It says in Romans 8:15 that “you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ” Abba! Father!” This adoption we have into God’s family is difficult to grasp. I still call my earthly dad, dad and my earthly mom, mom. The process of adoption we have in the world today is a legal process. At some point, an adopted person legally goes from being under the care of one family to being under the care of another. But this spiritual adoption that Paul describes is different, we retain our family here on earth while at the same time we join a much larger family. We are adopted into Christ’s family, his church, and receive all the blessings of his inheritance. In fact, Paul will later say that we are joined with all who have been chosen by God. This means that every person who ever had a saving faith in God (before Jesus’ death and after) is considered a brother or a sister to us.

We know what the process of earthly adoption looks like, but how does this spiritual adoption work? John 1:12 says that all who receive him, who believe in his name, have this right of spiritual adoption. It says that we must believe, we hear the gospel message of forgiveness and put our faith in Christ and his righteousness. But what a blessing it is to know that, just as a family chooses the child it adopts, so to does God choose his children. You may say that God’s choosing seems unfair, but I wonder how many adopted children who were taken out of desperate situations and brought into a home of love and kindness and protection will say the same?

“And there they continued to preach the gospel” - Acts 14:7

Each Tuesday a different reflection on the gospel and its continual effect on our lives

News titles don’t come any better than this

Tiny post-it notes left on a Chuck Norris “shrine” in Iraq by US troops left me in stitches: The fastest way to a man’s heart is with Chuck Norris’s fist, and Chuck Norris divides by zero. Classic.

Get out your checklists!

The other day after Sunday School, a friend stopped me and handed me a newspaper clipping of a Dilbert comic. The comic reminded him of me and he made it a point to cut it out and give it to me next time he saw me.

Before the internet, this was how we hyperlinked things.

Now, I’m a technology nut and I think there are many benefits to what technology allows us to do that we couldn’t do before. But, had he emailed me a link to this comic, I probably wouldn’t have thought too much of it. The fact that it was cut out and hand delivered was a little more meaningful, just like we all still enjoy receiving regular mail. Receiving it by hand was much more valuable to me than receiving it by a mouse click.

Then I got to thinking how important my clicks are to me. I read through a lot of news/blogs/articles everyday on the web. Each thing I read through is found with a single click on a hyperlink somewhere during my daily reading. So when I read through something that isn’t very meaningful or doesn’t cause me to stop and think, I honestly feel like I’ve wasted a click.

This isn’t good. I haven’t timed how long it takes me to click a mouse button but I suspect I’d need something better than a second hand to accurately measure it.

I was reading another biography on Jonathan Edwards the other day and found out that his study habits often found him behind his books for 13 hours a day. Now, this 13 hours included his pastoral duties, but it still offers a glimpse into how much time Jonathan spent studying the Word and those who wrote about the Word. But, the biography continued, he never seemed to be in a hurry to do anything. He never seemed as if he had somewhere better to be or something more important to be doing than whatever he was currently engaged in. How many people can we honestly say are like this?

This seems alien to me. Here I am worried about every click of the mouse and whether or not it is a good use of my time and I’m only spending a fraction of my day in the way that I would like to be. It’s difficult not to become so concerned with my time that I make others around me feel like I am unapproachable because I’m too busy.

We read in Ephesians 5:16 that we should make the best use of the time because the days are evil. Paul is referencing an avoidance of a depraved lifestyle in the passage but certainly we can apply this to this situation if I’m living like the world around me. Maybe this is a good time to clean out my feed reader of some unedifying blogs…

So, here it is. I’ve been using the Amazon Kindle just a few short weeks and it has certainly beat out any expectations I had. It’s not perfect, but we’ll get into that. There are plenty of other reviews of the Kindle out there, but this one is with a focus on using the Kindle as a Bible study tool.

What is a Kindle

I get asked this question a lot as people come across me using this “we only pretended to study the iPod while designing this thing” device. Its main function is to be an e-reader, to let you store multiple books on one device and provide you with a display that is not draining on the eyes after hours of reading. You buy a book (or find free a book) and download it to the Kindle, then you read through it just like you would any normal book, using the buttons on the side of the device to turn the pages forward and backward. Two things set the Kindle apart from other e-readers that have come out in the past: Amazon created it so you know the publishers will be following closely to keep up with their good friends in Seattle and it includes the ability to connect to Sprint’s cellular network and download the books from Amazon.com anywhere you can get a Sprint signal. These are great features, but personally, the thing that set the Kindle apart was the QWERTY keyboard that was included on the device, this allows you to take notes in the margins and highlight passages that interest you. I scribble a lot of notes while I read and now I can go back and read over them and even search through them since they are all electronic.

What Kind of Books Can You Put on the Kindle

From the Kindle you can browse the current selection of books offered at Amazon.com for the device. I will say at this point, the selection of “Christian” books is fairly slim although I don’t necessarily read the types of Christian books you would find in the Christian book store (see my library at LibraryThing). A nice feature to the Kindle is the ability to put your own books on it. There are lots of free books that you can download in html or pdf format that you can put on your Kindle simply by email them as attachments to yourdevicename@free.kindle.com. A few minutes later, you will get an email back from Amazon with a properly formatted azw file to download to your Kindle via USB. I’ve found quite a few books at ccel.org that I’ve been meaning to read through but haven’t because I didn’t want to read them on my desktop computer. Here’s a quick overview of the process:

1. Download a book to your computer, try Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper.
2. Compose an email to yourdevicename@free.kindle.com and add the PDF file as an attachment.
3. Plug in your Kindle to your computer with the USB cable.
4. After you get an email from Amazon with the azw file attached, download that attachment directly to the “documents” directory on your Kindle. That’s it!

Even though these books are free, people still had to spend some cash to get it up on the web, it might be a good idea to make a donation to the websites so that they can continue to offer these great services to us.

What Does the Kindle Mean For Bible Study

I have two versions of the Bible on my Kindle, the NASB and the ESV. Both of them have very awkward navigation methods. When you open the Bible, you start on whatever page you last left off on. This is difficult because if you are in the middle of a chapter, you will have no idea what chapter you are in or what book you are in. The book/chapter reference is not displayed anywhere on the screen except at the beginning of a chapter. The way around this is to change your habits a little and make full use of the search feature. When you want to read Ephesians 3, simply hit search then type in eph 3 and hit enter. You probably won’t be as fast jumping around the Bible on the Kindle as you would with a paper Bible but once you get the hang of it you won’t have any problem keeping up with sermons or Bible studies where the leaders jump from passage to passage. If you know you are going to be in three or four passages and want to flip back and forth between them, you can bookmark each one and jump between bookmarks easily.

I’ve touched on the cons of using the Kindle for Bible study, now for the pros. Search-ability. Can’t remember that verse you were reading earlier? Type in a word or two and you’re all set. This comes in handy when you’re away from a computer. You can also search any notes you’ve typed into the device, so if you are taking notes for a particular study, it might be good to tag your notes. For example, my Bible study group is going through Desiring God, so I’ll use the term “DG#” to indicate a particular note is for a chapter # in the Desiring God study. This is nothing new, you can do all this from any computer, but having it in a device that weighs almost nothing and has a battery that lasts close to a week is pretty cool. Searching will look through every book/note on your Kindle but the first result comes from the book you are currently reading.

A Few Tips

For any Kindle owners, here are a few things I’ve picked up during my use:

• All of your notes are stored as txt files so you can download them to your desktop and read through them.
• Don’t wait for the screen. The redrawing of the screen takes about 0.5 seconds but the Kindle will buffer any commands you give it during the redraw period. For example, if you know how many clicks of the scroll wheel it takes to get to the “Add Note” command you can click on that and begin typing your notes before the screen catches up with you. You can get really fast if you trust yourself and command the Kindle before waiting for the screen to catch up. Typing is similar. Don’t wait for your letters to appear, just type away and don’t wait for the screen to catch up.
• You can press the Next Page and Prev Page buttons multiple times before the screen redraws. So, if you know you want to jump three pages away, press the Next Page button three times quickly and you will jump that many pages away without having to redraw each page along the way.
• Make good use of the search function, it’s much faster than navigating.
• If you create your own books, be mindful of the title you use, if you are creating a reference book, you may want to add a “ZZ” to the beginning of the title, that way all books that start with ZZ will be at the back of your list.
• Keyboard shortcuts are very helpful. Learn em. A list is here.
• You can take screenshots on the Kindle and make them your screensaver. I took a screenshot of a passage in 2 Peter that I’ve been memorizing and now it is my screensaver so I can memorize it.

It is good to be back at sea-level…

When God uses metaphorical language in the Bible, its meaning really takes hold when you experience the metaphor itself. For example, God says we are in darkness until our eyes are opened and we see the world through the Holy Spirit’s council. This metaphor has a lot more meaning when you attempt to find your way around a room that you’ve never been in that is 100% devoid of any light. Psalm 40:2 says He set my feet upon a rock making my footsteps firm. This has taken on a deeper level of understand after coming down from a place that is not exactly “firm”.

And no, that is not the exact ship I was on, I just liked the picture.

Have a look.

The March/April edition of the 9Marks journal is available here. The focus is on gospel unity/division, from Jonathan Leeman:

all the writers in this issue of the 9Marks eJournal make their attempt at striking the balance between the gospel’s call to unity and its call to separation

Thomas Watson, 17th Century preacher, wrote in his Art of Divine Contentment:

The gospel is full of jewels, but they are locked up from sense and reason. The angels in heaven are searching into these sacred depths. (1 Pe. 1:12)

We get a picture that the things of the gospel as being very highly desired but very well guarded. To us, the gospel is guarded from our intellect. We would never figure it out on our own, it’s too simple; forgiveness come from being justified to God by faith in Christ? That’s too easy, there has to be a way in there for us to do something ourselves, for us to add to it. But it is that simple. It is that God-centered.

To the angels, it is guarded from their nature. Angels were not created to be the receivers of the gospel message. Christ did not die for the angels. Jesus died so that we would be his people, his church. The angels know that their existence is to glorify God and Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory (Heb 1:3) so they desire to look into the gospel and its mysteries. Looking into God’s reason for creating humans and angels is a wonderful thing to dwell on, it humbles us to know that we are created for God’s glory alone.

“And there they continued to preach the gospel” - Acts 14:7

Each Tuesday a different reflection on the gospel and its continual effect on our lives

This blurb has become quite the commodity lately. I’ve seen this video done with different music/images a few times now, the message needs to be heard though.