You can grow old, die, and become a legend in the time it takes me to watch a movie following its release. So don’t wait for me! Dave Black has seen the movie Woodlawn and has dutifully commented on his blog, and had his remarks posted on Alvin Reid’s blog. Since Dave was (actually) an (actual) Jesus freak, whereas I can make no such claim, it’s likely that he knows something about the subject.
Tomorrow is the 2nd anniversary of Becky Lynn Black’s homegoing. Dave has been posting some testimonies on his web site. I never met Becky, so I can’t relate personal experiences. But there is a way for me (and others) to learn from her.
I’m going to post my publisher’s foreword to her book My Life Story. I rarely write a foreword to a book as a publisher, but I am always delighted to publish a book that gives someone’s testimony. Theology is interesting. I consider Bible study to be of great importance. But sharing our experiences is, I think, of the greatest value.
A publisher’s foreword is intended to tell you why I published this book and why you should read it. I’m going to skip that. I want to tell you why you should act on it.
Becky Lynn Black was not the sort of person normally recognized in an autobiography. She wasn’t the head of a ministry. She didn’t lead a church order. She wasn’t a celebrity. But by the way God counts importance in His kingdom, she was extraordinary. She found the one thing that counts, her place as a servant. She said “yes” to Jesus Christ, and she knew that “yes” meant more than a ticket to heaven. It meant a life of service in answer to God’s call.
Toward the end of her pilgrimage (and she knew she was a pilgrim!) here on earth, she took the time and energy to tell her story, the story of God working in and through her to change many lives all over the world. She gave her witness to her creator and redeemer. The psalmist challenges us not to hide God’s great deeds from generations to come (Ps. 78:4), and Becky obeyed. I’ve spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about Hebrews 11, the honor roll of faith, as it’s often called. If you read the stories of these people, you’ll find they’re quite a varied lot. But they have one thing in common: When God called, they answered. In the end, it could be said for that one reason that “[t]he world wasn’t worthy of them” (Heb. 11:38).
Of course I want you to read this book. But what’s most important is that you act on it. And when you have acted, bear witness, whether to one or to thousands.
Will you answer God’s call?
Henry E. Neufeld
February 6, 2014
The fourth mark of a New Testament church that Dave Black finds in Acts he calls genuine relationships. The early believers devoted themselves to the fellowship, to their community. There are so many words for it.
In America today we rarely think of the church as a community and even more rarely as our community. Yet much of the New Testament’s teaching on the church centers around things that relate closely to this idea. We go to church for a “service.” We don’t participate in community. We take our children there for some moral education, not so that they can build relationships for their life. Often we barely know one another.
I’m not trying to make us all extroverts. I’m an introvert. I tend to make small numbers of closer friendships. I’m not talking about the number of friendships we each make. I’m talking about how we fit together into this larger community, one that includes various personalities, a wide variety of gifts, people who are like us, and also people who are not-at-all like us.
What we think about our community is going to impact everything else we do. Dave’s first mark is “evangelistic preaching.” That’s proclamation of the good news. But is the “good news” of your church the idea that one can join up, provided they’re not too different and become just like everyone else there? Or is the good news that through God’s Spirit we can all, with our various backgrounds, become one in Christ Jesus, contributing with various gifts, and receiving the salvation and healing that Jesus offers?
I suggest reading 1 Corinthians 12-14. Don’t skip over chapter 13. So frequently people who want to study about spiritual gifts study chapter 12, those who want to look at church order and how to structure your meetings at the church read chapter 14, and those who want to talk about love read chapter 13.
But that is to miss what Paul is doing. In this book Paul is looking at the various reasons why there are factions in the Corinthian church. When he comes to the start of chapter 12 he’s looking at the great gifted ones who lord it over everyone else. Genuine love, as expressed in chapter 13 is the key. How can one identify genuine gifts in action? It’s by the way they operate under the direction of that one Spirit and the way they carry out love in the church.
1 Corinthians 13 is not about marriage but about the church. It gives good advice for a marriage because it tells us how genuine relationships work.
How do followers of Jesus work together when the church meets? Chapter 14 tells us they work for “edification.” That’s building. That building is based on the genuine love that is expressed in chapter 13. So these three chapters work together.
I heartily recommend Dave’s chapter, but I’m going to quote this time from Ruth Fletcher in the book Thrive: Spiritual Habits of Transforming Congregations. Fletcher defines a difference between “friendliness” and “welcome”:
Friendliness assimilates newcomers into what already exists; welcome integrates newcomers by helping them know they belong. Friendliness says, “We’re glad you came to our table. We hope you feel at home here eating what we like to eat and doing things the way we like to do them.” Welcome goes beyond friendliness to say, “We want you to bring your gifts to this community. We know when you offer those gifts that we will be changed by your presence among us.” (p. 78)
Fletcher implicitly provides us with a good description of community. Rather than being a place where the current members give and others receive, it’s a place that welcomes people to become part of the giving, whatever it is that they may have to offer.
One of the critical things we need to look at in the church if we are to be such a community is gossip, judgment and criticism. For us to help one another grow, we need to be able to talk about ways to grow. Serious discussion of spiritual growth will not prosper where there is no trust, and gossip destroys trust. Gossip is always followed by judgment and criticism, and it destroys community.
Losing this spirit of judgment does not mean that one loses the ability to discern between different options, nor that one cannot recognize sin or destructive behavior. It does involve a change in the way we think and talk about these things. Our talking will be impacted by our thinking. Don’t imagine that you can pretend not to be judgmental and nonetheless deal with issues as a community.
I’m fairly unreceptive of the complaints of those who think that repenting of gossip, judgment, and criticism (three sins endemic in church life) means that we can no longer reform or call others to repentance. Gossip, judgment, and criticism don’t result from a genuine desire to help others find repentance. They result from our desire to feel that we are better than others and to let others in our inside group know that we are better than others.
A genuine concern for others will result in talking to them and doing it in constructive way. Note that this isn’t a strategy change. It’s repentance from a sinful approach (judgmental) and a turn to a genuinely constructive approach (edifying/building). If we have genuinely repented of the need to feel morally superior to others, I think we will generally know the difference. Most of us have been helped to find a better approach to some issue by a more experienced or knowledgeable friend. It feels different.
One critical point is that it comes from relationship. I have friends who help me with my business decisions who can quite comfortable tell me that some idea would be idiotic. We’ll laugh and go on to a better plan. Why can we do that? Because we have a relationship that comes before the correction. I highly value those friends and that correction. It has saved me from many errors.
“Genuine relationships” open the way to the various elements of community. If you truly want to help those you think are on a wrong path, establish a genuine relationship with them first. As you do so, you may become aware that you also have things in your life that can be improved by what you learn from them.
I think back on growing up in my missionary family’s home. You could not visit my parents’ church without getting invited to lunch. Not invited to join us at a restaurant, but to come join us for the family meal. My mother always made sure she had enough to feed guests. One never knew who would be a guest.
In Mexico, when a mother and son needed refuge from violence, she was invited into our home, even though there was a threat of violence to us involved. She was different from us, of the Chamula people, and only spoke a bit of Spanish, much less any English. But she had a home with us as long as she needed it.
Think about your own church. Would a visitor be welcome? Any visitor? As you bring in new members do you try to remold them after your own image or do they become a genuine part of the church family with their gifts and their warts? Does anyone in your church invite people home to lunch or dinner? Are your homes open? If someone was escaping domestic violence would they get a referral to a nearby shelter or would someone in your church open heart and home to them? If you see young people in your church without parents do you gather in groups to complain about “this generation” or do you decide to welcome the opportunity to get to know them and even mentor them?
I think becoming a community built on genuine relationships will require a great deal of repentance on the part of the American church. But if we want to truly be disciples of Jesus, carrying out the gospel commission, this is one mark we can’t afford to lack!
When the e-mail arrived offering me a copy of this gorgeous Bible edition, I didn’t really read the material thoroughly enough or I might have declined. I’m a content man. I have one complete bookcase and parts of three more dedicated to Bibles. Very few of them are special in terms of their binding. It’s the text that drives me.
But I saw that this was the New Living Translation, and that it was in a new edition, and so I said I’d review it. I’m actually glad I did. I’ve read a few of the other reviews, and they emphasize some simple facts about this Bible. It’s a work of art. Mine is goat skin for the cover, the paper and font are magnificent. It’s truly an heirloom Bible. You can find out all these details, however, from Amazon or from the publisher. I’m going to include some pictures in my review here on my blog so you can get an idea.
Though it is an heirloom Bible it is not one of those huge books that are destined to stay on whatever table they’re placed on first. It’s easy to carry and to use. You can reference it, which is nice, considering it’s a reference edition. So while you may not feel like doing anything too vigorous around it, lest you damage the work of art, it is nonetheless quite useful as a reading or study Bible.
Those who know me can predict where I’m going next. I’m afraid I have to admit that I start to twitch when I just hold this Bible. I didn’t actually look up the price before I received it, but within moments of actually putting my hands on it, I realized that it was a more costly Bible than I imagined. I’m not going to cite the price in my review, simply because current prices change. I’ll let you follow the link and get that information from the Amazon.com web site. I have never owned, and rarely touched or handled a Bible that costs this much. That leaves me with mixed emotions about it. But a book review should talk about the book from the point of view of what that book was written and/or designed for. I don’t criticize the NLT for not being either The Message or the NRSV. A Bible translation is designed for a purpose, and so is a Bible edition. You can decide what is right for you. If your plan is to buy an heirloom Bible that is to last and be passed on from generation to generation, you should be looking at this one.
Did I meniont that this Bible is designed to last and to be passed down from generation to generation. In pursuit of that goal it has lovely presentation and family record pages as well.
The text is, of course, the NLT. I have a high opinion of this translation for the appropriate audience. In one sense the NLT is descended from the Living Bible. One of the weakness of the Living Bible was that Kenneth Taylor didn’t read Hebrew or Greek. He worked from the English text of the American Standard Version. As a result, while the Living Bible was very readable, it was not always as accurate as it could have been. This problem was corrected for the NLT by a highly qualified evangelical translation committee. They managed to keep the readability, though I think they lost some of the charm and all of the eccentricity. How good that was is open to question. I have linked a couple of references to the NLT to my MyBibleVersion.com web site where you can get some additional information and see how I rate the translation in various categories.
As I say on the cover of my own book What’s in a Version? the best Bible version is one you read. The first question should be whether you’ll be able to use and understand a Bible version. Accuracy in details is of no particular value if you don’t actually read and comprehend the accurate words. Of course, readability should not be an excuse for inaccuracy. Unfortunately, reviewers of Bible versions frequently call disagreements with their preferred translation of some particular verse “inaccurate,” when it is really just “different than I would have done.” The NLT may be different, but it is competently different.
The things that stuck out for me in this edition are first things that are missing. This is not a study Bible in the sense of one with study notes, book introductions and so forth. I am pleased with that. Too many people are treating study notes as the inspired text and ignoring the actual text. You won’t do that here. You’ll need a good Bible handbook or Bible dictionary if you want to get that sort of information.
What you do have is a single column that is a good width for rapid reading. I’ve discussed before many different approaches to reading, and I think one of the most neglected is sustained reading of quantities of the biblical text. This Bible will make that easy. I prefer that greatly to the multiple narrow columns that tend to slow me down. Further, there are quite a number of cross-references. It is possible to become dependent here, just as it is to become dependent on notes, but in this case I think most people can do with the help. The NLT translation notes are included at the bottom of each page.
In the back you have a basic concordance and dictionary. This is not a replacement for your Bible dictionary but it will give you the basics and help you find a variety of references on a topic. This is followed by a selection of maps. Again, no effort is made to compete with your Bible atlas, but for reference on the run or in your study group, the material is better than average.
While the binding, paper, and high quality construction are the distinctive features of this Bible edition, I found that it is fully valuable as a Bible for your actual use. If you do choose to spend the money on an heirloom Bible edition, and hope to pass it on to your children, this will fit the bill. With decent (though not massive) margins, you may also be able to leave your notes and your testimony in it for your children as well.
I remain a content person, but I can respect a true work of publishing art when I see it, and this is one.
For those interested in the text, here’s my video review of the NLT:
(Disclosure: I received a copy of this book free from the publisher for review.)
From Bob Cornwall posting on the Energion Discussion Network:
I realize that some might find this affirmation of God’s realm a bit disconcerting. They might think that I’m recommending some kind of theocracy. In a way, I am, but not in the usual way of thinking. This isn’t a divine government imposed by an earthly realm. This is instead a recognition that our ultimate loyalty belongs to God, and when loyalties conflict, and they will, we must choose the realm of God. The church is called to be an expression of that realm on earth as a reflection of God’s realm in heaven. So, no I’m not advocating making the United States a Christian nation. I’m advocating that we recognize that God’s realm is present on earth as in heaven!
I’ll be tackling this rather intense topic tonight and likely failing to hold it down and get it under control! Following the event I will post more resources.
Informational Link: What Does It Mean to Survive Death?
Since I’ve been talking about Seventh-day Adventists starting yesterday, due to the date, I thought I’d use an Ellen G. White quote. A friend called my attention to this today in a phone conversation.
Every association of life calls for the exercise of self-control, forbearance, and sympathy. We differ so widely in disposition, habits, education, that our ways of looking at things vary. We judge differently. Our understanding of truth, our ideas in regard to the conduct of life, are not in all respects the same. There are no two whose experience is alike in every particular. The trials of one are not the trials of another. The duties that one finds light are to another most difficult and perplexing.
So frail, so ignorant, so liable to misconception is human nature, that each should be careful in the estimate he places upon another. We little know the bearing of our acts upon the experience of others. What we do or say may seem to us of little moment, when, could our eyes be opened, we should see that upon it depended the most important results for good or for evil. (Ministry of Healing, 483, emphasis mine)
I should note that I have found it much easier to appreciate Ellen White as a writer since I left the SDA church and quit trying to read her as a prophetess. While I think in many cases she was off the mark, she also was quite frequently very insightful.
This is strictly a links post, giving links to the resources I’ll be referencing tonight.
First some of my own resources:
Essays posted today on the Energion Discussion Network related to the Great Disappointment:
Some other recent posts from the Energion Discussion Network:
Books referenced tonight or at other times in the series:
Substantially changing beliefs have been a defining characteristic of my life. That may be hard to comprehend. It’s even hard to write in a grammatical form. This admission makes some people uncomfortable. Why should they listen to me now, if I have already changed what I may have believed and advocated decades, years, or even months ago?
I can definitely understand the question. We seek certainty and safety. It’s thoroughly bred into us. Around the caveman campfire, the Saber Tooth Tiger fundamentalist was king. He knew what to do with that spear. He didn’t dither about whether to put out a side of meat, reach out his hand and say “nice kitty,” or kill the tiger.
But certainty also is dangerous, both when it is not justified and when circumstances change. Thus I embrace passionate action and enough uncertainty to make me willing to change my mind.
The largest single change was when I left the denomination I grew up in, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and became first unchurched, and then finally a United Methodist. There are those who find that change mind-boggling. Others find it obvious, as though anyone with adequate intelligence would have made the move.
Even in that dramatic change in my life I remained convinced of the value of the people whose views I was rejecting. I became an ex-SDA. There are a few SDAs who consider that horrifying. I have left the truth. I have become an apostate. I am now working for the enemy.
Let those who are not SDAs not rise up to cast the first stone. The condemnation from the SDA side meets its match on the other in those who say, “See! Just like those cultists! They can’t accept that you’ve come over to an orthodox community!” There’s an ironic twist to this accusation from folks who generally believe they have all the truth, are never wrong, and thus SDAs are cultists, especially because SDAs are, well, intolerant.
Last night in an interview I mentioned that it was a good thing God could work with people who are wrong. That way God can work with me. If you think God is working with you because you have everything right—I suspect you’re wrong about that! But I still believe God is working with and likely through you.
I’m an un-angry ex-SDA. I affirm the work of my former denomination in many areas while at the same time I differ, sometimes substantially, with that church in matters of doctrines. Differing in matters of doctrine is, I believe, good cause to find fellowship elsewhere. It is not good cause to belittle and condemn. Many mainliners find it very easy to condemn SDAs for views they, the mainliners, don’t even comprehend. I have lost count of the times someone has told me that they really don’t like SDAs because they have such incredibly false doctrines, then when I ask them just which doctrine they find so wrong, they fall back on, “Well, they’re a cult.”
And that leads me to Adventists and The Great Disappointment. There’s a great deal of detail around this event in Adventist history. There was a lesser disappointment before the “great” one. Prophetic interpretation was adjusted as people moved on. This happens frequently in many, many groups. This occurred before there was a Seventh-day Adventist Church as such, but SDAs grew out of the Millerite movement and the responses to this great disappointment.
When and what was this great disappointment? October 22, 1844. The expectation was that Jesus would return in glory and take His children home.
It didn’t happen. The day passed uneventfully.
Some Adventists came to believe that the date was right, but the event was different. This interpretation is one of the key elements of the reason why I am no longer an SDA myself. Yes, I can list specific doctrines and the interpretation of Daniel 8:14 is one of them. A rather minor one, that is. I could co-exist in a church with people who are wrong about how to interpret Daniel 8:14. Come to think of it, I manage to hang around a church in which I would be surprised if anyone could name the general topic addressed in Daniel 8.
It’s easy for mainline Christians to point fingers at those who name times for the coming of Jesus or who express excessive certainty about the end-times, life after death, or prophetic interpretation. After all, we have the perfect solution: Ignore those issues. Maybe nobody will notice.
On the other hand, the people who have been out on a limb, taken the plunge, made the hard call, and lived with the result may have something to say to us as well. That’s where I see SDAs and also other Adventist groups. They may have been disappointed. I may disagree with some of their interpretations even after the disappointment, but they’re still engaged with the topic.
And so I’m going to do a few things. Starting tomorrow I’m going to publish some articles by SDA authors, folks who are published by my company Energion Publications, specifically about the Great Disappointment and 1844. What might we learn from the experiences of the SDA church? Are we making any of the same mistakes as we read scripture? They felt they were faithful to scripture. We (and they) know they were wrong at the time. But do we carry on some of the same mistakes?
Join me Thursday night for a discussion on my weekly video study and then watch here and on the Energion Publications News blog for links as the remaining articles are published. The introductory article is already posted.
On the scale of cosmic events, this is somewhat less significant than the proverbial one beat of a butterfly wing, but today I ate something from my garden for the first time. It wasn’t planned. I had to thin my radishes, so I saved them and added some of the tops to my salad. I have some more so will use them in a few other things.
Here’s the picture:
Yes, distinctly non-earth shattering. But nonetheless a nice moment for me. The last time I put in my own garden I was about 14 years old. Hopefully the remaining plants will be able to grow large and juicy in the space I provided for them.
