Spiritual Ponderings

I experienced something last night that gave me a real wake-up call, a reality check about a major area of weakness in my heart. God's Spirit has been using that experience to reveal to me all sorts of things this morning, many of which I cannot even remember but are part of ongoing silent discussions of the heart between God and I that He is putting inside for future use. I sense that God is trying to speed me up a bit in lessons of faith and obedience. He is seeking to train me to cooperate with Him closer to living in real time responsiveness instead of learning in retrospect after failing to reflect Him in some given situation. There are so many things I am learning in parallel these days that I feel like I am in an intensive educational program where I have to attend seemingly unrelated classes to learn all sorts of new things. But over time they begin to make sense with each other, and as the various insights of knowledge begin to become more clear, it also becomes excitin...

There are times in our lives when we are suddenly confronted with unexpected opportunities to make dramatic changes in our lives, to take a different course than the one we have been following for a long time. It is at those times that we can look back and, if we choose, learn from past mistakes and seek to know what God would show us to move in paths more in line with those He has outlined. One of those kinds of opportunities is when a church finds itself in upheaval and disarray. It may seem like a terrible disaster at first, but if one seeks heaven's perspective and tries to view everything through the context of God's Word, they will find that what at first appears to be nothing but pain and carnage may in fact be a golden opportunity to redefine core assumptions and beliefs of why a group of people meet together and call themselves as church to start with. It can be a time to reassemble a body of humble, thoughtful worshipers who desire to create a safe haven where sinn...

Bible translators have certain rules that govern how they determine the intended meaning of many words and concepts as they convert them from one language to another. Since it is rarely the case that languages have matching words that mean the same thing, the very process of interpreting and translating requires that the people doing so have to use assumptions about the intended meaning of the original author. Of course that is impossible to do if the author is not available to consult directly so as a result translators inevitably rely on their own assumptions and beliefs about what they think is true. There are several criteria for determining the correct rendition of the meaning of different texts by translators. Primarily they try to determine from wide usage in other places and even other documents in that original language what the most common idea of that word should convey. Yet it is true that in many languages certain words can have many nuances of meaning and some of those...