.  But I think the Brotherhood Journal and  Williams are looking even beyond that.  I hope there is more to me than just being a CFO.

Unfortunately, while all this reading has raised a lot of questions and “hmmm…”s in my mind, I don’t think I’m any closer to any answers.  It has only been two weeks though and as the Skin Horse says, it takes a long time.  So I’ll have to continue to ponder the idea of becoming.

Just testing a new WP plugin for generating Tweets since my last one mysteriously died.

This week’s Prepared Christian assignment has to do with creeds.  As we’ve been studying the chapter on God the Father, the idea/concept of creeds has come up a few times as we attempt to define the doctrine of God the Father.  One of the things we have learned in our class is that for the early church, most people did not have access to books like the Bible (and may not have been able to read it even if they did).  So, the church had to come up with ways to get everyone on the same page, especially when it came to understanding some of the basic concepts of being a Christian.  So creeds became an important tool in this effort.  Webster’s online dictionary defines a creed as:

a brief authoritative formula of religious belief

Our assignment was to review the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed; identify some common structural elements; and then write our own creed.  Having attended a Methodist church for many years, the Apostle’s Creed was pretty familiar.  That could also be a holdout from attending a Catholic church as a child.  I was also somewhat familiar with the Nicene Creed.  However, I had never run across the Athanasian Creed before (which, btw, fails on “brief”).

Pastor Mark sent us copies of the versions of each of the creeds he wanted us to use. This was a good move as a quick Google search will likely overwhelm you with the different versions that are out there. Looks like the Apostle’s Creed version is the Traditional English Version and the Nicene Creed is the International Consultation on English Texts translation as found at the creeds.net web site. The Athanasian Creed is close to one I found at affirms.org.

I did a little mindmapping as I worked through the creeds and came up with the following (sorry, been trying to figure out how to embed the Freemind file, but it keeps throwing an error when I preview – complains about Javascript and Flash not activated – so you’ll have to put up with PNGs):

Using that, I put together the following outline of some Christian creed attributes:

• Use the word believe. The Apostle’s Creed and Nicene Creed do this more actively.
• All seem to focus heavily on the concept of the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed is very, very focused on this. Probably half the creed is spent explaining this concept.
• God the Father
  • present in all the creeds
  • all use the adjective Almighty
  • references to being the creator/maker of Heaven, earth, all things
• Jesus Christ
  • the only Son of God
  • begotten
  • emphasis on incarnate nature
  • historical perspective of his life on earth
  • he died, was buried, and rose
  • ascended into Heaven
  • will judge us
  • life everlasting is possible
• Holy Spirit
  • Ghost is also used (I like Spirit myself)
  • giver of life (general and in terms of Jesus’s conception)
  • not much else
• Other stuff
  • catholic church
  • communion of saints
  • forgiveness of sins
  • resurrection of the body
  • everlasting life
  • Apostle’s Creed and Nicene Creed set these off; Athanasian Creed seems to incorporate them into the body of the creed

In starting to think about how to draft my own creed, some ideas included:

• use believe as an active verb
• touch on each “member” of the Trinity. I tend to feel the Holy Spirit gets the short end of the stick – any way to change that? I like John 14:26 and the reference to the Holy Spirit as the Helper coming to teach us and help us with remembrance, so perhaps use those?
• As I started writing, I decided the descriptions of the God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit would all start with “who”
• briefly considered structuring it using who, what, when, where, why, and how. That did not last long
• instead of the “other” things being included, ala Apostle’s and Nicene, I decided to go a little different route. I would use the five soli we studied earlier to structure the final section.

So with that in mind, I put together another mind map, this time of my creed:

Finally, converting all of this to a format of a creed that could be repeated yields:

I believe in Almighty God, who is our Father in Heaven and on earth, who created Heaven and earth, who is above us and with us, now and forever;

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, who became man incarnate that he might suffer for our salvation, who died, was buried, and rose from the dead, who ascended into Heaven, and who will judge us from His throne;

I believe in the Holy Spirit, who gives us life, who helps us by giving us knowledge and remembrance of what Jesus Christ taught;

I believe God grants us his grace that we may be saved;

I believe our faith is the path and the means to access God’s grace;

I believe Jesus Christ is our savior that our sins may be forgiven;

I believe in the Holy word of God as revealed through Scripture;

I believe in the Glory of God.

Amen.

A pdf version is available of just the creed.

Was reading up some stuff in A Guide to Prayer and came across two passages in some C.S. Lewis materials that seemed to connect with my blog here.

The first is from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer.  In that, Lewis writes,

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him.  He walks everywhere incognito.  And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate.  The real labour is to remember, to attend.  In fact, to come awake.  Still more, to remain awake. (emphasis added)

That just kind of touched me since my blog tagline is about my efforts to stay awake spiritually.  Or as Lewis puts it, “to remain awake”.  That is one idea that came to me when I really started to get more serious on my path to God.  Being a Christian is about more than being awakened to the existence of God and his saving grace.  Once we stir, we have to work to not fall back asleep, not even to nap.  I know there are many stories and passages in the Bible cautioning us to stay awake, some even told by Jesus.  That was part of what drew me to the concept.  I’m sure I’ll write about that some more as I run across these passages (or I could pull out my journal where I made a bunch of notes on it).

Speaking of my journal, I’ll briefly note that I am struggling with an organization problem.  I currently have ideas coming in from three different places – Sunday School (mainly the Guide to Prayer), church services, and now The Prepared Christian class.  I’m wondering if I need to somehow come up with a solution that would put all this material in one place.  Of course, that kind of calls for an electronic solution.  I’m somewhat resistant to that as the act of writing by hand is enjoyable and in some ways, forces me to slow down a bit and give a little more attention to my thoughts.  Been thinking about switching to a larger size Moleskin, but still not sure.

OK, back to the C.S. Lewis connections.  The second is from The Joyful Christian.  The passage, if I can summarize, is about an individual struggling with an experience he had with God and how that fits in with “religion” and theology.  The individual felt like he no longer needed those.  Lewis presents an interesting analogy of a person who takes a walk on a beach and then looks at a map of an ocean.  While the personal viewing of the ocean is very powerful, it does not help one get anywhere the way a map does.  Lewis notes that one benefit of the map is that it has had input from many different people who have all had their experiences and that is now combined to produce the map.  As we studied in our class, one consideration regarding the authority of The Bible is the number of people who have helped write it (over many centuries, cultures, languages, etc.).  So in a way, The Bible is similar to the map in helping us understand where to get to and how to get there.  And it has the benefit of all these shared insights as opposed to a single person having written it.

A few minutes ago I finished up our nightly devotion with my son.  Tonight’s lesson was about integrity – doing the right thing even when no one else knows about it.  My son seemed to really struggle with understanding what moral dilemmas and difficult decisions are.  Not sure whether that is good or not.

Anyway, part of each night’s devotion is an activity.  Tonight’s was an exercise to unscramble a verse using a key that was provided (I guess it is more breaking a code than unscrambling).  The verse was Psalm 119:11, which in his KJV read:

¹¹Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.

Or, using my ESV:

¹¹I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.

Seeing the word, “word” in there immediately brought to mind John 1:1 for me:

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Since we’ve been doing a lot of studying recently about words and THE Word, I found the Psalm passage to be one of those that jumped out at me as contemporaneous.  And, I don’t recall running across that particular passage in our lessons, so it was one of those “new” connections.  I’m sure there are many, many more instances of this through The Bible since The Portable Seminary can only hit the primary examples.

One of the things I like about the passage is how it connects with John 1:1.  And if I think about having the word in my heart could also be taken to mean having Christ in my heart.  I also like the idea of having Christ and God’s word in our hearts will help us not sin.  I think in my case the more time I spend in the word, and in studying the word, and with the word, the easier I find it to resist temptations.  Even to the point where some temptations aren’t really even temptations any longer.  I think it also makes it easier to engage in more wholesome or peaceful or productive activities and pursuits.  It is just an all around good thing!

A few weeks ago, Pastor Mark put together some images that could be used as computer wallpaper.  It listed the five solas (soli?) that we studied as the core of evangelical Christianity. [Aside - inerrancy of Bible and personal conversion, the short definition - I still remember!]  I’ve got it on all my computers at home and work.  Except one – the iPhone.  Finally took the time to sit down and convert it into format that would work on the iPhone.  Thanks to Mark for the original artwork that served as the basis.  Now I’m rockin’ with five solas on all computers.

This week for my Christianity study, Pastor Mark gave us an assignment focused on Isaiah 40:6-7 (ESV):

⁶A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said,”What shall I cry?”
All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.
⁷The grass withers, the flower fades
when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.

In our last chapter that we studied, we covered several literary conventions and how they are used in the Bible. Looking back through my notes and the chapter, the following conventions are what I’ll analyze the passage for:

• literal speech
• figurative speech
• simile
• metaphor
• parable
• allegory
• symbolism
• prophecy
• poetry

Not real sure whether prophecy is really a literary convention along the same lines as simile or metaphor. To me, in the list above, it stands out from the rest as not being a convention that is applicable to any other writing. So it is not so much a literary convention as a Biblical convention. But since it was covered in our lesson, I’ll at least consider it anyway.

Literal speech. By literal speech, the question is whether the passage can be read literally. That is, with the simple, well-understood plain meanings of the words. The passage records the vision of Isaiah. To the extent that it is recording “history” I think it can be read literally. This really is the vision that Isaiah experienced. The only exception might be the first line, which could be figurative (see below).

Figurative speech. Are any of the words used in a way that is slightly different from the normal, plain meaning? Do they stand for something else? I tend to think not. The language is pretty straightforward and I don’t think any of the words are used in a way that is different from what is written. I suppose there is the possibility that the first line, “A voice says, ‘Cry!’” could be figurative in that it is describing a voice calling out, but perhaps not a physical sound that we would normally associate with hearing with our ears. Kind of like the sunrise I saw the other morning, which could have been described as the sky painted by God. In the same way, the voice described may not be an actual sound. Maybe.

Simile. Since simile is identified through the use of the words “like” or “as”, we can pretty easily spot the simile in the line “its beauty is like the flower of the field”. Following the line above, I suppose “its” could refer to either flesh or grass.

Metaphor. A more direct comparison than simile, this is indicated when a thing is described as being another thing. In this passage, I think there are a couple instances. First is the line “All flesh is grass”, the metaphor being that flesh is grass. The second occurs at the end when it is stated “the people are grass”. Here again, people are being compared to grass directly.

Parable. A parable is defined in our text as an extended simile and has a single main point. I think this passage probably does qualify as a parable. It is a very brief story about grass being beautiful, but it and flowers fade when the LORD blows on it. The point being that people (as grass) are the same – we will eventually wither and fade.

Allegory. An allegory is defined as an extended metaphor with different parts of the story representing different points. I think with the first and last lines of the story of grass being metaphorical statements, there is a strong temptation to see the whole passage as an allegory. But I’m not sure it really contains multiple meanings or multiple metaphors for different things. So I’m going to come down on the side of this not being an allegory.

Prophecy. As we discussed in class and in the text, Biblical prophecy is not foretelling the future. Rather, it plays one of two roles. Calling people (back) to a holy life and/or predicting blessing or judgment. I don’t see anything in this passage that plays to either of those roles, so I’m going with no for prophecy.

Poetry. We had a whole section in our text about poetry, including how Hebrew poetry differs from English poetry. Given some of the conventions used to indicate poetry in modern Bibles, I suppose it is possible the passage was written in a poetical(???) manner. Not real sure on this one.

Have I ever mentioned that literature and English classes in high school were my most difficult subjects.

Last night my wife and I went to see The Book of Eli.  There were a couple times when I felt it was kind of pandering to a Mad Max’ish audience.  It was also a lot to take in and I believe I may need to watch it again (and again and again?) to see what I missed.  Anyway, don’t want to go into too much about the movie at this point except to say that there are at least two twists at the end.  I had kind of figured one out, but they layered a twist on top of a twist (so maybe three twists).

It was interesting in light of some of the studying we’ve been doing the past couple weeks.  Especially in this week’s reading (Chapter 3 of The Portable Seminary) and last week’s about the languages of the Bible.  Looking back through this week’s chapter, I think this quote from Dallas Willard (bottom of page 73) makes an interesting point to The Book of Eli:

“God has been willing and competent to arrange for the Bible, including its record of Jesus, to emerge and be preserved in ways that will secure his purposes for it among human beings worldwide.”

I think anyone who sees the movie will understand how fitting that comment is.

This past week in our Christianity study, Pastor Mark challenged us to a quick writing assignment during the class.  The question he posed to us was “how are the Biblical languages ideal for God to reveal himself to us?”  We went around the table and most everyone discussed or shared a little bit about what they wrote.  So, to kind of memorialize what I managed to slap down on the paper, here is what I had.

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In order for God to reveal himself to us, he had to make sure the message would get to us.  This meant, among other things, that the Bible and all of the information in it had to survive over numerous centuries, peoples, technologies, and cultures.

To get things started, Hebrew was used and was ideal because it is a language that I call “pictoral based”.  That is, it is good for describing the world – things, basic actions, this happened, that happened.  To some extent, it is a good storytelling language that would have been especially useful in a time when written words were rare and people relied instead on a spoken tradition.  And if you’ve ever done the whisper exercise, you know that keeping things simple is important.

I also tend to think of that time period as an “infancy” period for God’s people.  In relative terms, those who believed in God were in a young period in history – like a little child.  Having had little children, I know that when teaching them to communicate, you have to start with basic words.  Mama. Papa. Ball. Apple. Dog. Run. Walk. Sit.  That is, words that describe the world and what the young child sees and experiences.  Much like the Hebrew language.  So this was ideal in preserving God’s revealed message for the first few thousand years.

With the arrival of Jesus, a new language became necessary.  Greek.  Of course there were practical considerations that made it an ideal language.  It was a language that most people in that part of the world could communicate with, which helped in spreading the Word.  But for my “construct”, a key component is that Greek was a language that could express higher level concepts and thoughts.  As our Portable Seminary text indicates, Greek was a very nuanced language that could convey lots of information (if I can get started on my Greek study, maybe I’ll figure that out).

This new language was important as God’s people (both Jew and Gentile) had reached a new age and to some extent had grown up.  With Jesus, it was now time for us to start to learn how to think about applying God’s laws and revelations in a way beyond mechanical adherence to an ordinance.  So being able to describe and communicate how we think and feel and what motivates us became important.  Again, this is similar to a child growing up.  As they get older, at least in school, they start getting into abstract concepts and ideas.

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OK, I think that is probably all I’ll get to tonight.  Seems like I had something to wrap this up with, but my brain has spaced out on me.  I’ll have some more entries later this week – a little something from our A Guide to Prayer that we use in Sunday School and I need to start a bit about my lifestyle change (yeah, that’s a fancy way to discuss losing weight!).  And no, I haven’t proofed this before hitting the Publish button.