Ramble On

COWPER’S GRAVE I. It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying; It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying; Yet let the grief and humbleness as low as silence languish: Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish. II. O poets, from [...]

My small group at church is currently going through the book of Hebrews.  Hebrews presents Jesus Christ as the supreme revelation of God with a special focus on showing how Christ is superior to the Old Testament covenant of works – that is, the law.  I thought I’d write up a few of my thoughts [...]

Zondervan sent me a free review copy of John H. Armstrong’s “Your Church is Too Small”.  The book weighs in at 199 pages + glossary and notes.  Throughout the text difficult or technical words in the text are bolded and explained in glossary.  This allows the text to use jargon like Kerygma or make references [...]

I recently got the opportunity to review Zondervan’s new “Illustrated Bible Background Commentary” for the Old Testament. I was given Volume 1 (which covers the Pentateuch) to review. The series contains 5 hardcover volumes and is in the same vein of their New Testament commentaries of the same name (4 volumes). A friend of mine [...]

(Originally a paper for PM 503 – Biblical Preaching: Theory & Practice at Urbana Theological Seminary) Summary Graeme Goldsworthy lays out a foundation for Christocentric preaching in Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture.  The book is divided into two parts:  part one deals with Biblical Theology and part two takes a closer look at [...]

Google Summer of Code ended on September 3rd and I’ve uploaded the final product.  That is to say I hope people use my code and find bugs and fix them I can develop the module further… I started fixing some bugs in CGI.pm as a way to contribute back to the perl community (and also [...]

Well, that was nice.  We (the youth group of Knox Presbyterian Church + alumni + adults, 154 strong) went to Cedar Rapids, IA to do disaster relief with AmeriCorps.  We built a very sweet lady’s house. Psalm 127:1 – “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain.” Hebrews 3:4 – “For every [...]

I made a relatively minor commit – added some tests to test the next_prime funtion over small primes and some POD documentation to the module itself. I’ll be out of town / off the grid for a week starting about 10 minutes from now until the 13th.  I’ll be with my old church in Naperville, [...]

Preached my first sermon at the young adult service (called Godsearch”) at the Vineyard in Urbana, IL.  You can find the MP3 and the entire podcast at the Godsearch website. Feedback – irenic or polemical – welcomed, encouraged, and appreciated.

Icebreakers Use one of the following questions to open up discussion.  (If you have first-time guests, be sure to have people give their names as they answer the icebreaker question.) What did you think of the service on Sunday?  What does worship mean to you? Our Study:  Metamorphosis “Yet a time is coming and has [...]