Prayer should be brief and pure, unless it happens to be lengthened by an impulse or inspiration of divine grace.
- Rule of Benedict
Quoted in sojomail.net 8/24/07
from Essential Monastic Wisdom by Hugh Feiss
My one year old daughter surprised me last night by spontaneously hugging me and saying, “Daddy, I love you.” If only our love, our faith and our prayers could be as brief and as pure as my daughter’s. Though that too will change soon (not to soon) and “I love you” will be followed by, “Can I have the car?” Likewise our faith can get complicated, especially when we “go pro.” “Professional” and seasoned “amateur” believers are at a risk of loosing their brevity and purity of faith. It seems the more advanced, the more religious, the more trained and practiced we become the more complicated our faith gets. We read more critically, pray more skeptically and love more guardedly. Our once brief and meaningful expressions of faith become drawn out and routine. Let us be called back to simplicity keeping our expressions of love and faith: brief and pure.
The Episcopal church has taken a beating in recent years regarding the ordination of an open and practicing homosexual. Compounding this problem is the great amount of diversity inside the Episcopal church, which is causing great divisions. A new divide could be on the horizon with Episcopal priest Ann Holmes Redding and her recent conversion to Islam.
Perhaps conversion is too strong a word, it implies a turning from one stance to another, but according to her own statements she is both a Muslim and a Christian. She attends Saturday prayer services at a local mosque and then dons her priestly collar to offer Christian church services on Sunday mornings. While many are perplexed, her present Bishop Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner recently stated that, he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting. But I believe that there is still hope that the Episcopals may make a stand as the Bishop of Redding’s ordaining body has taken Redding’s collar for a year to evaluate this entire fiasco.
Christians aren’t the only ones evaluating this, recently on CNN a Muslim cleric was discussing how from his religion’s view you could not be both. How right he is! This is not an issue of openness or tolerance, to accept both is to reject both and become nothing. For if you accept both, you must reject their teachings on critical issues such as Christ. The Christian believes that salvation comes from the physical resurrection of Christ, while the Muslim holds that he was simply a great teacher. Muslims holds to essentially a works based religion, specifically the faithful attain salvation by adherence to the five pillars of Islam. Still another difference is the nature of God. Christians believe in the Trinity (or Triune God) while Islam vehemently rejects this as polytheism and worship Allah only.
It is time for the Episcopal church to take a stand. They need to reject the acceptance of both beliefs or join the modern unitarian church movement. If they can not stand as a church then they should change their name to the Episcopal Center for Spirituality and continue to explore the melding of opposing beliefs into nothing.
A good Bible dictionary is a great asset for studying scripture. In someways it beats the internet because of the pictures and quality of the articles! I love looking at pictures of things that the Bible talks about, it really helps the text to come alive. Below I’ve created some links to a few of the better Bible dictionaries, most of them you can actually preview on Amazon and see which one you like best.
Besides the Bible there is nothing more essential to good study than a concordance. You need a concordance in order to be able to search the whole counsel of God regarding a particular subject. I’ve just put up a Bible search tool in the menus on the right, you can search Crosswalk’s Bible from here just like we did in our session. For those of you who are interested in purchasing a concordance any Christian bookstore carries them as well as Amazon, I’ve placed links to some better concordances below.
I promised that I would give you some additional study resources, here they are. These will serve as an introduction to the hermeneutical (Bible study) process and help you to think more systematically when studying. I hope these are helpful, Thursday I’ll post the resources for researching historical and literary context. I’m working to make sure that pos will go up right after class and not a week later.
A Basic Guide is very approachable, very easy to understand, and a great introduction for anyone new to this. I would suggest Grasping God’s Word as a great introductory tool that is very comprehensive (more than Basic Guide) yet approachable. This was my wife’s hermeneutic’s textbook in college. The final book A General Introduction to the Bible will help you to understand how we got the Bible in its current form and is a good primer on the theology concerning God’s word. This book is a little dated and has more information than you would care for, but it is very readable.
The phrase “You the man” is seen in a completely different light after reading this! I pray that I would not be that man. Only God’s inspiration in Nathan’s surrender could have resulted in this type of repentance. David had already killed one man, what would stop him from killing Nathan? Only God! There are a lot of historical questions here, rich and poor, customs, shepherding, what kind of authority would David had. There is another question that perplexes, “Why did the child have to die?” We also need to research the context in David’s life to see how Nathan’s complete prophecy is played out through the ordeal with Absalom. What do you see in this text?
This passage inspires me to continue in faithful service to God - if Paul could endure these hardships surely I can with God survive mine! Acts and other narrative passages contain a lot of historical information that we need to research. Some of the historical material includes the places: Ephesus, Asia, Miletus, and Jerusalem. Knowing about houses, customs of traveling teachers, ship travel, and prison would give us great information. We also would probably want to compare this brief narrative with the letter to the Ephesians. These are some of my observations, what about yours?
I pray that I would be one of those who are counted righteous and secure according to Psalm 112. This Psalm (and others like it) raises many questions about whether these are God’s promises or principles. Will the righteous really never be moved? Are they physically secure in this life or are their hearts steadfast regardless of their situation? We’ll talk about this later in our Wednesday night class. Some key words in here I think are righteousness, and some of the adjectives describing them and their position. It might be helpful to know historically where this Psalm is placed (if it can be at all) as it mentions the “land.” Is this their homeland or are they in captivity? What is the role of righteousness and giving, particularly to the poor? These are some of my questions what are yours?
What a great text this is! I love the absurdity of Peter’s response and God’s reaction. As I read this text I was convicted of my own arrogance and impetuousness. God has a great work to do inside of me to make me less like Peter and more like Jesus. The observations and questions I had regard the significance of Moses and Elijah, the word “dwellings,” the particular significance of Elijah and his role surrounding Jesus’ ministry, what is the significance of the cloud that surrounds them and why is this a secret. Those of you who are reading this passage along with me please post your thoughts along with this blog and we can dialog regarding them. If time permits next Wednesday I’ll try to answer some of the more popular questions.
Sitting under the authority of scripture is the most important aspect of studying and teaching the Bible. We can not suppose to master the text until we have allowed it authority over us. This is why we can’t read the Bible the way we read other books. We can not come to the text supposing to have control over what we read or how it applies - we must allow the text to speak and control us. Robert Mulholland in his book Shaped By The Word really develops this idea of the transforming power of scripture. I recommend this book to you as one that will help you learn to read the Bible.
