Jesus in China
July 8, 2008 by bereanccClick here to see.
Pray for our summer team leaving tonight!
Galatians Wordle
July 7, 2008 by bereancc
[Click to enlarge]
What’s a wordle? A wordle is a graphic representation of a body of text. The words that appear more frequently are given a larger size, while the words that are less frequent are smaller. This is a good, visual way to chart out and evaluate how certain words are given more prominence in any given text.
The above picture is a wordle of the book of Galatians. I’d thought it would be fun and appropriate to post since P. Peter has been going over a series in Galatians for the past month.
Now my good sense tells me that it would be an exegetical fallacy of some kind to automatically attach greater significance to words that are used more frequently. The frequency of a word doesn’t necessarily directly correspond to importance. In fact, a writer may deliberately choose to use a word less frequently to create a deeper impression upon its usage.
Now that being said, one must remember that a conventional method employed by biblical writers for emphasis is repetition. Therefore, it’s a common hermeneutical principle to be attentive to words that appear more often than others in a given passage or book of Scripture.
In the end, use discretion and evaluate accordingly; take for it what you will but obviously, the prominence of Christ in Galatians is not to be ignored. =)
Good-o-Meter
July 4, 2008 by bereanccA little cheezy, a little fun, but it gets the point across.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Meet Our Retreat Speaker: Pastor Paul Kim
July 3, 2008 by bereancc
Family: wife, Linda; son Micah (7); Kylie (2); and baby boy (due July 9,2008)!
Pastor Paul and Linda have been married for 10 years. They met during their time together at UC Berkeley where they both graduated. Today, Linda is working as a preschool teacher.
P. Paul is the original church planter and lead pastor for Harbor Presbyterian Church in Carmel Valley and Carlsbad. HPC is a multiethnic, multi-site church in the greater San Diego region.
He graduated from UC Berkeley with a history degree, and received his Master of Divinity from the Westminster Seminary in Escondido, California. Prior to Harbor, P. Paul served as college pastor of Cerritos Presbyterian Church, as well as the youth and college pastor of KCPC in San Francisco.
Among his many hobbies, Pastor Paul is an avid Lakers, Padres, and Chargers fan. He frequents Mexican restaurants and loves reading pretty much any subject (theology, history, fiction, non fiction, etc). He also loves spending time with his kids and family, going to the beach, firing up his Nintendo Wii and rocking out to Guitar Hero.
Please pray for Pastor Paul as he will speak from God’s Word, teaching us on the the topic of The Christ-Centered Life. Please also pray that our retreat next month will be a fruitful and enriching time of instruction and fellowship for our church body!
The Excellent Christ
July 2, 2008 by bereancc
Once…in 1737…I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension…The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception…which kept me the greater part of the time in a flood of tears, weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust; and to be full of Christ alone’ to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity.
The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1995 [1834]), xlvii
A Call to Extraordinary Prayer for Revival
July 1, 2008 by bereancc[referred to by Elder Vince]
Click here.
Resolved Reflections: Jon Sng
July 1, 2008 by bereancc
Initially I was skeptical about going to RESOLVED. 12 sermons in the span of 4 days seemed a little heavy. Upon arrival at the conference my mindset shifted from indifference to amazement. Seeing thousands of believers gathered in a room to hear the Word of God through pastors like John MacArthur, CJ Mahaney, John Piper, and the others preach about heaven and hell was a sight I will not soon forget. After this conference I became eager to see heaven and to be able to worship Christ in Heaven. Death does not seem so bad after all.
Pastor’s Desk: Why Do We Sin? (pt. 2)
June 30, 2008 by bereanccOur lack of faith leads to sin and our sin leads to lack of faith.
Many sin because their faith or lack of faith allows them room to live with an ongoing, unrepentant presence of sin in their lives. But there are also many who lack faith because of their sins. In 2 Cor.4:4 we are taught that the “god of this age” has blinded the mind of the unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. The reason why our adversary has this kind of control over them is through the presence of sin in them. Sin gives our enemy the foothold to blind people to the reality of God’s glory. As Christians we have been delivered from the ultimate blindness that leads to death but we are also susceptible to momentary blindness when we allow unrepentant sin to exist in our lives. We cannot question why God does not reveal Himself all the while refusing to take off the very blinders that prevent us from seeing Him. God is not playing hide and seek with His people. God is Spirit and we can only connect with Him in spirit. We (mankind) at one point were only flesh (because we were dead spiritually through our sin) God became flesh to make contact with us. But now that we have been born again of the Spirit.. God remains in the Spirit (mostly). We keep asking to see God and yet God is exhorting us to open our eyes. It is our unwillingness to live in the spirit that prevent us from seeing God.
Isa 59:1-2
Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,
nor his ear too dull to hear.
2 But your iniquities have separated
you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
so that he will not hear.
NIV
Thank God that He is gracious enough to forgive us when we are willing to repent. Even if it is over and over again.
