Discipline vs Love?

in agreement with Sean's sermon yesterday, Peter Mead offers the following additional and helpful pointer to people like me who can fall into thinking that pursuing the disciplines are ends in themselves. He says...

Jesus did, of course, have extended prayer times and experienced physically harsh settings, yet he didn’t promote such things.

His own devotion was, of course, robust: he once spent more than a month in the wilderness being tempted by Satan; he also spent full nights in prayer; and he often hiked long distances and slept in rough settings. Yet asceticism wasn’t a take-home lesson for his disciples. Even the followers of John the Baptist asked why Jesus didn’t insist on some fasting.

Read the whole thing here.

Approaches to the Book of the Revelation

Have recently started meandering through a sermon series on Revelation that is 204 sermons long.  At current rate, I will finish the last sermon about three tears (tears? I mean years!) from now.  One of the introductory sermons was on different (European) approaches to the book. Here follows a brief summary:

On Prejudice and Scapegoats

One of the reasons I love working in a comprehensive secondary school setting is because you see wider society played out on a microcosmic scale.

The following social experiment is VERY clever and a real eye opener. Many of us liberally educated types assume we have risen above prejudice, but that's because we earn enough to enjoy enough creature comforts in life with our loved ones.

If the economy continues to stumble along as it has today, it will only be a matter of time before the cry for a scapegoat becomes unbearably loud and even the so-called "enlightened" will be drawn into baying:

Are You Past or Future Oriented?

Too past-oriented and you become nostalgic.
Too present-oriented and you become selfish.
Too future-oriented and you become naive.

I'm one of the people in the video below who thinks waiting is a waste of time. I need to learn that it isn't. As the old saying goes: Patience is a virtue and it reaps a great reward (Heb.6:12).

The Real Jesus

If you lived at the South Pole without any contact with the world beyond, it would be hard to conceive of any kind of life beyond the snow - yet we know there is so much more to the world than whitened landscapes.

Similarly, it's easy for all of us to get stuck in a rut in our understanding of who Jesus is.

This month's Biblical Thinking Forum will see Mark Amos leading us in thinking again about who the real Jesus is and why it matters.

Come join us on Monday 16 April @7:30pm in the RFC Offices and get released from your rut.

Computers Like Humans? Probably not... IMHO

A recent Horizon documentary posed the question of whether it is possible for machines to be intelligent like humans.

The presenter took us round the world visiting people who were trying to work out what artificial intelligence is and then reproducing it in a machine. We saw machines teaching each other things, beating humans on quiz shows and creating art amongst other things.

But then we were asked the question, do computers really think, or are they just simulating thinking? If that's a confusing question, here's a short video to explain the difference:

Resurrection = New Home

Moving home and some!

Understanding how to live in this new period of history - after the resurrection of Jesus - is sometimes difficult to get your head round, because some things continue, but others stay the same.

For example, there are no longer any restrictions on what you can eat, no animal sacrifices to perform, no requirement to worship God in only one place (e.g.Col.2:16). And yet, other stipulations remain0. It's still no to sexual immorality, eating blood etc. (Ac.15:28-29). So what's the rule of thumb for distinguishing what to keep and what to chuck?

I don't have a definitive answer, but perhaps a metaphor would help.