I’ve been lax in posting lately, and particularly in posting reflections. So here’s a new one.
Our Bible study has recently jumped in to a study of I John. We aren’t using any particular materials, just going through it (using inductive study methods). Outlining it is rather a pain, as it has a stream-of-consciousness structure rather than a more rigid, logical organization. But that’s fine; John is not Paul, and did not write like Paul.
Jenn & I picked up 12 Angry Men from the library this week and watched it on Sunday. One word comes to mind to describe it: flawless.
OK, so it did have a flaw: I didn’t feel the heat and humidity of the jury room as much as I thought might be appropriate. But that could just be me.
Last night, I was updating some packages on our server. Among these was SpamAssassin. The update shut down the spam filter daemon, and I did not notice this. Until this morning, when my inbox was full of spam.
Spam filter is off for one night (~12 hours), and I get 71 spams. As opposed to the normal 2 or 3 per day that actually make it to my inbox. Kudos to the SpamAssassin developers for such an excellent product.
Jenn & I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai the other day. ’Twas a good movie.
Warning: this may spoil some plot points; don’t read more if you don’t want to.
I think, sometimes, that the epistles to the Corinthians are some of the more difficult portions of the NT (aside from Revelation) to understand. There are a few reasons:
We don’t have the whole conversation. We’re "missing" at least one of Paul’s letters to them, and we don’t have the letters they wrote to Paul (or at least they aren’t readily available to the average lay person). This makes it difficult to understand the entire context in which Paul wrote.
It is worth noting, however, that this ought not to be a roadblock to our endeavors to understand the text. If we needed the rest of the context to understand what God intended to communicate through Paul writing these letters, then He would have seen to it that we got that context.
These letters (especially I Corinthians) contain or allude to some teachings which appear nowhere else in scripture, or have at best tenuous connections to doctrines expounded elsewhere. Thus, it is difficult to get clarification from other texts.
One of the clearest examples of this is the allusion in I Cor 15 to being baptized on behalf of the dead. To my knowledge, this concept is mentioned no where else in Scripture. What were they doing? Why? What does it mean? Is this a practice we should have in the church today? These questions go unanswered.
Another is the teaching in ch. 10 on head coverings. Specific teaching on this subject is not present in other epistles (although there are other teachings on authority), so there isn’t much information about what other churches in other areas were taught to practice.
Then there are things like II Cor 6 and 7. It seems fairly straightforward, but my mind was struggling today to wrap itself around 6:14-7:1. It’s clear enough, but why is it here? Before it, Paul is asking them to enlarge or widen their hearts. After it, Paul is asking them to make room for him in their hearts. What does this middle piece have to do with welcoming Paul in their hearts? It seems to me that the nature of the yoking mentioned in verse 14 would have something to do with the context, but I’m somewhat at a loss to make a connection.
I’ve used Zechariah 3 before in my Sunday posts, but I’m revisiting it again in my personal study and found it worth bringing back to light. However, I think that today I shall redirect you to the insights of Spurgeon on the text.
This is just to say that I like SpamAssassin. I’ve been running it on my mail server for the last few months, and found it to be rather robust. I’ve never received a false positive, and my wife has received only a few. It also blocks the vast majority of spam - a handful of messages trickle past it into my inbox.
I’ve found that I’m able to trust it enough that anything to my address with a spam score of 10 or higher automatically hits the bit bucket (5 or higher gets stashed in my spam folder).
I’m presently facing a programming task to work on, and am thinking through which language to work on it in. It’s a simple calendar & address book app, so it needs to work with vCard/iCalendar and network/VFS type things (at least HTTP). It also needs a GUI; preferably GTK+.
Contenders:
One of the things I enjoy about sitting under the teaching of John Piper is that I can relate to him, that he is publicly transparent about his struggles, and that he wrestles with the same things that often plaque my feeble mind. On the Desiring God blog, he wrote a New Year’s Eve post, laying out ten resolutions for sustaining mental health.
I have usually placed little stock in the concept of new year’s resolutions, seeing them through the eyes of the stereotype expressed so well in today’s BC comic, as nothing but a collection of wishful statements to be broken within a month. But, on the other hand, if I am unwilling to actually step up and commit to something sometimes, I’ll never get anywhere in life.