As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
Especially at this time of the year, Christians all over the world are making public statements about the supreme gift God the Father made to mankind: His own eternal Son, Jesus Christ the Lord.
For hundreds of years before the Lord Jesus arrived on planet Earth, the Father had promised to His people Israel that His Son was coming to provide salvation to those who would believe in Him. For example, Moses wrote:
The simplicity of Paul’s ethical mandate for believers is unmistakable in 1 Corinthians 10:31: “Whatever then you eat or you drink or whatever you do—all unto God’s glory you are to do.” In that context Paul challenges the Corinthian believers specifically to handle freedoms pertaining to eating and drinking in a such a way as to contribute to the purpose for all activity: to glorify God.
If God’s own purpose in His activities is His own glory (e.g., Eph 1:6, 12, 14), then it should come as no surprise that the stated singular purpose in our activities is that we should likewise glorify Him. This is the ought of Christian ethics: that we should glorify God, and it is important that we also understand the is upon which the ought is grounded.
Read the series so far.
Listen sometime to an NFL or college football coach after they have just won a Super Bowl or national championship. Almost inevitably you will get some excitement about this achievement in their lives and how much it means to the players, etc. But that interview always seems to come back to this theme: “that was great, but it means that the coaches who didn’t make the playoffs have had this much time to get a head start on next season.” It’s a never-ending process.
On a much smaller scale I go through this each week with sermon prep. I study, pray, meditate, study some more, and form a message (hopefully from God) from the text for the week. I stand up Sunday and deliver a word from the Lord, then go home exhausted. Sunday night we do it again. Monday is a day of rest, and the cycle begins again on Tuesday.
“There are ways to deceive that don’t require outright lying. One is to present facts without enough context to make them meaningful. That’s a specialty of the Green movement: using facts without context to generate fears”
“The faith-work movement has risen in prominence across evangelicalism, with more and more pastors and congregations grabbing hold of the depth and breadth of Christian vocation and expanding their ministry focuses in turn.”
From Voice, Nov/Dec 2014. Used by permission. Read part 1.
Most of the innovations sweeping higher education are products of the Internet that is quickly transforming virtually everything and making our entire world more global, mobile, social, visual and digital.
The world of work is increasingly international. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and be culturally diverse. Working from his home country of St. Vincent, a West Indian pastor/graphic artist designed the current Piedmont logo. That seemed most appropriate to me as we added “International” to our school name and featured the curvature of the earth in the logo.
My son is finishing up his M.Div from Southern Seminary. He was a resident there for two years, but is finishing up his last year online. His wife is also taking online courses. I know lots and lots of people doing this — not only the wave of the future, but a current “wave.”
What about you? What do you think about this? Are classes better this way, worse, or close to an even trade (pros and cons balance).
Poll Results
Have you ever taken (accredited) online courses?
There are basically two ways to ride a roller coaster. The first is to resist the ride. You can press your feet against the floorboard and arch your back. You can grip the handle bar so hard your knuckles turn white. You can tense your jaw, tighten your abdominal muscles, and scream bloody murder as you descend the precipitous drops and are flung around the death-defying turns.
Somewhere in my rather limited experience of roller coasters, I discovered a second approach. You can actually relax on a roller coaster. Really! You can loosen your grip on the bar, relax your jaw, legs and abdominal muscles. In fact, you can take a roller coaster ride in the same physical condition and mental state of a couch potato.
Obviously, your physical state will have no influence on the roller coaster. No matter how tense or relaxed you may be, the roller coaster will not alter its route one inch or adjust its speed one iota. Either way, you will be delivered to the platform on time and in one piece. You cannot control the ride, you can only control the rider.
Discussion