I was considering the thought that when I hold the Scriptures in my hand, many men from the history of the church died to keep these books. People have been beaten, tortured, and so many other awful things, in order to keep what we now have as our Scriptures. I think so often, without keeping in view what our brothers and sisters from times past went through to preserve the Scriptures, we can really become complacent and forget that we have such an incredible gift that men have died for so that we could have it … Let alone forgetting the fact that we have the very words of God spoken to us through the writers of Scripture! Praise God for raising up men to write down what God inspired and also that God raised up men to preserve those writings for our benefit.
“…the Emerging Church is the latest version of [theological] liberalism. The only difference is that old liberalism accommodated modernity and the new liberalism accommodates postmodernity.” – Mark Driscoll
I can appreciate what the Emerging Church is attempting to do in reaching people with the Gospel in order that people may be saved. I respect their analysis of the modern church growth movement and agree with pretty much all of their criticisms of it. However, something very dangerous has entered the church now. Though it seems so palatable and sensible, it really has deadly poison behind it, even if the main leaders of it don’t intend for it to be this way. to illustrate what this is like, here’s an analogy. If you begin a journey in a straight line, but are off by just one degree when you start, by the time you go the distance it takes to arrive at your intended destination, you are actually very far away from where you wanted to be.
And so it is again with the emerging church, just as it has happened time and time again in the history of the church. What Driscoll is saying in his quote is that the theological liberalism that widely entered the church in the 20th Century was initially an attempt by men to reach the “modern” culture with the Gospel by lopping off miracles and any supernatural quality that makes Christianity what it is. So they threw out the resurrection, substitutionary atonement, and a host of other core, orthodox doctrines. And they failed miserably in their original mission, because in order to meet the culture they adopted the cultures philosophies and ideas, and integrated them into their teaching. It was a disaster. Entire books were devoted to defending historic Christianity, one most notable work by a man named J. Gresham Machen, entitled Christianity and Liberalism. Highly recommended!
And so the Emerging Church is now doing the same thing liberalism did in the 20th Century, but philosophies and ideas of the culture have changed since then. Therefore in order to accommodate the culture, the Emerging Church is becoming a part of the culture by saying we can’t really know anything for sure, that all ideas are on the table, and they are lopping off huge chunks of doctrine essential to the orthodox Christian faith. And just as liberalism was a disaster for the church in the 20th Century, so now the Emerging Church will be a disaster. It is the new liberalism for our post-modern culture. Though there are many genuine believers in this movement at the present time, and I do not want to totally discredit the work that God has done through it, eventually, this will result in a great many people being led away from the Gospel. As John Piper has said, “Adjust your doctrine – or just minimize doctrine – to attract the world, and in the very process of attracting them, lose the radical truth that alone can set them free.” We now live in a post-modern world where truth is relative. And if we adopt this idea and try to fit it into and read it into the Scriptures (eisegesis), our culture who needs the Gospel so desperately will have no Gospel when they come. The Gospel consists in doctrine.
You cannot ultimately reach the culture with the Gospel on a large scale by becoming apart of the culture, adopting the cultures philosophies and ideologies. Instead, we are to go out into culture and lovingly confront them with Gospel, showing them how the Gospel itself can meet the very things they are searching for outside of Christ, knowing that God has the power to work through the foolishness of what is preached.
Os Guinness says this about how the church is beginning to address th culture on so many fronts: “By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.”
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Related, but more funny than serious:
http://purgatorio1.blogspot.com/2005/11 … ng-if.html
If you are currently running any flavor of Ubuntu version 6.06 and desire to upgrade to version 6.10 and are running vnc4server with resumable desktop sessions, you need to know that this functionality will break. Instead what you will get when connecting to the linux machine removely is a grey screen that looks like this …
;)
“Argh” you say … Well, the solution to fix this problem is to simply downgrade vnc4server to the version before the latest one and the problem should be resolved (has worked for most people with this issue so far). Do this in the gui interface on the machine by going to Applications > System > Synaptic Package Manager, find “vnc4server” in the long list of apps, elect it, then while still in the Synaptic Package Manager, go to the menu Package > Force Version, and you should now have the ability to downgrade vnc4server to the previous version. Apply the change, restart, and you should be back to square one (theoretically). If this doesn’t work, there is another work around I figured out, but it is a bit more complicated.
“Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession …”
Hebrews 3:1
“Even those that are holy brethren, and partakers of the heavenly calling, have need to stir up one another to think more of Christ than they do, to have him more in their minds; the best of his people think too seldom and too slightly of him. We must consider Christ as he is described to us in the scriptures, and form our apprehensions of him thence, not from any vain conceptions and fancies of our own.”
– Matthew Henry, Commenting on the verse above
I think about how much I actually consider Christ during my days, how much I actually turn from my own little self-consumed world and involve Christ in my daily activities, and I am ashamed. Considering how much of my day is spent on self-centered ambitions and pursuits puts me to shame and I am guilty of exchanging the glory of God for something of infinitely lesser value. Christ is the supreme King and the High Priest of our confession! And after having seen such great divine love as this, shown in the incarnation of Christ and ultimately His cross, in not considering Him, I am guilty of sin worse than an unbeliever who does not have this knowledge. How dreadful a thought! I am a sinner beyond what I can even imagine and the more I see it the more it awakens reverent fear in me of God’s holiness. How rotten my soul is and how desperate is my condition! I have nothing to bring this wonderful lovely God who bowed down to rescue me from the depths of hell by going through hell on my behalf. He has bridged the gap between me and God and given me Himself as my treasure, and yet how often and prone I am to turn from Him and His glory. Considering this shows me in a deeper sense how inadequate I am. The word inadequate to describe my condition is itself the same as its meaning. I am exposed and naked before the eyes of Him to whom I must give account, But …
… Praise be to God for the person and work of Jesus Christ that He is actively obeying on my behalf, where He is forever interceding for me and entered into the holy of holies, a place I could never begin to even draw near to without His blood shed on my behalf. I have no hope apart from His work. I cannot fathom the depths and lengths Christ had to go to set aside His heavenly realm and descend down to a worm like me in order to make a wretch His treasure. How incomparable is the love of Christ! What grace has been applied to my dead soul by the Holy Spirit, that was walking straight into the fires of hell in rebellion against God when at His own time, by His own purpose, pleasure and will, He birthed me anew and washed me clean of all my sin. He has removed the guilt and turned away the wrath of God that was ready to be unleashed like an archer with a bow and arrow pulled back over my heart (Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God) … and He did this when Christ stood in the way and took the arrow in His heart for me! “He was cut off from the land of the living,” in order that I may have Him as my treasure forever! OH what great kindness and love is this. This is the love that awakens my heart to sing of His glories. The work of Christ, in His life, death, and resurrection, has brought me life in Himself beyond what I could ever have conceived and I exalt Him for how He has paid for my sins that are so dreadfully awful as I consider their injury to His glory, worth, and value. The greater I see how bad the offense really is, the greater I see the lengths to which Christ had to go for me (and even that I cannot conceive fully).
And so in considering your grave, gloriously injurious sin toward this matchless, loving, kind, yet frighteningly holy God, how you’ve slighted Him day after day, pursuing idols in exchanging Him for things of essentially no value in comparison to Him, consider Jesus Christ, that by faith in His work on your behalf, you have been purchased and redeemed “not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” (1 Peter 1:18-19) The guilt you feel for your sin has been absorbed in Jesus’ work, and only when you begin to see this can you be truly free from sin … if you try to fix this on your own (as all other religions attempt to), you will fail and wallow in your sin and guilt forever. If you are seeking your joy and satisfaction outside of the person of Christ, whatever form that may be in, look to Christ and consider Him and His great love for you brought to a climax on the cross, calling out for you to once again be reconciled to Him, that you may have your enjoyment and satisfaction complete by God Himself. “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” (Hebrews 3:15)
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/02/06/D8N4JF080.html
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/02/0 … 39lll.html
Although hacking attacks are inevitably going to occur, it’s good to know that no major disruption was accomplished with this attack on the 13 top-level DNS servers as had occurred back in Oct 2002 when hackers successfully took down 3 of the 13 servers.
The fact there is disagreement about this in the scientific community leads me to believe that proper scientific methodology for determining facts was not followed. Just as the same people screamed in the ’90s about the effects of acid rain on our health, car paint, the water supply, so also this thing will pass and no will consider it just a few years from now. Have these scientists considered the fact that all the planets in our solar system over the past several years have had average temperature increases along with our planet? Could it be possible that as a fact the sun’s energy output has increased, causing a slight average warming trend in our atmosphere? Could it be this is just a front to push a deeper agenda, namely higher taxes, more government, less freedom, the redistribution of wealth?
A site that has movies, tv shows, and tons other stuff … http://www.alluc.org/alluc/
Here’s a link to a Star-Telegram article about Ernie and Zach (Zach is in my D-team @ CCBC) appearing on Oprah today … http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/16587162.htm
Well, it finally happened … during an install of Windows XP nonetheless. I was getting tired of dealing with Windows 2000 Server and some of its overhead, so I decided to put XP on there, and for some reason, it used enough power to push my already fragile power supply over the edge. Gonna take a couple of days to get a new one, so its all good. I don’t have email right now, but it’s being forwarded to my two backup mail servers. So anyway, there’s the scoop. Kinda sticks, but oh well, not the end of the world, God is sovereign 🙂 Teaching me some about where I place to much of a priority actually. So praise God for that … it has been way overdue for a new power supply anyway, so it all works out. Email me at westerfunk@gmail.com if you need to get in touch with me …
Update … 1/31/2007
Got the webserver back up and running now. Email and all services are back up and running normally.
http://www.petri.co.il/configure_tcp_ip_from_cmd.htm
This could be very helpful for times you need to quickly switch back and forth between multiple IP configurations on the same network interface using a batch script.