Author: Glen

Some Biblical Expressions of Corporate Worship

Last night Back in Jan­u­ary 2003 we talked about wor­ship, and I dis­cussed dif­fer­ent ways we wor­ship God. This list isn’t exhaus­tive, but it’s help­ful and so I thought I’d post it here for future ref­er­ence.

Singing: the book of Psalms, Eph­esians 5:19, Colos­sians 3:16
Music: 1st Chron­i­cles 13:8, Psalm 33:3, Psalm 150
Artis­tic Cre­ation: Exo­dus 31:1–11, Exo­dus 28, Ezekiel 4:1
Clap­ping: Psalm 47:1, Isa­iah 55:12
Words: Psalm 9:1, Psalm 73:28, Psalm 78:4–6
Laugh­ing & Rejoic­ing: Psalm 9:2, Psalm 126:1–3, Psalm 149:5, Zepha­ni­ah 3:14–17
Shout­ing: Psalm 95:1, Psalm 98:4–6, Psalm 100:1
Silence: Psalm 46:10, Habakkuk 2:20
Stand­ing: 1st Chron­i­cles 23:30, Psalm 24:3–6
Rais­ing Our Hands: Nehemi­ah 8:6, Psalm 63:3–5, Psalm 134:1–2; 1st Tim­o­thy 2:8
Bow­ing & Kneel­ing: 2 Chron­i­cles 7:3, Psalm 95:6, Daniel 6:10–11
Lying Pros­trate: Deuteron­o­my 9:18, Rev­e­la­tion 19:4
Leap­ing: 2nd Samuel 6:16, Luke 6:23, Acts 3:7–8
Danc­ing: Exo­dus 15:20–21, Psalm 149:3, Psalm 150:4
Speak­ing In Tongues: Acts 2:1–11; Acts 10:46; 1st Corinthi­ans 14:26–33

Inci­den­tal­ly, when I saw the mas­sive num­ber of Bib­li­cal ref­er­ences in this post­ing, I decid­ed to final­ly install Jonathan Fox’s Scrip­tur­iz­er plu­g­in for Move­able Type. Worked like a charm! If you use MT and quote from the Bible, I high­ly rec­om­mend this won­der­ful tool.

UPDATE: on 12/21/04 I added the Artis­tic Cre­ation entry (3rd one down) and struck through the com­ment at the end. Also, I’m not using the Scrip­tur­iz­er plu­g­in right now so the pas­sages prob­a­bly aren’t hyper­linked.

Ancient Tablet Seems to Corroborate Biblical Narrative

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, archael­o­gists have found a very spe­cial tablet.

Israeli geol­o­gists said Mon­day they have exam­ined a stone tablet detail­ing repair plans for the Jew­ish Tem­ple of King Solomon that, if authen­ti­cat­ed, would be a rare piece of phys­i­cal evi­dence con­firm­ing bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive.

The find — whose ori­gin is murky — is about the size of a legal pad, with a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that strong­ly resem­bles descrip­tions in the Bible’s Book of Kings. It could also strength­en Jew­ish claims to a dis­put­ed holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City that is now home to two major mosques.

…

The sand­stone tablet has a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that resem­bles descrip­tions in Kings II, 12:1–6, 11–17, said Israel’s Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, which exam­ined the arti­fact. The words refer to King Joash, who ruled the area 2,800 years ago.

In it, the king tells priests to take “holy mon­ey … to buy quar­ry stones and tim­ber and cop­per and labor to car­ry out the duty with faith.” If the work is com­plet­ed well, “the Lord will pro­tect his peo­ple with bless­ing,” reads the last sen­tence of the inscrip­tion.

It’s inter­est­ing, but I should note that there seems to be much more con­fu­sion over this tablet’s authen­tic­i­ty than over the James ossuary.

The Groves of Academe: When Disrespect is Respectful

Dar­ryl Hart, aca­d­e­m­ic dean at West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, weighs in with a con­trar­i­an per­spec­tive on Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­mics in an essay titled The Groves of Acad­eme: When Dis­re­spect is Respect­ful.

Well, con­trar­i­an for an evan­gel­i­cal.

He argues that mod­ern uni­ver­si­ties have no place for Chris­t­ian schol­ar­ship, and appro­pri­ate­ly so: If believ­ing schol­ars could rec­og­nize hos­til­i­ty to faith as the acad­e­my’s high­est form of flat­tery, in oth­er words, if they could acknowl­edge the ways in which Christ and cul­ture are legit­i­mate­ly at odds, they might under­stand why some habits die hard. They might even dis­cov­er the plau­si­bil­i­ty of cer­tain anti-reli­gious prej­u­dices.

Inci­den­tal­ly, this essay is a response to Force of Habit and Spe­cial Plead­ing (both are also quite inter­est­ing, and take dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives).

Why Americans Don’t Like Evangelical Christians

I just read a very inter­est­ing arti­cle by The Inter­net Monk explain­ing Why Every­body Hates Us.

It’s a thought­ful and well-writ­ten essay. Here’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt:

Here’s my list of why evan­gel­i­cals are among the most dis­liked per­sons in Amer­i­ca:

1. Chris­tians endorse a high stan­dard of con­duct for oth­ers and then large­ly excuse them­selves from a seri­ous pur­suit of such a life. Jesus is the most admired per­son in his­to­ry, but evan­gel­i­cals are far more like­ly to devise ways for Jesus to be like us than for us to be like Jesus.

If it has­n’t struck you late­ly that you do the very thing you con­demn oth­ers for doing (Romans 2:1), urge oth­ers to do what you don’t do or excuse in your­self what you require in oth­ers, then you prob­a­bly don’t get this arti­cle at all.

Our Sneaky God

God brings us togeth­er with a Stan­ford stu­dent.

God is sneaky. I’m pret­ty sure that’s not in the Bible (unless you read a very loose trans­la­tion), but I’m con­vinced of the fact. He tells us to be wise as ser­pents, and He mod­els that for us.

For exam­ple, today Paula and I shared at a church in Burlingame, CA called Three Cities Assem­bly. The San Fran­cis­co Forty-Nin­ers had a play­off game today, so I was expect­ing the atten­dance to be a lit­tle bit down. Oth­er than that, I was­n’t expect­ing any­thing unusu­al.

God had oth­er plans, though.

After the ser­vice, it’s cus­tom­ary for a mis­sion­ary guest speak­er to be avail­able to shake hands and chat with peo­ple. I met the head of anthro­pol­o­gy for Wycliffe Bible Trans­la­tors after the ser­vice today–that was pret­ty cool. I also met a guy who used to be in a Chi Alpha group led by some friends of mine in Stock­ton, CA. That was also pret­ty cool. It’s not unusu­al to meet very cool peo­ple after the ser­vice.

I also met one of my upstairs neigh­bors, which was pret­ty sur­pris­ing (and cool).

The best was yet to come, how­ev­er.

Towards the end of the good­byes, I met a young man named Charles who was vis­it­ing the church for the first time. Charles is a first-year Stan­ford grad stu­dent, and even though Burlingame is a good 25 miles away from Stan­ford he decid­ed to vis­it the church today because he used to know Pas­tor Hern­don back when they both lived in Las Vegas (Charles was actu­al­ly in Jay’s youth group).

Charles has been try­ing to find a church that can acco­mo­date his crazy stu­dent sched­ule: every third or fourth Sun­day he won’t be able to go to church. Today he learned about Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford and he was able to hear me preach.

I guess he liked what he heard, because he’s plan­ning to join us for wor­ship on cam­pus this Tues­day!

How prov­i­den­tial of God–to bring us to the same church at the same time and arrange a con­nec­tion. He’s sneaky I tell you…

I Hate Being Sick

sick­ness is mis­er­able

For the record, I am offi­cial­ly against being sick. I dis­like it immense­ly.

I have a dull body ache and have become a mucous fac­to­ry. I’ve been feel­ing a lit­tle sick ever since Chi Alpha’s Win­ter Con­fer­ence, but I thought I had kicked it yes­ter­day. Instead I kicked it into high gear.

*sigh*

The Unfinished Task

I just ran across an inter­est­ing site that gives up-to-the-minute esti­mates of the state of world evan­ge­liza­tion. I don’t know how they arrived at their fig­ures, but I find it inter­est­ing: The Unfin­ished Task

International Students at Stanford

Stu­dents from around the world come to study at Stan­ford.

I came across this infor­ma­tion regard­ing inter­na­tion­al stu­dent enroll­ment at Stan­ford. Some of the infor­ma­tion is a year or two out-of-date (which sur­prised me–it seems like this could be dynam­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed from a data­base and be 100% accu­rate at all times).

1/3 of all grad stu­dents are inter­na­tion­al, as are 1/20 of all under­grads. That works out to some­thing like 20–25% of all Stan­ford stu­dents hail from anoth­er coun­try.

The Top Ten For­eign Nations (among grad­u­ate stu­dents)

  • Chi­na
  • Korea
  • India
  • Cana­da
  • Tai­wan
  • France
  • Japan
  • Sin­ga­pore
  • Turkey
  • Mex­i­co

Talk about poten­tial for glob­al impact!

Minor Site Tweak

I get even more Flash-ified.

I just redesigned the site nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tem using Flash. It should degrade grace­ful­ly (mean­ing that if you can’t run Flash, you should still be able to use the site).

Now that the site nav­i­ga­tion­al sys­tem is in Flash, I can do some pret­ty cool things with it. I’ll try to restrain myself from doing any­thing too obnox­ious (but I’d like to do some cool stuff that still loads quick­ly… feel free to post links to sites that you think use Flash well in the com­ments).

I’m still hop­ing to post some book mus­ings soon. We’ll see…

Whew–one long day

dri­ving to church­es all day long

Yes­ter­day Paula and I got up at 5:30am to dri­ve to a church in Sal­i­da to share with them about our min­istry, and then we drove to Sono­ra to share at that church.

We did­n’t get home until 11:30 at night!

Still, we had a great day. Both the church­es were swell (although very dif­fer­ent).

I’ve been mean­ing to post some reflec­tions on books I’ve read late­ly. Hope­ful­ly I’ll get a chance to do that some­time tonight…