Knowledge
22 08 2008
“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
I want to know Jesus. Properly. Truly. I want to know the one who is in very nature God, and took on the form of a servant. I want to know the one who became man, was born in a scungy little rural town in the backwaters of Israel.
I want to know the one who lived life amongst his people, while they didn’t recognise who he was. I want to know the one who called sinners to himself. I want to know the one who taught the wisdom of God.
I want to know Jesus, who suffered terribly at the hands of men. I want to know the one who was arrested on dodgy charges, who was beaten up by thugs, who was condemned by a frenzied crowd and a cowardly man. I want to know my Lord, who did not retaliate, but took it all. I want to know the man who bore the sins of all of these people. I want to know Jesus, God himself, who bore my sins.
I want to know this divine man, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was strung up to die on a Roman cross. I want to know about his death, because his death was for me, and for you. I want to be his follower, being like him in his death, because in his death I am united to my Lord. I want to know this Jesus, because his death is freedom for me.
I want to know Jesus, to be united to him, to have fellowship in sharing in his sufferings, in suffering now for his name, so that I am part of his people. I don’t know why God chose me, to give me life, to set me aside for resurrection on the final day, but I want to know Jesus my Lord and share in his resurrection.
To live is Christ. To die is gain.
I don’t want to know the things I’ve done. They’re rubbish.
I want to know Christ.
I hope you do too.
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Categories : bible, christian, sermon
Hear Hear
10 08 2008I’m getting more frustrated with Accordance by the day. Not with maps - with the core stuff.
Perhaps some competition will help things along.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Categories : apple, bible, blogs, christian, tech, web
Not convinced of the value
27 05 2008
For mac users, Accordance version 8 is now out. It looks like there’s a couple of bugs still being worked through (the universal binary didn’t have the help file for a while), so if you’re keen on getting it maybe wait a couple of days.
To be frank, I’m not that impressed with the feature list. The big one is that it’s now a universal binary, which means that on newer Intel-based macs (read: any mac that has been available in the last 2 years or so) it should run with fewer system resources. That’s good, but I’ve never really noticed it being particularly power-hungry anyway, so it’s one of those features that I probably won’t notice much.
More advanced search features sound cool, but I’m yet to be convinced of their utility. Horizontal panes of bible texts - meh.
And the final thing they’re trumpeting is Unicode import. This means you can type/paste unicode characters into the search field and it will actually work, as opposed to now where it simply doesn’t recognise the characters. Presumably you can still export to unicode, but there is no mention of upgraded fonts, so my frustrations continue. The beautiful fonts used to render Greek and Hebrew within Accordance remain accessible only to those who own Accordance. In order to share work effectively, you need to use a sub-standard font, which is really annoying.
I’m amazed that unicode is still not used internally. I’ve done some coding on mac, and it’s really not that difficult to support as far as the programming tools go. Font creation and modification is not impossible either. There must be an awful lot of legacy code that they’re unwilling to change, and very few programmers, over at Accordance HQ. At some point they’re going to have to strip it back and rework it properly, and the longer they wait, the bigger the job will be.
My conclusion? I’m nowhere near impressed enough to shell out for an upgrade. Feel free to convince me otherwise.
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Categories : apple, bible, christian, language, tech
Phew.
9 02 2008
Calvin reading… check.
Hebrew translation… check.
Greek translation… check (well almost, but will be by tomorrow).
Time for a holiday. See you all in a week.
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Categories : bible, books, christian, snorkeling, travel
Sermon Soak
5 02 2008
The active soak is the research phase, where the various bits and pieces about a passage whirl around and congeal and start to make some unified sense. My overall understanding of what I’m about to do comes from this part of my prep.
For me, the passive soak is where my stuff gets interesting. Having understood the big picture, I like to let it brew for a few days, a week, whatever. Things come up in life that would be perfect as an illustration of a difficult point. I think of a great link to a book I read 3 years ago as I’m driving down the M4. A conversation turns to a tangential issue, and helps me see the whole problem anew.
My advice? Soak. It will make your delivery better.
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Categories : bible, blogs
A tale of two cities
13 12 2007
Canberra and Melbourne.
Two conferences in two weeks: National Training Event (AFES), and an Engineering Education conference (AAEE).
The difference in tone was really remarkable. The theme of NTE was God’s word to God’s world, and was consistently and thoroughly marked by a dependence on hearing and receiving God’s words. One of the speakers, Peter Adam, had a consistent refrain in his talks: Hearing God is Receiving God’s words, written for his people, by his Spirit, about his Son. There was a real understanding that God has spoken clearly in the Scriptures in a way that is both accessible and applicable to those who hear now. In short, there was truth, and truth recognised and taken on board as determinative for life.
The Education conference, on the other hand, was a little like the blind leading the blind. I went down on behalf of the team I worked with at UNSW, to present a paper on the way we had structured and taught a particular Electrical Engineering subject this year. All the people at this conference were educators in some way, mostly lecturers/faculty at various universities, and many of them really passionate about teaching their students the profession they know and love. The content of the presentations, however, were almost universally along the lines of ‘this is what we tried, it seemed to work (or, alternatively, it really didn’t), you might like to try it yourself’. Even those with massive experience and expertise in education philosophy and techniques were reluctant to make broad sweeping statements.
For good reason.
There is no reason to expect any particular educational philosophy is canonically good and true. There is, however, every reason to expect that God’s word is truth for his people, to be accepted as such.
The tone of the conferences was actually a great encouragement. Christians are confident that God speaks to his world by his word. Other endeavours are trying to feel their way towards something that works perhaps a little better than other systems tried to date. In reading the Bible, this is a great comfort.
God’s words, written for his people, by his Spirit, about his Son.
Truth indeed.
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Categories : bible, christian, culture, tech, travel
More vocab
31 10 2007
I’ve passed some of these around already, but I’ve submitted my global NT Greek and OT Hebrew vocab files to Provoc (a great mac program that I’ve written about before in the context of the Moore College set texts). They cover all of the words in the NT & OT respectively, and are sorted by frequency. They’re grammatically tagged (by masc/fem noun, verb, adjective, etc.), and unicode so you can choose your font.
You can fetch them from the vocab section of the provoc website, or the direct links are listed out on my downloads page - I won’t replicate them here.
Enjoy.
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Categories : bible, language
More Accordance
29 10 2007There’s a new version of Accordance out, but it won’t be found by the AccUpdater widget (at least this was true for me. This may have changed). Visit accordancebible.com to download the latest version.
According to Accordance themselves (ha!), this version ‘does not have many new features‘ other than minor bug-fixes, but is now Leopard-ready. Which means that if, like me, you’re running Tiger, then you get a taste of the detached-tabbed look of 10.5:
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Categories : apple, bible, christian, nerdy
